3. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
3.4 SOUTH AFRICAN NSI POLICY DEVELOPMENT
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The PDCA cycle entails (i) ‘planning’ to achieve policy objectives fully; (ii) ‘do’ to implement the policy plans; (iii) ‘check’ that the anticipated improvement policy objectives are being achieved;
and (iv) ‘amend/act’ to take corrective action and the cycle continues (Deming 2000:7). Veugelers et al. (2009:247) state that policy needs to be supported by analysis, M&E practices, which then feed back into the policy process. The PMI (2008:87) and Australian/New Zealand Standard ASNZS (4360:2009 2009) define control as the monitoring of specific policy results to determine if they comply with relevant standards and identifying ways to eliminate causes of unsatisfactory performance (Australian/New Zealand Standard ASNZS 4360:2009 2009). The National Research Foundation (NRF) is responsible for the monitoring of the evolution of new and significant fields of study and research, which is an important function and growth of the NSI.
Steps thirteen, fourteen and fifteen also involve policy monitoring and control. Fayol, the
“Father of management theory” was the first to describe “control” as an important policy and management function of along with other functions which set out as being planning, coordinating, commanding, organising and controlling (Fayol, 1949; Chambers & Rand, 2010:116).
Step thirteen entails the identification of policy needs, which can collected from all South African citizens using an interactive process and strategy.
Step fourteen and fifteen involve establishing of a policy team, the team composition, training needs and policy quality issues.
Steps sixteen to twenty comprise the policy execution phase. Step sixteen specifically entails the formulation of policy direction, which can be aided by the PDCA cycle. Step seventeen to nineteen involve the policy committee providing a feedback loop, as well as undertaking stakeholders’
satisfaction the feedback loop which can be undertaken on monthly and yearly basis as part of policy monitoring and control. Step twenty involve modifying policy infrastructure, as necessary, guided by the feedback loop, which can be facilitated by policy infrastructure, procedures and processes, future and current policy structures, awards and recognition programs among other elements.
The next section entails a discussion of South Africa's NSI policy development.
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planned and proposed institutional changes by various South African policy documents have not taken place. The literature review has shown that the planned and proposed institutional changes by various South African policy documents have not taken place. For instance, an innovation agency proposed by the OECD (2007b) Country Review has not been set up. Instead, the role of the NRF has been expanded to encompass innovation. Innovation programmes aimed at poverty reduction and the exploitation of South Africa’s strong position in mature industries has not been launched.
The White Paper approved by Cabinet in 1996 established a policy framework for S&T in South Africa. The formation of the NRF in 1998, the NACI in 1998, and the DST in 2002 constituted the STI policy blueprint. A major development of STI in South Africa was the creation of two sources of competitive funds for R&D, the Innovation Fund (IF) in 1997 and the Biotechnology Regional Innovation Centres (BRIC) (2001). With oversight of the NSI as a whole, a Ministerial Committee on Science and Technology (MCOST) operated for several years from 1994, but then fell away in 2000. In 2002, National Research and Development Strategy (NRDS) under the responsibility of the DST were drafted. According to the SA DST (2002:64)
Government will publish and annually update a three-year R&D Plan ‘in sync’ with the MTEF, capturing its R&D vision as well as key targets and investments. The R&D Plan will capture the programmes of each department, including the targets expected of parastatal institutions and the ‘return on investment’ expected from transfer payments. The strategy would be placed before Parliament on an annual basis.” The governance role of the DST was defined in the 2004 New Strategic Management Model (NSMM) of policy on standards for science, engineering and technology institutions (SETIs).
At the highest level, the activities of the DST are overseen by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for S&T (comprising members of Parliament). The DST’s primary function is the pervasive, systemic formulator and coordinator of NSI-related policy and strategy, allocating macro-resources, promoting system learning through the oversight of effective and integrated M&E, maximising international cooperation and resources, systemically overseeing public research organisations, and providing best-possible knowledge infrastructure (people, equipment and facilities, and cyber-infrastructure) within the public sector (SA DST Ministerial Review Committee, 2012:19). At Level 2, the NRF is the only sizeable agency in the system, in the sense that it deals with multiple programmes. The use of research councils/institutes is widespread at Levels 3 and 4, which receive a substantial grant from the responsible ministry and have a mandate both to set priorities for individual projects and to do research.
