Collaborative governance — election buzzword or game-changer for municipalities?

True collaborative local governance needs to move beyond superficial community consultation toward active, joint problem-solving, where both can address interconnected system failures, ahead of the elections.

Sinazo Nkwelo is a portfolio director at the DG Murray Trust responsible for place-based development, working in several municipalities in the Northern Cape, Free State, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

With local government elections just months away, South Africans are thinking about the neighbourhoods they want their children to grow up in. Municipalities create the conditions for children to thrive, working alongside national and provincial governments. Families, NGOs, businesses and other non-state institutions also shape children’s lives. It’s a collective effort.

The shortcomings in municipal service delivery are well known; some businesses focus solely on profit, and NGOs may lack sufficient scale. Yet even when institutions and organisations are in place, and even where each performs its role reasonably well, often the child development outcomes they collectively seek to influence fall short. Why?

For decades, South Africa has invested significant effort in improving the capability of individual institutions and programmes – municipalities, schools, clinics and government departments. However, shifting human developmental outcomes requires attention not only to the capabilities of an ecosystem’s individual parts but also to the ecosystem’s capabilities as a whole.

Of course, the quality of individual interventions matters. But better programmes alone are not enough if the systems around a child are fragmented. Collaboration is key.

Yet, South Africa’s commitment to collaborative governance and public participation has not lived up to its promise. The draft revised White Paper on Local Government acknowledges this nearly 30 years after the original framework was published.

For too long, collaborative governance has been restricted to the practice of consulting communities around a municipality’s service delivery agenda. Consultation is important, but its value is realised when it leads to joint planning and implementation.

The full potential of collaborative governance lies in organising around the outcomes people experience in their everyday lives and asking what different actors can do individually, and together, to improve them. The latter is both imaginative and fundamentally different.

I realise that abstract concepts like collaborative governance can be hard to fully grasp without a real-life example to anchor them. So, here’s one, drawn from the experiences of a low-income community in the Eastern Cape.

That community wanted to understand how best to improve early childhood development outcomes. At a gathering this year, they brought together community health workers, early childhood development practitioners, officials from the departments of health and social development, civil society organisations, local businesses and residents.