Prof Jaap de Visser
Jaap de Visser assumed office as Director of the Dullah Omar Institute in 2013 and has been associated with the Institute since 1998. In 2015, he spearheaded the conversion and renaming of the Community Law Centre into the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights. He is a Professor of Law at the University of the Western Cape's Faculty of Law.
He is the co-author of Local Government Law of South Africa. His research, teaching and consulting focuses on multilevel government, local government, good governance and federalism in Africa and he has published widely on these topics. He has overseen and conducted postgraduate and contract research on multilevel government in South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Lesotho and Kenya. With Prof Nico Steytler and Dr Tinashe Chigwata, he convenes the Masters in Law, State & Multilevel Government.
Jaap de Visser has consulted for many national and international organisations, including the Worldbank, UNHABITAT, USAID, Forum of Federations, GIZ, South Africa’s Department of Cooperative Government, the City of Cape Town and many other local authorities in South Africa. He was lead consultant on the Western Cape Land Use Planning Act of 2014 and on the review of Lesotho’s Local Government Act under contract with the UNDP. Prof De Visser is Treasurer of the International Association of Centres for Federal Studies and alternate board member of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum.
He holds an LLB and an LLD from Utrecht University where he taught from 2002-2006 and an LLM from the University of the Western Cape. He is rated by the National Research Foundation at B-2 ("considerable international recognition for the high quality and impact of his/her recent research outputs").
Recent publications:
- 'Constitutionalisation of Local and Regional Government in Uganda, Lesotho and South Africa’ in (2019) Fombad & Steytler Decentralisation and Constitutionalism in Africa OUP
- 'Municipal Law Making under SPLUMA: A Survey of Fifteen 'First Generation' Municipal Planning By-Laws' (with X Poswa) PER / PELJ 2019(22)
- 'Ministerial Directives to Local Government in Zimbabwe: Top-Down Governance in a Decentralized Constitution' (with T Chigwata & V Muchapondwa) 2017 Journal of African Law
- Concurrency in South Africa' in (2017) N Steytler (ed) Concurrent Powers in Federal Systems
- 'Overseeing the Overseers - Assessing Compliance with Municipal Intervention Rules in South Africa' (with J November) 2017 Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 1
- 'The (mis)management of ethnolinguistic diversity in Ethiopian cities' (with Z Ayele) Ethnopolitics 16(3): 260-278
- Local Law Making in Cape Town: a Case Study of the Municipal Planning By-Law Process UNHABITAT Urban Legal Case Studies Volume 3 (2016)
- 'The Enforcement of Socio-Economic Rights against Local Governments in South Africa' in (2015) Bosire & Gikonyo (eds) Animating Devolution in Kenya International Development Law Organisation/ Judiciary Training Institute/Katiba Institute: Rome/Nairobi pp. 193-207
- 'The Unresolved Ethnic Question in Uganda’s District Councils' (with D Singiza) 19 LDD 107-126
- 'Confronting the State of Local Government: the 2013 Constitutional Court Decisions"'(with N Steytler) 2016 Constitutional Court Review