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The 1996 White Paper on S&T seeks to stimulate the NSI, which is central to the empowerment of all South Africans in seeking to achieve social, political, economic and environmental goals as well as a problem-solving, multi-disciplinary, partnership approach to innovation as a mechanism of growth and development. In the global context, the 1996 White Paper seeks increased coordination of innovation policies and strategies in response to the complex challenges generated by global social and economic changes.
The 1996 White Paper attempted to ensure the "constructive interactions" between the Growth and Development Strategy of 1995 and the Macroeconomic Strategy of 1996 for the successful implementation of the broader policies. The principal NSI institutional stakeholders are made up of the central policy and line departments, government agencies, SETIs, private sector, higher education sector (HES), Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) (SA DST, 1996:22-26).
The 1998 system-wide MCOST reviews found that public sector institutions were characterised by poor interactions and networking, which constituted a major weakness of the South African SET system, with the major deficit between SETIs and the HEIs. The reviews recommended that a provision be made for system-wide independent oversight, evaluation and strategic advice to the government and that numerous opportunities should be provided to facilitate linkages and interactions across disciplines, sectors and institutions in order to create a stimulating environment and an innovative climate throughout the entire system. The National Research and Technology Foresight (NRTF) exercise published outputs in 1999, which were intended to put real content into the NSI and, thereby, develop a framework of goals within which the technology programmes can be shaped. The NRTF initiative was different from other NSI-related interventions. However, the immense effort of NRTF was not rewarded with take-up in line departments or even in the policy trajectories by the DST (SA DST, 1996:25-26).
In 2002, the government endorsed the DST’s NRDS which made some of the institutional and governance proposals of the earlier White Paper more explicit, by identifying eight key weaknesses in the South African NSI (SA DST 2002:15): (i) the dramatic drop in Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD), which fell from 1.1% of GDP in 1990 to 0.7% in 1994, and which had only slowly been recovering; (ii) the need to maintain and to generate national absorptive capacity; (iii) failure to renew human resources for S&T; (iv) declining investments in formal R&D by South African companies; (v) an inadequate infrastructure and legal system to handle IP; and (vi) fragmented governance structures in research and innovation funding.
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The five missions of the NRDS (2002) are: (i) new Technology and Innovation Missions for the S&T System; (ii) core functions of technology and innovation missions; (iii) S&T for poverty reduction; (iv) technology and knowledge for and from resource-based industries; (v) and strengthened programmes to support innovation. There is a high degree of mismatch between identified strategic priorities and implemented programmes, with only the first two of the five aforementioned technology missions seem to have been developed and implemented. An R&D programme that was not part of the NRDS has been implemented on a larger scale than any of the priority missions of 2002, and probably with much larger cross-system effects.
The NRDS DST (2002:17) proposed that basic research is a key shared function of the DST and the Department of Education (DoE) and that the DST should, over time, create five cross-cutting institutions/agencies, illustrated in Figure 3.4-1.
Figure 3.4-1: Five cross-cutting institutions of SA DST Source: OECD (2007b:105)
The five cross-cutting institutions/agencies proposed by the NRDS Figure 3.4-1 are: the National Research Foundation: the FEST (later to become the Institute for the Promotion of Science), the Foundation for Technological Innovation, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) (OECD, 2007b:105).
According to NGP document by EDD (2010) the (NPC), (2011a) and the SA DST Ministerial Review Committee, (2012:76) the recommendations of the NRDS 2002 have not been fully implemented. For instance, the poverty reduction programme and the programme for resource- based industries have not been implemented, resulting in significant missed opportunities to use research and innovation to support central social and economic development objectives. The SA
FEST/Institute for the Promotion of Science
National Research Foundation
Foundation for Technological Innovation
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Human Sciences Research Council Department of Science
and Technology
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DST TYIP (2008) failure to transform the ‘S&T for poverty reduction’ a key Mission of the NRDS, (2002) into a Grand Challenge and appears to fly directly in the face of the recommendation of the OECD (2007b) to close the gap between the 'first' and the' second' economy.
