Editorial Introduction
- Jul 31
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 7
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Welcome to this issue of the Journal for Inclusive Public Policy. Volume 6(2) arrives at a moment when the questions our authors are grappling with — digital transformation, democratic resilience, trade justice, and the terms on which Africa and Europe negotiate a shared future — feel less like academic abstractions and more like live governance choices being made in real time.
The issue opens with two contributions that examine the digital state from complementary vantage points. Phineas Motsiri Peta traces how digital transformation is reshaping the machinery of government and organisational life in South Africa, from paperless operations to cybersecurity. Maxwell Maseko then widens the lens continentally, asking whether South Africa's relative digital maturity positions it to shape digital democracy elsewhere in Africa — and what the divergent governance models within BRICS mean for that ambition. Read together, they frame a question this journal returns to often: technology can widen access to the state, but only where the underlying institutions are built to carry it.
Three articles then take up EU–Africa relations directly, each from a different angle. Ogonna Beauty Ogbologu confronts the deadlock in the EU–West Africa Economic Partnership Agreement, arguing that trade preferences have failed to formalise employment because existing frameworks regulate goods, not work, and proposes a mechanism — the Employment Formalisation Prerequisite — to close that gap. Assi J.C. Kimou assesses what the 7th AU-EU Summit changes, and does not change, for the economic and strategic architecture linking the European Union to Francophone West Africa. Brig (Rtd) Dr Robert Kabage turns to the security dimension, examining how EU engagement in Kenya's peace and security architecture intersects with the country's own agency, donor dependency, and regional leadership ambitions. Together these three pieces make the case that "EU–Africa relations" is not one relationship but several, negotiated separately in trade halls, summit communiqués, and security operations.
Sameh Abidi's contribution extends this thread into climate and industrial policy, examining how Tunisia's exposure to the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism forces a rethink of industrial strategy and fiscal planning — a reminder that European climate ambition has direct, and not always comfortable, consequences for African industrial policy.
Daryl Swanepoel then offers a comparative examination of China's national health insurance architecture, presented as a reference point for South Africa's own NHI reform at a moment when the NHI Act faces active Constitutional Court scrutiny. Whatever one's view of China's political system, the institutional design choices it has made — layered risk pooling, bounded benefits, contribution discipline — are argued here to be genuinely instructive for the sequencing debate now underway at home.
The issue closes with Prof Wynand Goosen's Metacognition and Machine Cognition, which examines how metacognition, reframed as "secondary thinking", mediates human judgement in an era of generative AI. Drawing on cognitive psychology, human–computer interaction, and decision science, Goosen argues that critical thinking alone is an insufficient safeguard against automation bias, and proposes a model of the supervisory reasoning that determines when and how people evaluate machine-generated outputs. It is a fitting note to end on: as AI systems take on a larger share of analytical and administrative work, how humans monitor and calibrate their trust in those systems will increasingly shape the quality of decision-making across the institutions this journal exists to study.
We are grateful to our reviewers for their continued rigour, and to our authors for their patience through the review process. We hope this issue contributes, in some small way, to more inclusive and better-governed public policy on the continent and beyond.
Stephen Langtry
Editor-in-Chief
This report has been published by the Inclusive Society Institute
The Inclusive Society Institute (ISI) is an autonomous and independent institution that functions independently from any other entity. It is founded for the purpose of supporting and further deepening multi-party democracy.The ISI’s work is motivated by its desire to achieve non-racialism, non-sexism, social justice and cohesion, economic development and equality in South Africa, through a value system that embodies the social and national democratic principles associated with a developmental state. It recognises that a well-functioning democracy requires well-functioning political formations that are suitably equipped and capacitated. It further acknowledges that South Africa is inextricably linked to the ever transforming and interdependent global world, which necessitates international and multilateral cooperation. As such, the ISI also seeks to achieve its ideals at a global level through cooperation with like-minded parties and organs of civil society who share its basic values.In South Africa, ISI’s ideological positioning is aligned with that of the current ruling party and others in broader society with similar ideals.
Email: info@inclusivesociety.org.za
Phone: +27 (0) 21 201 1589
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