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

Susan Parnell; Ian Palmer; Nishendra Moodley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783609648 ISBN 13: 9781783609642

Publisher: Zed Books, 2017

Synopsis

The sustainable development goals signed in 2016 marked a new phase in global development thinking, one which is focused on ecologically and fiscally sustainable human settlements. Few countries offer a better testing ground for their attainment than post-apartheid South Africa. Since the coming to power of the African National Congress, the country has undergone a policy making revolution, driven by an urgent need to improve access to services for the country’s black majority.

A quarter century on from the fall of apartheid, Building a Capable State asks what lessons can be learned from the South African experience. The book assesses whether the South African government has succeeded in improving service delivery, focusing on the vital sectors of water and sanitation, energy, roads, public transport and housing. Emphasizing the often-overlooked role of local government institutions and finance, the book demonstrates that effective service delivery can have a profound impact on the social structure of emerging economies, and must form an integral part of any future development strategy.

A comprehensive examination of urban service delivery in the global South, Building a Capable State is essential reading for students and practitioners across the social sciences, public finance and engineering sectors.

About this title

About the Author

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)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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: 978-1-78360-964-2

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 work effectively over time. It is also necessary for services to be affordable to very poor households and for services to work in very poor homes. How much money is available puts a limit on how much can be spent at all and how much redistributed to the poor. As important, though, is having the capability to spend the funds effectively on the things that will make a difference at scale, and to invest in the expansion of services in a way that can be sustained over time. State capability is thus defined not only by the effective and sustainable roll-out of services, but also by the ability of the citizenry to access these services affordably and reliably.

The government that took over from the apartheid-era state in South Africa in 1994 encountered its own capability challenges as it had to address past inequity and face the new demands generated by urbanisation and population expansion. South Africa is a middle-income country, but its high levels of inequality, and distorted history of racial territorial segregation, mean that the range of local conditions echo realities of much richer as well as far poorer countries. The dual imperatives of addressing poverty and inequality make the South African case a useful stimulus for reflection on more sustainable human settlement pathways in developed and developing contexts alike.

To ascertain what it takes for government to respond to citizens' needs in a rapidly changing environment of population growth, urbanisation, and political change, this book provides a grounded account of the institutional dynamics of government and the technical imperatives of service delivery across urban, peri-urban, and rural locations. South Africa's uneven efforts to end discrimination, expand service delivery, and improve human settlement conditions over the past twenty years illuminate some of the organisational and fiscal capabilities that a state must hold, protect, or create if it is committed to meeting its obligations of universal service delivery and improving human settlements.

This is not an attempt to present the South African case as a best practice example, for in many respects it is not. However, the country's service journeys offer an opportunity for deep reflection on the trajectory of developmental change undertaken by the post-apartheid state, especially at the subnational scale. The South African story offers insights into just how much it takes to dramatically scale up rights-based service implementation of a quality and durability that is needed to make a tangible impact on the quality of life of the most vulnerable, and those living in places that lack effective government. By implication, the authors are suggesting that the national and local scale of the challenges faced by the newly elected post-apartheid government in 1994 is not unlike that facing the 2030 Agenda-inspired aspirations of the global community today.

The post-apartheid service delivery challenge, while distinctive in many respects, reveals common fiscal, political, institutional, and skills-based barriers to transforming the focus of government and expanding its reach into historically unregulated and chaotically administered jurisdictions. The fundamental battle here, as elsewhere in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America, was for government to expand and improve services for the most vulnerable in the country, who had suffered because public institutions either did not work, or did not work for them.

Capability, services, and the built environment In 1961, Jane Jacobs revolutionised the way 'place-making' was understood, by articulating the imperative that scholarly observation be grounded in the real world of the city block or street. Jacobs was interested in the ways that cities emerged from a composite of human activities and physical infrastructures that worked at the neighbourhood scale, and on which she argued wider city and regional economic well-being and vitality depended. Jacobs' logic of prioritising close observation, and of focusing first and foremost on what worked in practice, holds for other aspects of urban research.

