NSI STATECRAFT 2026
Statecraft 2026
Speakers & PanelsInternational Congress on Civil Service Reform and Democracy. Confirmed-speaker programme.
Working Conversations, Not Presentations
For two days, NSI brings together practitioners, scholars and senior officials from South Africa and across the Global South for honest conversations about civil service reform. The format is working discussion: short interventions, moderated conversation and cross-comparison across contexts. No papers, no panels of the ordinary kind.
The premise of every panel is the same: we already know reform is necessary. The question is how. Click on any speaker’s photo to read their bio.
Day 1
Opening Address
South Africa documented the capture of its state in forensic detail, argued the diagnosis in public for a decade, and won the argument: the Public Service Amendment Act 9 of 2025 takes the power to appoint officials below head-of-department level out of the hands of ministers. Ivor Chipkin has been at the centre of that journey, from the early research on patronage networks to the legislative change itself. The keynote asks why the merit-based design of 1994 proved so vulnerable, what made legislative change possible, and why the hardest part, implementation, is still ahead. It frames the questions the two days return to.
Appointing Senior Officials
How countries appoint senior officials reveals how they think about the relationship between political leadership and professional administration. Korea’s 2006 Senior Civil Service reform, told by the minister who implemented it, opens the comparison; Chile’s Servicio Civil, Indonesia’s open selection for senior positions and the United States’ federal workforce follow. Set against the keynote’s account of South Africa’s own reform, the panel asks what made reform possible, what the unintended consequences were, and what a well-designed system still cannot solve.
Moderator: Brian Levy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Political Patronage, Corruption, and Informal Power
Many countries have the right laws on paper: civil service acts, merit requirements, transparency regulations. And yet appointments remain political and procurement captured. An analytical, not moralistic, look at the conditions under which informal power becomes entrenched, and what disrupts it.
Moderator: Jelena Vidojević (NSI)
Protecting Civil Service Independence in South Africa
The Public Service Amendment Act 9 of 2025 shifts the power to appoint officials below Head of Department level from ministers to Directors-General and Heads of Department, and separates political and administrative roles. This panel is not about what the Act says. It is about what is actually happening: the resistance emerging, the regulations that remain unclear, and what has surprised the people trying to make reform work.
Moderator: Yoliswa Makhasi, New South Institute
Governing State-Owned Enterprises
Not what went wrong with South Africa’s SOEs (that analysis is familiar) but what it would take for things to go right: which governance arrangements, political conditions and institutional choices produced better outcomes in the past, and what eroded them.
Moderator: Stephan Malherbe, Chair of the NSI Board; Founder and Chair, Genesis Analytics
Day 2
Managing the Political-Administrative Interface
When the relationship between elected politicians and professional civil servants works, politicians can lead and civil servants can deliver. Brazil, Slovakia and Latin America more broadly offer very different versions of this tension, and different answers on what protections actually work in high-turnover systems.
Moderator: Zukiswa Mqolomba, Deputy Chairperson, Public Service Commission of South Africa
Training, Professionalization, and Leadership Development
Better training does not automatically produce better government. Often the problem is the system civil servants return to. Two institution-builders and an anthropologist of institutions working the same question from different angles: what does it actually require to shift a training institution from certifying civil servants to reshaping how they govern?
Moderator: Ivor Chipkin, Chief Executive Officer, New South Institute
Governing Johannesburg: What Would It Take?
This panel is about the city the congress is taking place in. Not what a well-governed Johannesburg would look like in theory, but what it would actually take to get there: what changes between city, province and national government, what institutional reforms within the administration, what political conditions. Diagnostic and frank.
Moderator: Ann Bernstein, Founder and Executive Director, Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE)
Urban Governance: What Makes Large Cities Well-Administered?
City leaders from Medellín and Greater Monrovia in a single, focused conversation: how each appointed and retained capable officials, managed the political-administrative relationship across electoral cycles, and delivered services at scale, and what, in their experience, is transferable to cities like Johannesburg.
Moderator: Prof. Taibat Lawanson, University of Liverpool; NSI Board member
Deepening Public Participation and Civic Engagement
South Africa’s constitution treats public participation as a requirement; in practice it often functions as a formality. This panel does not repeat that critique. It profiles arrangements that have actually worked, from the IDC’s Social Employment Fund to the EDP’s fourteen years of collaborative intermediary work in the Western Cape, and asks what made them work.
Moderator: Stephan Malherbe, Chair of the NSI Board; Founder and Chair, Genesis Analytics
What the Two Days Add Up To
Ivor Chipkin closes the congress: the clearest lessons from the nine panels, the questions that remain open, and where NSI takes this work next. A synthesis report of the congress will follow, and all sessions are recorded. The congress concludes at 17:00.
Join the Conversation
Registration is free. Places are limited and advance registration is essential.
Register Now ← Back to the Congress Page