Making Social Justice Matter: A Research Chair’s Social Justice Quest

In addition to South Africa’s Constitution being globally acclaimed as among the best in the world, it is among the few transformative constitutions that express a clear commitment to serve as a blueprint for the transformation of society into a socially just, human rights-based democracy.

The preamble to the Constitution states in part that the people adopt it to “heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights and freedoms” where the lives of all citizens are improved and the potential of all persons is freed.

The persistence of high levels of inequality along contours of past injustices remains, which is not only unconscionable, but defaulting on the constitutional commitment to social justice and related equality advancement duty.

The CSJ four years on

The Law Trust Chair in Social Justice (CSJ), which recently received senate approval to become a Centre for Social Justice, has been engaged in intense research to establish the cause of what appears to be undirected pivoting from the egalitarian transformation quest dictated by the Constitution.

The Chair in Social Justice was established as one of the strategic interventions to give meaning to the University of Stellenbosch’s vision of being at the forefront of building a South Africa based on shared prosperity, where all belong.

Since its establishment in 2018, the CSJ has published various research papers and prepared policy briefs and law and policy reform submissions, including COVID-19 regulations and convened:

• Twenty-three Social Justice Roundtables on various pressing themes, including education
• Three Social Justice Summits hosted on the concept of social justice and themes such as economic parity
• Twenty-two Social Justice Cafes.
  The CSJ has also presented more than a thousand lectures, speeches and papers nationally and internationally on various social justice dimensions and has been pivotal in the #Action4Inclusion student debt initiative, which has assisted 88 students to reregister and/or graduate.

The Musa Plan for Social Justice

The CSJ’s flagship project is the Musa Plan for Social Justice (Social Justice M-Plan). The Social Justice M-Plan, inspired by the post-World War II Marshall Plan for Europe’s recovery, seeks to mobilise integrated civil society contribution to the advancement of social justice.

The focus is on ending poverty and breaking the back of structural inequality by 2030 in line with the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through engaged civic action on:

1. Equality and poverty impact conscious policy, law and programme planning.
2. Social accountability and social cohesion.
3. Civic financing of initiatives to advance social justice in pursuit of the SDGs and NDP goals.
4. Cultivating ethical and constitutionally attuned leadership and state capacity at all levels.

Towards social impact conscious policy design

Another premier initiative of the CSJ is to cultivate a culture of social impact conscious policy and legislation design. The initiative integrates foresight science into law and policy reform.

The theory of change transcends evidence-based policy planning and focuses on impact conscious policy design, bearing in mind that divergent groups in society are impacted disparately by facially neutral laws and policies. The approach, which incorporates systems thinking and design thinking, seeks to help policy and law-makers leverage data analytics to predict the likely impact of planned laws, policy and services on divergent groups with varied socioeconomic needs and capacities in society.

The CSJ has designed a checklist referred to as a Nine-Dimensional Social Justice Impact Assessment Matrix (SIAM) to assist policy-makers to conduct requisite prospective impact assessments. The idea is to abandon a policy that will unfairly advantage a social group or groups while disadvantaging or exacerbating the disadvantage of others, thus exacerbating existing inequality and/or poverty.

The future

Developments worth celebrating, include the emergence of a strong social justice movement and growing acceptance of the constitutional commitment on social justice together with consensus on the desirability of social justice as an anchor of shared humanity or Ubuntu.

Agreement on a shared vision of what South Africa should look like by 2030 and beyond in the form of a national compact or new deal augmenting the Constitution, as agreed in the last Social Justice Summit, presents the possibility of a guardrail that will accelerate the advancement of social justice.