Developing a turnaround strategy for municipal public assets in the Langeberg Municipality

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY: This study focuses on municipal public assets and on challenges that the Langeberg Municipality experiences when effectively managing public facilities where a lack of resources and continuous repair and maintenance of facilities necessitates a turnaround strategy. This study occurs at a time that the municipality is seriously looking at ways to resolve the challenges of vandalism, theft and damage to property, together with a housing issue whereby groups of people are collecting housing materials from a sports facility in order to create informal settlements. As an example, groups of people severely damaged a swimming pool, despite these same people later requesting the municipality to re-construct the pool. Public facilities provided by municipalities for communities have different meanings and consumer uses for different people. These public facilities operate within a legal and constitutional framework and, because of the developmental nature of local government that exposes society to issues pertaining to the development of communities, towns, cities and developments on the African continent and globally, the new public management approach of co-production has the potential to align municipal public assets in co-commissioning, co-assessing, co-designing and co-delivery of a project or facility to advance poor communities. This will also avoid the exclusion of communities in the planning, organising and management of public assets that contribute towards the needs of communities and who, if neglected, can expose a facility to vandalism and result in further disempowered communities.The research also highlights community halls, libraries, sports facilities and the Thusong Service Centre as public assets that affect many citizens in the Langeberg municipal area. Services and the utilisation of these facilities change the mind-sets of youth, adults and the elderly, and contribute to the social cohesion that communities so desperately need, as these are places where citizens can share ideas, exchange views, have robust debates, socialise in family gatherings and events, and contribute in the value chain of respect and appreciation towards each other.Successful relationships with government sectors are evident in the research as these relationships advance the municipality by forming partnerships with businesses and communities for the benefit of all stakeholders. The global trend of 'Smart Governance' can be adopted as a vehicle in all work streams of the municipality as it contains best practises that can avoid service delivery challenges with inadequate or slow responses.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University