Bulletin n. 2/2015
September 2015
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Thomas A. Koelble, Andrew Siddle
    Decentralization in Post-Apartheid South Africa
    in Regional and Federal Studies , Volume 24, Issue 5 ,  2014 ,  607-623
    Decentralization in South Africa was entrenched in the new democratic constitution of 1996 and charged local government with bringing basic and other services to the population. Our in-depth empirical study of 38 municipalities across South Africa indicates that the experiment with decentralization has largely failed to achieve its main aims—democratizing local government and delivering adequate basic services to all communities. In order to provide some answers to the question as to why this failure occurred, we focus attention on the legislative over-burdening of local government and its concurrent lack of institutional capacity to actually turn legal obligation and decentralization principles into practice as two of the main and related causes for this failure. While the South African constitution gave clear mandates to local government, the issue of adequate institutional capacity for municipal government was largely overlooked or ignored altogether.
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