Full Professor
Professor Ruffin’s career spans across law, business, government, the non-profit sector and academia over 30 years. The former U.S. lawyer represented municipal governments, community and economic development corporations, small businesses and private individuals. Professor Ruffin served as a consultant to or manager of various public, commercial, non-profit and meta-sector organisations prior to joining academia. Her 2010 doctoral thesis is a comparative socio-legal cross-national study of the impact of law on the network governance of business improvement districts in the United States of America and Republic of South Africa in the context of globalisation and urbanisation.
Using the OECD’s urban entrepreneurial governance analytical framework, the study internationalizes the dependent variable of the network model to explore sub-local business improvement district (BID) interaction with independent variables of an entrepreneurial municipal government, BID transnational discourse, and national legal systems. Besides two terminal degrees, Professor Ruffin holds several professional development certificates from institutions such as the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ as a contributor to the Garnet Network of Excellence (Belgium), and from Rutgers University (USA) in mediation. She served as Public Governance Academic Leader from 2015-2017.
Awards and honours bestowed include the 2018 UKZN Distinguished Teacher’s Award and the national 2019 CHE/HELTASA Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Among her funded research projects are international partnerships of municipal governments, community-based justice systems and curriculum transformation. Consultancy areas and research interests surround indigenous knowledge systems, local and international public-private partnerships, meta-sector network governance and global governance and comparative law.
