Browsing by Author "Scheepers, Louis Adrian"
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- ItemAn institutional capacity model of municipalities in South Africa(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Scheepers, Louis Adrian; Schwella, Erwin; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Public Leadership.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Local government occupies a special place in the architecture of state in South Africa and there is an increasing realisation that the performance of local government is critical in respect of poverty alleviation and the rendering of services to communities. There is, however, also a need to focus on the capacity of individual municipalities to improve their quality of governance and levels of service delivery. This dissertation therefore presents a model, the Municipal Institutional Capacity Model (MICM) that can be used, outside of the present research for the dissertation, to facilitate the development of tools for the assessment of the institutional capacity of municipalities in South Africa. As background to the study, and also as a key informant towards the ultimate design and construction of the model, six eras in the development of the South African state, with special reference to the system of local government, are identified and described, namely (1) the pre-colonial era; (2) the colonial era (laying the basis for race-based governance); (3) the Union years (institutionalising race-based governance); (4) the apartheid era (entrenching race-based governance); (5) the pre-negotiations phase (challenging race-based governance); and (6) the democratic era. This timeline represents an enriching of the historiography of the development of the South African state by including a narrative on the system of governance of one of the pre-colonial societies found in South Africa. At the centre of the South African local government system lie a set of developmental ambitions, contained in the White Paper on Local Government, the Constitution and the suite of local government that regulates local government in South Africa. The lofty ideals contained in this framework create a standard against which to measure the system of local government and the outputs and outcomes that it produces. At the same time, the discourse on the developmental state and developmental local government has developed into a theoretical framework that underlies the developmental ambitions of both the South African state and the importance of the system of local government in achieving these ambitions. The MICM is constructed in three sections consisting of two capacity areas, namely, a primary capacity area (leadership) and a secondary capacity area (innovation); and a set of four key institutional capacity elements, namely (1) long-term visioning and planning; (2) fiscal management; (3) public participation; and (4) human resources. The dissertation can be classified as a non-positivist, descriptive and explanatory qualitative study. In line with this classification, the model was validated by internal as well as external validation. The internal validation is based on a triangulation of calibrating the MICM with (1) the continuities between the different eras of local government development in South Africa; (2) the developmental mandate of local government; (3) the constitutional and legislative mandate of local government in South Africa; (4) the status quo in respect of local government performance in South Africa; and (5) the discourse on institutional capacity and capacity measurement. The external validation of the model consisted of an expert validation workshop in which four experts engaged with the MICM and considered whether the MICM provides predictive and structural validity and whether the model outputs agree with an external entity, in this case, municipalities in South Africa.