Building a Capable State: Service Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa - Hardcover

Palmer, Ian; Moodley, Nishendra; Parnell, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178360963X ISBN 13: 9781783609635

Verlag: Zed Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A timely study of the South African government's efforts to improve access to public services and the lessons this holds for global development strategy.

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Ian Palmer is the founder of Palmer Development Group (PDG). He has 40 years experience in the fields of civil engineering and development. Ian is also an adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT) attached to the African Centre for Cities. For a period of 15 years from 1997 to 2012 he was on the board of Mvula Trust, an NGO focused on providing water and sanitation for rural communities.

Nishendra Moodley currently works with the South African National Treasury's City Support Programme. He joined the City of Cape Town in 1998 to manage local government transformation projects and subsequently joined and later led Palmer Development Group (PDG). He has a Master's degree in Public Administration. He has worked on local government policy development, monitoring and evaluation processes for national government, and institutional transformation projects for municipalities.

Susan Parnell is a Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at UCT. She is centrally involved in the African Centre for Cities, serving on its executive. She is the author of over a hundred peer reviewed papers, and a number of books, including Africa's Urban Revolution (co-edited with E. Pieterse, Zed 2014)

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Building a Capable State

Service Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa

By Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, Susan Parnell

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan Parnell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78360-963-5

Contents

List of figures, vi, 
List of tables, ix, 
Abbreviations, xi, 
Preface, xiv, 
1 What is the 'capable' state?, 1, 
2 Twenty years: local government in transition, 22, 
3 Institutions, 49, 
4 Improving capability through regulation and support, 75, 
5 Municipal organisational capability, 109, 
6 Financing municipal services, 129, 
7 Water and sanitation, 158, 
8 Electricity, 187, 
9 Roads and public transport, 208, 
10 Housing, 230, 
11 Is South Africa a capable state?, 252, 
Appendix A: comparative country profiles, 274, 
Appendix B: economic factors, 276, 
Notes, 278, 
References, 283, 
Index, 295, 

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS THE 'CAPABLE' STATE?

1. Introduction

There is global consensus that human settlements must be designed and run differently. The international community has, under the rubric of the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (United Nations, 2015), set itself somewhere between fifteen and twenty years to reach ambitious targets on human settlements, to provide basic service delivery (for water, sanitation, energy), as well as initiating a major new thrust to make cities safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. The time frame for governments to deliver on the human settlement-related promises of the Sustainable Development Agenda (United Nations, 2015) and the New Urban Agenda (United Nations, 2016) is not unlike the two decades that have passed since apartheid ended in South Africa.

After 1994, the realities of changing a society and putting in place the bold development aspirations of a newly democratic country put the spotlight on the institutions and fiscal arrangements that could, mindful of ecological constraints and economic aspirations, deliver basic services for the poor. The emphasis of the South African transition was to extend and reform the role of local government within a broadly rights-based and state-led logic of development. In this ambition, the post-apartheid experience provides a touchstone of what might realistically be achieved in the time frames of current global policy ambitions. The lessons from this highly unequal middle-income nation that was determined to shift its developmental trajectory also provides a sobering reminder of the impediments to change, and the effort required to build a capable state.

On balance, this book finds that the South African state today is sufficiently if not optimally capable. Certainly, it is more capable of equitable service provision than its apartheid predecessor, but the demonstrable gains that have been realised in twenty years were not achieved consistently over the period, nor were they evenly distributed in space. There is also strong sectoral variation, for example between transport and water, in how state capability was imagined and realised. The post-apartheid journey towards a technically more capable state has been bumpy and is always vulnerable to wider political turbulence. This uneven record of building state capability in South Africa is pitted with obvious gains and significant setbacks, providing an opportunity for critical reflection that, given the similarities between post-apartheid aspirations and the global developmental ambition, is of value beyond the immediate national context.

Like most other nations, the South African settlement system is characterised by intra- and interurban inequality, as well as deep rural poverty. Because of its history, the subnational governance arrangements inherited from the pre-1994 had to be undone to remove institutional discrimination, most obviously but not exclusively relating to racial segregation. There is now a recognisably 'modern' system of elected municipal government based on a universal franchise that operates across every piece of South African territory. In practice in many areas of the country, municipal authority now coexists alongside formal and informal activities of central government and local traditional authorities as a hybrid. Thus, especially in poorer rural areas, where municipalities are new and where pre-existing settlement management practices have not been destroyed, the de facto system of local governance is not always very legible. Peculiar in many respects, these diverse local governance institutional forms echo the realities of many different global contexts, especially in Africa, where it is not only the multi-scalar dynamics of government that must be taken into account, but also the precolonial forms of settlement. In thinking about capability, our understanding of the state thus emphasises the different spheres of government and refers, as necessary, to the ambiguous role of traditional actors tasked directly or indirectly with developing places and attending to the settlement-related rights of citizens.

The fragmented political map, and the complex, often opaque governance arrangements inherited by the new democratic government in South Africa, are not unusual. Nor were its other challenges, reminding us that the post-apartheid state's capability for sustainable development was forged under conditions of multiple uncertainties. Putting aside the unsettling question of politics for a moment – population growth and urbanisation (made up of trans-frontier movement and internal migration) meant that the spatial landscape of local service demand was constantly changing and expanding – at the same time as unprecedented household splitting compounded the increase in the total demand for built environment services. The task of building a more capable state in democratic South Africa, even before issues of reconstruction are factored in, must be acknowledged to have taken place under fluid and demanding conditions.

The demographic and urbanisation transitions were not the only aspect of flux. The social, political, and economic context in which government operated changed quickly, impacting on the technical tasks of government. Globally, a climate of neo-liberalism prevailed, influencing the logic of macroeconomic policy and institutional governance. The 2008 economic crisis was felt globally, including in South Africa. In the same decades, major new technological innovations, such as the Internet, impacted on how effective local governments could be. Finally, the national political context of the nascent democracy was far from constant – or stable. Notwithstanding uncertainty after 1994, South Africa made progress in implementing its utopian vision of universal suffrage and equal rights. In part, we argue, this progress was realised by the building of a more capable state. It is also this more effective pro-poor service delivery, enabled by growing capability across government between 1994 and 2008, that is threatened by more recent corruption and state capture.

2. Building the capable state: a prerequisite for rights-based sustainable development

It is possible, but not easy, to fulfil the demand for affordable basic service provision associated with a rights-based sustainable development agenda. The problem is not just having the money to do so, although this book will argue that how public financial resources are generated and allocated is a necessary condition to making the institutions that provide water, housing, power, or transport...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178360963X
• ISBN 13: 9781783609635
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland