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

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.A real-life exampleI 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. The diverse group gathered around a shared question: what’s stopping children in their community from entering Grade R healthy, safe and ready to learn?They did not begin with a predefined programme or solution. Instead, they worked together to understand what was happening in the lives of children and what contributed to negative outcomes. One unexpected priority emerged: the high number of unregistered births.The community gathering had not been convened around Home Affairs. Yet, as participants followed the experience of children and caregivers, they began to see how the absence of a birth certificate could trigger a chain of negative consequences. Caregivers struggled to get social grants. Early learning programmes struggled to access state subsidies for undocumented children. And more obstacles arose as children reached school-going age.What appeared to be an early learning challenge was, in part, a Home Affairs problem.They identified where services and responses needed to connect more deliberately so that children stopped falling through the cracks between different government departments. As a way forward, they came up with practical actions for all involved.An ongoing practiceThe example shows that meaningful public participation can bring different pieces of local ecosystems into view. Through collective inquiry, communities can develop a richer understanding of a problem, identify where responsibilities intersect, bring missing actors into the conversation and begin to coordinate their contributions around a shared outcome.This is what meaningful collaborative governance looks like: it’s not a once-off act of consultation or planning but an ongoing cycle of collective sense-making, action, accountability and learning. The work does not end once priorities are identified; those involved must also hold one another accountable and be open to adaptation as new information about a problem emerges.Responsibilities are shared, but not equal or interchangeable; municipalities and other public institutions retain their statutory obligations. They can’t shirk their responsibilities. Instead, collaborative governance should make those obligations more visible – while expanding the agency of others to act where they have the capacity to do so.Strengthening connectionsThe draft revised white paper offers an important policy opportunity: to take seriously the idea that local governance is not only about what municipalities deliver to communities but also about how residents and other actors combine their capabilities to solve problems and improve outcomes, together.We need to shift from public participation understood as periodic consultation towards partnering as an ongoing feature of developmental local governance. Residents are not only voters or service users to be consulted about plans; they are potential partners in identifying problems, shaping priorities, mobilising local capabilities and co-creating responses.Municipalities can work in this way with the communities they serve. Integrated Development Plans offer a mechanism for aligning government priorities, even if community participation within them has been largely consultative and somewhat rote. The District Development Model and One Plan also seek to improve coordination across different spheres of government. And initiatives like Sukuma Sakhe in KwaZulu-Natal offer a blueprint for continuous interactions between government and communities.Looking ahead, the white paper’s emphasis on collaborative governance should not become another compliance requirement – another forum to establish, consultation to record or stakeholder process to complete. Its potential lies in changing how we think about the production of developmental outcomes. It can be a game-changer. DM