Reconfiguring local governance and community participation in South Africa and Botswana

While the questions of governance and community participation are distinct, their operationalisation in the context of local government is not always mutually exclusive. As a result, issues of governance and community participation have continued to be of interest in most developing countries. For local government as an important sub-national government structure within the Southern African Development Community, there are a myriad of both opportunities and problems associated with the decentralisation of their powers. This article argues for a need to reconfigure governance and community participatory models so as to maintain the relevance of local government structures in African countries. Anstein’s public participation model is propounded for the purpose of analysing these participation models. Embedded in the discussion is the legislative and functional consideration regarding configuration and governance of local government. The examination of the ward committees in South Africa and village development committees in Botswana as institutionalised and legitimate participatory fora for local community members remains a key focus. In the final analysis, an analogue and critique regarding opportunities and challenges for local governance and participation issues in South Africa and Botswana are provided.

Reliability Allocation to I&C Sub-Systems: A Practical Methodology

As part of probabilistic safety assessment for a nuclear plant, regulators around the globe specify global limits for frequency of nuclear incidents like core damage frequency (CDF), lethal dose to the public, etc. Further allocation of individual targets to subsystems of the plant is left to plant designers normally. In this paper, a workable methodology for reliability allocation is illustrated with Instrumentation and Control (I&C) sub-systems of a Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR). Here, plant I&C is modeled as a set of systems grouped into four categories namely 1) control systems 2) mitigating systems 3) support systems 4) Plant protection systems. From the global limit on core damage frequency, the reliability allocation for I&C subsystems are done based on the hypothesized demand from the subsystems for plant protection. It is illustrated that all I&C sub-systems with varying functions can be linked to the global target directly or indirectly. A case study with entire I&C subsystems which are designed based on functional consideration in Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor is shown as a proof of concept. While it is widely agreed that probabilistic approach is supplementary to deterministic approaches for enhanced safety, the paper argues that probabilistic targets have to be plant wide to have maximum benefits.