A remarkable degree of continuity is encountered in the visionary roll of planning under apartheid and the post liberation planning experience. Whereas the broad objectives of planning may change radically, the demonstration and use of the power of planning is constant. The allure of planning is the constant theme as its power to drawn in potentially dissident perspectives (the example used is the NGO sector) is demonstrated time and again. The ambitions of planning are an equally important theme. The integrative function of planning is invariably overestimated and its social transformation promise is endlessly expounded but seldom realised. Broad ranging local strategic planning like lOP suggests a high degree of
decentralized state authority. However the ambiguity between the local autonomy implied in the right to formulate municipal IDPs and the restrictive terms of
the overall IDP legal and policy framework needs to be critically understood. Persuasive notions of entrenched autonomy, as advanced by Oldfield need to be treated with a healthy degree of skepticism. The latter it seems can justify increasing levels of national oversight provided this is based on 'irrefutable' national development principles typically set out in macro policy instruments like the National Spatial Development Programme, GEAR and in the Eastern Cape, the Provincial Growth and Development Programme. The obvious problem in such thinking is the implied existence of a set of incontrovertible principles. However it is the interpretation of these principles through the professional and sometimes authoritarian logic of planning that should cause real concern and previous critiques of IDP have tended to neglect the possibility that planning is in itself is a powerful means of capturing and directing development discourse. One instance of this examined in this paper, is the manner in which IDP cleverly 'dips into' radical critiques of planning and pre-empts much of the criticism - only to draw heavily on the basic principles of technical rationality and the crushing logic of the economy.
In practical terms lOP in South Africa may be regarded as being confronted by problems of application. Government began to experience a growing gap between its policy ideals and it's real administrative and governing capabilities at local government level. The ubiquity of planning helps to explain why the municipal government transformation programme remained fixated with high order policy matters at a time when it's fundamental incapacity to ensure basic service delivery and governance where obviously lacking. This can only be further understood if the purposes of policy are not taken at their economic and political face value. Clearly modern government, and particularly weak government, does not always subscribe to the principle that policy complexity should reflect proven administrative capability. This paper explores the disconcerting possibility that the state may be
trying to govern through policy rather than with policy i.e. policy replaces good administration.
The intellectual exercise of municipal policy design in a middle-income, developing country like South Africa has been widely acclaimed. Apart from international recognition and consequently donor support, lOP provided government with a strong vision to direct and focus the minds of local politicians and municipal staff.
More importantly the lOP programme proved effective in capturing the imagination of civil society. Initially the policy ideals and intentions managed to dispel criticism however the danger of any high-order policy framework is the disjunction it
creates when practice and implementation invariably occur at a more modest level. Thus an excessively idealistic policy framework poses a real problem for a new, inexperienced and under-capacitated municipal bureaucracy. Their faltering performance is almost inevitably short of the administrative and governance standards contained in the policy.
For political leadership the lOP programme is a double-edged sword as it provides both the substance of vote-garnering political rhetoric but also the benchmarks against which their administrations will be measured, if not by citizens' than at least by their political bosses or other powerful interests like banks and developers. Where local public service consistently falls short of the political promises inherent in the policy, the glaring gap between policy and practice eats away at the
legitimacy of the local state and its office-holders. The public not only perceives a growing gap between municipal objectives and actual outputs but may see their local officials as focused on irrelevant and unreachable goals rather than local needs. This dilemma is not unique to the local sphere of government and there are a number of factors such as citizen's allegiance to government based on identity and political history, which suggest that South African local government may be immune to this form of delivery audit or at least the consequences in terms of political loyalties.
Focusing on the gap between policy and practice nonetheless remains useful because it shifts away from a more conventional approach that suggests that the merit of policy can be assessed separately to that of bureaucratic and administrative capacity. Charles Lindblom646 notes that the latter convention, assumes that the broad frameworks of values and intent that occupy the world of policy-makers can be assessed on their own merit. The administrator's task is simply to see that the policy is implemented as the drafter intended and the policy designer takes no responsibility for the shortfalls of the policy implementer /
administrator. As Lindblom warns, the relationship between policy and technocratic decision-making is far more complex and it seems inevitable that policy must finally be evaluated on its outcomes.
