Steven Friedman is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. He is a political scientist who has specialized in the study of democracy. During the 1980s, he produced a series of studies of reform apartheid and its implications for a democratic future. Friedman has researched and wrote widely on the South African transition to democracy both before and after the elections of 1994 and has, over the past decade, largely written on the relationship between democracy on the one hand, social inequality and economic growth on the other. In particular, he has stressed the role of citizen voice in strengthening democracy and promoting equality.

Carolyn Bassett is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Director, International Development Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada. She has researched South African politics for more than 25 years, focusing on policy processes and the role of civil society, especially trade unions. Her work has been published in Review of African Political Economy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary African Studies and other journals, and she is currently working on a book on COSATU and the policy process in South Africa.

Imraan Buccus is a Senior Research Associate at ASRI. He is also the academic director of a university study abroad program on political transformation and concurrently a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN, and the editor of Al Qalam. Buccus is the former editor of Critical Dialogue, a journal of Public Participation in review, he co-authored the National Framework on Public Participation for the South African government. During his time at the Centre for Public Participation, he led an initiative to bring policy making spaces closer to ordinary people and also led a project to assess the state of participatory democracy in Namibia. He has wide ranging experience working with various donor agencies including the Ford Foundation, NiZA, EU, Kellogg Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. In the early 2000’s Buccus worked as academic coordinator of the Workers College, a progressive experiential education college for workers from the trade union movement, where he developed a passion for experiential education and its personal and academic developmental potential. Imraan is also widely published, in academic journals and book chapters, in the area of participatory democracy, poverty and civil society.