Cape Town: "Sustainable Future: What’s left? What’s right? What’s next"

This year’s International Winelands Conference entitled "Sustainable Future: What’s left? What’s right? What’s next", was coordinated by Professor Kobus Muller, Director of the School of Public Management and Planning of the Stellenboch University.
The meeting began with an introductory session on “Sustainable Future: Challenges of Macro-Governance”. Emeritus Professor Basarab Nicolescu from the Universities of Budapest and Paris 6 opened the conference together with Professor Joshua Farley from Vermont University who discussed the subject of inter-disciplinarity of knowledge as an objective for improving governance. The current international situation is characterized by a “triple crisis”: depletion of oilfields, climate change and market instability. Then, the Mayor of Cape Town held a speech on urban governance.
The conference continued with a focus on four parallel themes: governance, development, technical assistance and sustainable eco-systems. Among the most relevant speeches, there was the address by Mr Charles Dalton, Director for Government and Healthcare at KPMG who introduced the consultancy models applied to public governance.
The conference concluded with a workshop on local governance reforms in a comparative perspective on April 18th – afternoon session and April 19th.
The roundtable was organized by Professor Norbert Kersting - Willy Brandt Faculty of Transformation and Regional Integration of the Stellenbosch University. Saturday session was opened by Professor Janice Caulfield who compared the Malaysian case, an example of best practice in Public Administration, with the Indonesian case where in 1997 the process of decentralization had started. This stopped in 2004 when the central government re-gained decentralized competencies of local bodies. Subsequently, the Chinese case was examined with a focus on administrative reforms. The following speech by Professor Andrew Nickson from the University of Birmighan concentrated on local governance reforms by comparing three non-federal countries: Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay.
The working day concluded with a speech by Professor Hellmut Wollmann from the University of Berlin who compared France with the key role played by the “Departements” at level of local administration, Great Britain characterized by a strong process of decentralization, and Germany with the system of “Länder” .
Finally, Ms Lucia Santuccione from the International Activities Office of Formez drew attention on the Italian regional system with reference to the new Community planning and the Twinning tool as a means for sharing knowledge between the public administrations of European countries and neighbor countries.