Administrative competence is however seldom a hard consideration when assessing policy. Edgar Pieterse, while conceding less than ideal and uneven capacity across the country, suggests that South African municipalities as a whole were relatively well equipped in resource and human capability terms to take on the challenge of implementing a policy embodying participatory local government:
... South Africa seems potentially different because the new local government policy framework appears to satisfy four conditions associated with successful decentralisation: 'sufficient powers to exercise substantial influence within the political system and over significant development activities; sufficient financial resources to accomplish tasks; adequate administrative capacity to accomplish those tasks; and reliable accountability mechanisms ... 647
Ten years after the advent of democratic municipal government, a retrospective view might suggest that policy should have been 'tailored' to fit the demonstrated or proven capabilities of the bureaucracy and its political leadership. The
conventional analysis of implementation strategy tends to focus exclusively on constraints in resources, human capacity and institutions plus the need to have properly 'orientated' staff. It is invariably assumed that that these must be improved, redeployed or realigned to meet the demands of policy. This perspective is invariably one of linear and inevitable progression.64s
The third structural change is to ensure sufficient administrative capacity.
Government policy documents, including the White Paper on Local Government, acknowledge that the transitional municipal structures lack sufficient administrative and financial capacity to undertake their mandated responsibilities. Effective developmental local government will require
appropriate staff in each municipality. The transitional municipal structures had too many of the wrong (inappropriately trained and inexperienced) staff and too few of the right staff. As national and provincial departments look to devolve new powers and functions to municipalities, the correct administrative capacity must also be built, through the devolution of appropriate staff. As well as capacity building at municipallevel.649
Attempts to understand the real relationship between policy and administrative output seem half-hearted. In February 2003 Dr Meshack M Khosa authored a report on behalf of the Centre for Policy Studies which tried to understand the relationship between policy-making and implementation by examining eight areas of social policy formulation and implementation namely: education, health, water, justice, the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR) and the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS).650 Khosa quoted from State President, Thabo Mbeki's speech in mid 2002 where Mbeki suggested that government had good policies and institutions to enact these policies but that the real challenge lay in proper implementation. Why the state bureaucracy cannot simply implement policies as they were intended, seems to genuinely perplex government.651 Khosa identifies two issues implicit in government's thinking:
1. policies adopted since 1994 are appropriate and sound 2. these policies are being imperfectly implemented
Khosa suggests that the relationship between policy and implementation is
"complex and sometimes contradictory, and that it is the articulation of policy-
making and implementation that often results in crises in policy implementation."652 The report is a rare attempt to understand the relationship between policy-making and implementation and the institutions that undertake these activities, however it stops short of commenting on the possibility that the gap between policy and implementation may have an effect on the credibility of the policy itself and thus its efficacy. Inevitably the key conclusions are that "Implementation problems result from unrealistic and optimistic policies; in other words that implementation problems flow from the policies themselves" and that even when policies are sound, problems arise from the logistical aspects of implementation.653 The problem with this critique is the implied remedy through more modest or less ambitious policy - while certainly useful to administrators such policies would lack the bold 'breaking with the past' element that is required to ensure their political support.
What distinguishes the South African IDP programme from 19th century planning and more recent market driven programmes was that IDP did not "almost always assumed the continued poverty of the poor and the privileges of the rich."65' In fact the abiding rationale for IDP was for more state resources to be directed to pro- poor strategies through clearly formulated targets and greater efficiencies. However the outcomes and financial impact of planning as illustrated by the Ngqushwa
and Buffalo City case studies, suggest a new form of accumulation and self-
beneficence that appears to lie behind the fa9ade of the new model of 'democratic
and developmental' municipalities. One of the important techniques employed in such planning exercises is the manipulation of rationality that Flyvbjerg identified in the Aalborg experience. In Buffalo City's this entailed manipulation of the planning process to validate previous plans that had gone awry and to justify the building of a vast managerial empire within the municipal administration.