Drawing from Jacobs to think about the provision of built environmental services, which are the key means for securing social and environmental rights, not just economic prosperity, entails immersion in service delivery practice. For us, this implies not only the deep understanding of the lived experience of service consumption, but also looking beyond the accounts of households and communities fighting to access services to the challenges of those tasked with service provision. The strongest argument to emerge from this focus on service providers is that failed and flawed service delivery by government is augmented by sophisticated informal service delivery operations who compound unequal and exclusionary service access.

It is much easier to critique the outcomes of state delivery or to decry the outsourcing of traditional functions of government to other service providers than it is to get inside the institutional vehicles of state delivery in order to better see and understand the full service value chain, especially in poor neighbourhoods with high levels of illegal and informal supply. The work of Jaglin (2014) is an exemplar of the thinking that takes seriously the idea that a crude framing of neo-liberalism is unhelpful and that services are provided in a complex system of co-dependent provision, where states are one of many actors. Jaglin's concern was to break down the binary of formal and informal, state and non-state provision, in order to probe the basis for creating more legible, predictable, and affordable service governance.

The task of this book is in some senses simpler. It seeks to look only at the deliberations and conundrums of municipal and other government offices that are mandated to supply a service into public purview. This is so that one can ask how those tasks, where government is a central if not the sole actor, might be done better. The book does this for multiple services, so as to construct a more integrated perspective on state capacity, beyond an individual department or line function. While obviously much of our attention is on what happens at the local level, it is clear that municipalities function within the broader arrangements of the state. A capable state is one where intergovernmental arrangements do not falter or fragment at the point of service delivery. Building a capable state in this way, albeit off a low base, is the very antithesis of the neo-liberal logic of service provision, and is instead the foundation of a progressive rights-based settlement agenda.

3. What is the capable state?

What are the defining features of a capable state, if one acknowledges that the state is not uniform, and that the challenges and responses of government vary over time, place, and sector? This text begins by recognising that in order to realise ambitions of universal service coverage – for instance, of water or sanitation – as is demanded by the rights-based South African Constitution or implied internationally via the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), most contexts require that a proportion of the population receive a subsidy of some kind. This book therefore considers that one of the criteria of effective public service delivery includes, but is not limited to, the capabilities of states to redistribute financial resources. It may not be imperative that government is the sole or even dominant supplier of guaranteed affordable built environment services. But state involvement is necessary in setting up and overseeing the costing of the service and the operational relationships between spheres of government, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the private sector, and civil society, if redistribution is to succeed in service delivery. Under conditions of democracy, the terms in which these relationships are framed are set out in election promises and can be changed by popular will through the ballot box and protests.

States have a key role to play in ensuring access to public services, whether by outsourcing, partnerships, tax collection, or even the simple environmental oversight of service standards. Government best does redistribution and subsidies that ensure affordability. Taking as given the commitment to sustainability, the public good, and effective service delivery, the characteristics of a capable state that are presented in the chapters that follow include: functional political arrangements, sound policies, the requisite technical and scientific skills, well-structured institutions, reliable access to finance, and competent local government.

The issue of building local state capacity as a means to secure the implementation of the SDGs has been taken up by the multilateral agencies, most directly through SDG 11, where there is overt acknowledgement of the subnational role of government. Similarly, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development – otherwise known as Habitat III – in its New Urban Agenda, encourages both local and national governments to address issues of territorial planning and local development collaboratively. Coordination and harmonisation are common themes in realising sustainable settlement aspirations.

Multi-scale governance is never simple, and in the South African case it invokes spheres of government, rather than the subsidiarity implied by the notion of tiers of government. This means that not only does local planning need to ensure coherence of different forms of state investments, but national and provincial departments responsible for local functions have to be aligned with the activities of municipalities. While not perceived as direct service providers, national or provincial political and administrative process are also responsible for making policy that has impact at a local level, setting up institutional and finance arrangements, regulating and supporting municipalities. The capability of the state must therefore be measured across the sum of all of these interconnected actions.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Building a Capable State by Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, Susan Parnell. Copyright © 2017 Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan Parnell. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783609648
• ISBN 13: 9781783609642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320