Local government in South Africa forms part of an overall state system also consisting of national and provincial government. Together their main objective is to promote the general welfare of the populace through service delivery and development initiatives.
For the purpose of delivering services and promoting development local government is of significant importance as it is the state agency that citizens firstly come into contact with. The local sphere of government has undergone fundamental transformation, both from a political and structural point of view. In addition to local government becoming democratic structures in line with the overall democratisation of South Africa, the approach to and actual municipal structures also changed dramatically. Municipalities, the organisational units of local government, have the task of pursuing the ânewâ goals of local government within this changed environment.
One of the significant changes that have been introduced into municipal management is the utilisation of an integrated strategic approach to organisational planning. This has been facilitated by legislative reform that provides for municipalities to compile integrated development plans (IDPs) and utilise it, together with budgets and performance management systems, to promote service delivery and development in their areas of jurisdiction. Therefore reference to the term integrated strategic planning.
The introduction of this new system has, however, not been flawless with dissatisfaction about the service levels of municipalities being expressed through negative reporting on municipal performance from a variety of public role-players as well as through local communities illustrating their dissatisfaction through protest action. A critical question therefore revolved around why there was such a high degree of dissatisfaction with municipal services, in spite of legislative provisions for improved municipal planning.
This thesis therefore explored the implementation of integrated strategic plans in Free State municipalities in order to ascertain what the typical factors were that contributed to the inability of municipalities to implement such plans. Recommendation were furthermore provided, based on empirical and literature research on the issue with the view of improving the status quo, not only in the Free State, but in South Africa as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-07182013-104108 |
| Date | 18 July 2013 |
| Creators | du Plessis, Lyndon Mark |
| Contributors | Prof JCO Bekker |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-07182013-104108/restricted/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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