In point of fact, it is this manipulation of rationality with varying degrees of sophistication, that forms the common thread in both the Buffalo City and Ngqushwa case studies. In contradiction to stated policy intentions both IDPs provided a rationale for increasing staffing and associated costs while critical aspects of service provision like operation and maintenance were neglected and in general budgets did not match stated principles or strategies. Increasing numbers of senior managers and the establishment of entities like development agencies and non-profit companies did little to reduce the municipality's reliance on paid conSUltants and advisors provided by donor agencies. This occurred against a background of the planned nett decrease of R18m in infrastructure spending in Buffalo City between 2003 and 2007. The IDP notes and discusses this key issue but does not translate its rhetoric into preferential resource allocation. Only in 2004 /2005 was the need to upgrade or replace most of the sewerage infrastructure fully reflected in the budget and by then it was arguably, too late as the space for discretionary spending had been greatly reduced. Buffalo City makes reference to intergovernmental agreements and planning frameworks that are ostensibly cooperative and supportive but in the final analysis, and when actually attempting to resolve problems like the release of land for new settlements, these frameworks become contradictory and restrictive. This problem is also illustrated in grand scale by the Ngqushwa study where policy incoherence resulted from an un-declared dispute between the National Treasury / Department of Finance and the Municipal Demarcation Board. While the former had framed a long-term policy of reduced local government dependence on the national fiscus, the MDB was framing a model that included a strata of small municipalities existing primarily as 'welfare' entities. Buffalo City, arguably more viable and self-sustaining as a local organ of state, found within this new vision an excuse for less financial prudence. Whereas the 2002 IDP framed over ambitious development objectives completely beyond the means of Buffalo City, new plans tried to justify the resulting lack of achievement and created a rationale for further planning. The looming crisis of a R62 million bad debt provision was not resolved and the pattern of potentially disastrous cutbacks on maintenance and the stripping of assets continued. At the same time Buffalo City looked increasingly to national government to cover its financial shortfalls.
Ngqushwa illustrates many of the same issues as Buffalo City but also includes the questionable outcomes of the demarcation process where two small under- performing municipalities were merged on the basis of an untested assumption that a newly empowered district sphere of government would fill capacity and resource gaps. The Ngqushwa IDP thus set the municipality on a path to increasing dependency on national government accompanied by a progressive de-linking of affordability issues from local socio-economic patterns and concerns.
Like Buffalo City, the Ngqushwa IDP comprises a narrative where policy intention and actual practice merge or become very blurred. Intention is equated with reality but certain 'realities' e.g. the fact that the bulk sewerage treatment works services a tiny percentage of the population, are filtered out in order not to negate the master narrative of the plan. The IDP failed to factor recent administrative history into its formulations for the future. It failed to acknowledge for example that even minimal municipal service provision by the previous transitional local councils of Hamburg and Peddie had generated public debt and that larger projects flowing from the Consolidated Municipal Infrastructure Programme would deepen the debt trap. Most of the IDP strategy is formulated around and limited to an anticipated state response and where citizens are supposed to participate, it is strictly within the context of the hegemony of the local state. The local state, in the form of the municipality, was in fact largely absent. Its service obligations, apart from refuse collection, where mostly performed by the private sector and paid for with revenue it had not collected. The 2002 IDP entirely avoided this issue and set in place policies and measures that would further escalate financial overheads and said nothing to the long-standing problem of debt collection. It specifically ignored those brief but telling periods where more financially responsible policies had prevailed resulting for example in a not insignificant collection of property rates.
In more pedagogical terms Bond might simply assign these failures to the inevitable capture by neo/iberalism while Pieter Le Roux 655 might suggest that these were simply the result of the new ANC government's imperfect attempts to find a balance between redistributive economic policy (the RDP) and pressure from capital for fiscal discipline656 Leroke657 drawing upon the seminal argument of Fanon, might point out that this is simply another 'gravy train' phenomenon and strongly resonant with the emergence of a new 'national elite' anticipated by Fanon for the postcolonial state in Africa. Denied the opportunity to accumulate capital under colonial rule, the national middle class is forced to use the organs of the new state to fight their way back into the capitalist order.
