NSI STATECRAFT 2026 — SPEAKERS & PANELS
Statecraft 2026
Speakers & PanelsInternational Conference on Civil Service Reform and Democracy. Confirmed-speaker programme; additional participants to be announced.
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
Korea reformed its senior civil service from the inside, and Professor Pan Suk Kim helped design and implement that reform. His keynote is not a success story: it is a practitioner’s account of what it actually took — navigating a bureaucracy that resisted openness, building political coalitions, and holding together a reform that had to be technically sound and politically viable at the same time.
Appointing Senior Officials
How countries appoint senior officials reveals how they think about the relationship between political leadership and professional administration. Opening with the experiences of Chile’s Servicio Civil and Indonesia’s bureaucratic reform, and building on the keynote’s account of Korea, 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
Additional international speakers to be announced.
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 senior officials from politicians 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
Additional speakers to be announced.
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: Martha Ngoye, attorney and NSI Board member
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.
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 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, Co-Founder and Director, New South Institute
Additional speakers to be announced.
Governing Johannesburg – What Would It Take?
This panel is about the city the conference 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, Executive Director, Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE)
Urban Governance – What Makes Large Cities Well-Administered?
Two of Latin America’s most closely studied city leaders 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. Final line-up.
Moderator: Prof. Taibat Lawanson, University of Liverpool
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 examines what it takes to make participation consequential rather than decorative — for democratic legitimacy and for the quality of policy.
Additional speakers to be announced.
Bureaucracy and Democracy – The Reform Agenda Ahead
The closing panel does not summarise the conference. It asks what it adds up to: where the clearest lessons are, where the most important questions remain open, and what the reform agenda requires from institutions like NSI and the people in the room.
Join the Conversation
Registration is free. Places are limited and advance registration is essential.
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