The New Strategic Management Model (NSMM) organisational model was established in 2004 for the public sector SETIs because of significant failures in achieving SETIs objectives. However, no progress has been made to date and considerable resistance is being encountered to the current piecemeal approach.
The NRF is an agency of the DST and receives about half its income in the form of a core grant from the DST, and the balance via service contracts with the DST, the Department of Trade and Industry for Technology and Human Resources for Industry (THRIP), the Department of Labour (DoL) (for the Scarce Skills Development Fund) and the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (for marine research). Figure 3.4-2 illustrates the organisational structure of the NRF adopted from OECD (2007b:118).
Figure 3.4-2: Organisational structure of the NRF Source: OECD (2007b:118)
Prior to the OECD (2007b) Review, the NRF resource base had become too thinly spread across a wide range of activities. In response, the NRF has moved to rationalise the programmes under its control, including the Centres of Excellence, the Flagship Projects and the National Facility
HartRAO (SKA) SAAO (SALT) HMO Innovation
Fund (DST) THRIP (The
DTI) Scarce Skills Development
Fund
IThemba LABS (MRMC) S&T
Advancement
RISA: Service Supervision
RISA: Core Grant Research & Innovation Support & Advancement
Corporate Office National Research
Facilities
Nuclear Sciences
Astro / Space /
Geosciences Biodiversity &
Conservation President / CEO
NRF NRF Board
Corporate Secretary
SAASTA
ICD KFD
KM&S
SAIAB (ACEP)
NZG SAEON
STAF (DST)
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clusters. The challenge remains to balance investment between the foundation disciplines and areas of strategic focus, including priorities identified in the NRDS and the Grand Challenges. The NRF funds mostly within nine broadly defined focus areas which are primarily thematic rather than disciplinary in nature and emphasise the link to social and economic application.
The CSIR was set up in 1945 and is by far the largest of the South African public research institutes (PRIs). The CSIR functions as the major national industrially-oriented research institute and is directly comparable to institutions such as Valtion Teknillinen Tutkimuskeskus (VTT) (State Technical Research Centre) of Finland, The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (SINTEF) of Norway and Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) of Netherlands. Although there has been a steady improvement in the quantity and quality of the CSIR's outputs (in the form of ST&T publications, patents among others), the biggest problem continues to be the breadth of its mandate, in that the organisation can be called on to do anything that may be said to have a 'technology' definition (Mashelkar, Leppävuori & Kaplan, 2003:12; OECD, 2007b:139). The SA DST Ministerial Review Committee (2012:76) notes that “it seems that the proliferated, fragmented and over-committed activities of the CSIR are a reflection of, among other things, a larger systemic failure to provide coordination for the NSI”.
The HSRC was established in 1968, with the mission of undertaking, stimulating and promoting policy-relevant applied social science that contributes to development in South Africa. The research agenda of the HSRC is directly guided by national development priorities, as well as the UNDP MDGs (2010). The HSRC pursues strongly-structured programmes of research, which include large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal research, as such the annual National R&D Survey and the Innovation Survey. The annual government lead R&D survey is a highly significant component of the NSI.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) was established in 1969 as a research facility of the Department of Health, which produces about 600 peer-reviewed journal articles a year and two to five patents. A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right by the government, which allows the patent holder to exclude others from “working” the invention: making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the RSA or “importing” the invention (South African Intellectual Property Rights, 2008). The MRC has 47 research units organised into six categories and is the only one of the research councils to act as an R&D funding agency. However, the six categories have no leaders, are more descriptive than organisational and not reflected in the planning process.
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Other agencies of the DST include the Indigenous Knowledge Trust to safeguard and exploit indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), the Meraka Institute for information and communication technology (ICT), the BRIC, the SA AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the SA Bioinformatics Initiative, the Automotive Industry Development Centre, the Innovation Hub, the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, the South African Malaria Initiative, and the S&T centres of Armscor. It is estimated that the total budget of the units was approximately R 700 million in the 2008/09 financial year. To this end, the next section presents a summary of OECD South African NSI country review.