However it is Swilling et al writing in an earlier decade to the Buffalo City and Ngqushwa case studies, who best capture the spirit of what was to become a chronic and seemingly irresistible trend in local government. Planning and IDP specifically not only failed to prevent this trend but helped carry it to its logical conclusion:
There is undoubtedly much absurdity when it comes to 'majestic' displays of authority and pomp, to say nothing of the time and resources consumed.
The efforts that communities make to address their own understanding of globalisation often get stuck in a disembodied theatrical performance of what passes for power, authority and modernity. The appearance of
majesty, importance and efficacy, as manifested through spectacle, formality, bureaucracy, ceremony and the fac;:ade of urban modernity (mansions, lUxury cars), is corrupted and made banal as it now can be applied to countless occasions and locations. Grandiose but empty ceremonies attended by
excessive consumption have become all too familiar. These, however are easily seen through by everyone .... the spectacle is supported because in the absence of viable alternatives, the collective mockery of the caricature is an act of self- recognition."658
END NOTES
1 See for example Diamond, L. 1994, Civil society and democratic consolidation: building a culture of democracy in a new South Africa in Giliomee, H, Schlemmer, L. and Hauptfleisch, S. 1994 The bold experiment: South Africa's new democracy, Southern Books (Pty) Ltd, Halfway House, South Africa p68-75 2 See Kane-Berman, J. 1990, The apartheid legacy in Schrire, R.A. (Ed.) Critical Choices for South Africa:
am agenda for the 1990s. 1990, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, p 370-392 3 Diamond, L. 1994, p 71
4 Khosa, M. 2003, Towards effective delivery: Synthesis report on the project entitled 'Closing the gap between policy and implementation in South Africa', Research report No. 98 (unpublished), Centre for Policy Studies Johannesburg, p49
5 Ibid
6 Ibid P 37
This term is borrowed from Mitchell, T. 2002, Rule of Experts, University of California Press, USA p 79
8 Buffalo City municipality, 2002 Integrated Development Plan Buffalo City municipality, p31
9 Ibid, p36
10 Ibid, P 68
11 Ngqushwa Municipality, 2002, Integrated Development Plan. p1
12 Escobar, A. 1992, Planning in Sachs, W. 1992 The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, South Africa, p134
13 Mitchell, T. 2002, Rule of Experts, University of California Press, USA p 79
14 Ibid, P 9
15 Khosa, M. 2003, Towards effective delivery: Synthesis report on the project entitled 'Closing the gap between policy and implementation in South Africa', Research report No. 98 (unpublished), Centre for Policy Studies Johannesburg, p49
16 See for example Foundation for Contemporary Research, 1999 Making Your lOP Work: A Local
Government Conference March 1999, Foundation for Contemporary Research, Cape Town, South Africa,
1/ Beauregard, R.A. 1996 Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of US Planning in Carnpbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, Malden, USA, p 113
18 Klosterman, R E. 1996 Arguments for and Against Planning in Campbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Malden, USA. p 93
19 See for example Beauregard, R.A. 1996 Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of US Planning in Campbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Malden, USA.
20 Campbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Malden. USA. p 5
21 Ibid
22 Ibid, P 6
23 Ibid, P 5
24 Klosterman, R E. 1996 Arguments for and Against Planning in Campbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Malden. USA. p 86
25 Ibid
26 Ibid
27 Beauregard, RA. 1996 Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of US Planning in Carnpbell, Sand Fainstein, S ,1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, Malden, USA. p 108 28 Ibid, P 112
29 Ibid, P 110
30 Ibid
31 Ibid
32 Ibid
33 In Campbell, Sand Fainstein, S 1996, (Eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Second Edition) Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Malden. USA. p 75
34 Ibid