Local Government Organization and Finance: South Africa
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support, and it is anticipated that Project Consolidate may provide a new framework for their joint efforts. Their local government programs are now more aligned and provide some dedicated operational expertise at the national and provincial policy and monitoring levels. Moreover, multiple donor involvement has made it possible to address different aspects of the reform agenda: the technical issues of fiscal and operational management, as well as accountability questions in governance of councils and their relationships with local media and civil society groups. This new, integrated approach takes the agenda of consolidation significantly forward. Provided it can draw on a wide cross-departmental support base within South Africa, it promises to enhance accountable delivery considerably.
Lessons for Developing Countries The emergence and gradual consolidation of local government in South Africa has highlighted a number of important lessons, both from what South Africans have done right and from the challenges that they have found difficult to resolve. One could identify many lessons, but a few stand out.
Lesson 1: The Power of Vision South Africans are quite self-critical about their emphasis on policy in recent years. The government has become impatient to prove that it is firmly in the business of delivery, not merely of policy making. Yet in articulating powerfully their vision for local government, South Africans have managed to move the reform agenda forward on scale and at a persistent pace. The beginnings were in the constitutional negotiations of 1993, followed by a few years of finding their feet through the complex challenges of undoing a deeply embedded, skewed system and introducing a new one that meets the aspirations of a democratic nation. The 1998 White Paper on local government’s stance on developmental local government was an important landmark, but developing that vision has not stopped. It has continued in sectors, in the initiatives for partnerships with the private sector, and in the elaborate work of the National Treasury to define the fiscal framework more clearly and to set out tight fiscal policy and regulations that enhance monitoring as much as they allow innovations. The vision is developing—and with it the scope to test new ideas and explore new avenues by learning from both international and local experience.
