Assessment of different approaches to public service provision by the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality

[摘要] Since its establishment in the 19th century, the City of Johannesburg hasmetamorphosed from a gold mining dormitory, a segregated town to a modernmetropolitan municipality that is one of the flagships of South African municipalities.The formerly apartheid city had the legacy of fragmentation along racial lines basedon the disintegrated economic logic that systematically developed areasdisproportionately with black urban and peri-urban areas at the mercy of the whiteurban areas1.The advent of democracy in 1994 necessitated the city's transformation into ademocratic, non-racial, developmental and mega municipality encompassing thetownships that were previously on its periphery. This required the nationalgovernment, as the superior government to formulate a regulatory framework forlocal government to foster a developmental orientation, democracy, goodgovernance and accountability to the constituent inhabitants, provincial and nationalgovernment. Similar to all other municipalities country wide, it became paramount toimprove the provision of public services to cover the backlogs that were created bythe previous separate development policies of apartheid, but specific toJohannesburg, to maintain its position as the biggest city by population, grossdomestic expenditure and economic growth.In this study the researcher maintains the seven assumptions advanced by Caiden(1982:14-6) about public administration i.e. that it is unavoidable, expects obedience,has priority, has exceptional size, has political top management, poses difficulties inperformance measurement and that more is expected from it. Although publicmanagement is not entirely unique in the above ways due to the phenomenon ofnew public management (NPM), it is easy in the South African context to identifypublic administration through the schedules in the Constitution (1996), the PublicFinance Management Act, 2002 (PFMA)2 and the formation structures of serviceproviding municipal entities. Public policy analysis literature documents the paradigm shift in public managementfrom traditional bureaucratic structure to decentralisation, NPM and policy networksamid the complexity theory in the public service endeavour to provide services. Thelocal legislature i.e. the municipal council is granted the authority over the sphere ofwork of the municipality and therefore has the final say in the running of themunicipality to meet the expectations of the electorate. In this study the researcherfocuses on the analysis of the council's choices of the above public managementstructures or policies options in exercising its authority.The council has to decide on functional activities i.e. municipal services from whatthe Constitution (1996) allows and decide on the executive institutions that aretasked to execute the functions within the budgetary allocations. Regarding researchmethodology, annual reports, departmental reports, AG performance reports,community complaints, council meeting minutes, provincial government reports,national treasury reports and primary data from questionnaires and expert interviewswere consulted to answer the questions on the levels effectiveness and efficiency.It was found that the provision of services has substantially improved as from thebeginning of the 21st century and the reason for this improvement is the publicservice reforms that include NPM. The semi permanency of entities and utilitiescould inhibit the provision of services in future. It was also found that theweaknesses with the utilities and entities can well be covered by the implementationof policy networks and the municipality finds it difficult to cope under exogenouscomplexity challenges.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University