Officials said it was challenging to obtain support and coordinate these line functions, especially when given contradictory instructions and advice. Municipal officials implied that their elected counterparts or senior managers largely dictated their actions. The author, however, observed that officials had discretion over project-level decisions.
They nonetheless tended to defer decision-making until they received directives or approvals from senior management in order to avoid being held personally and hence financially accountable for 'fruitless and wasteful expenditure,' as per the Public Finance Management Act National Treasury, p.
Considering this, municipal officials said compliance with senior management's often unwritten directives or prevailing practices were a significant form of civil service protection, as informal settlement servicing tended not to be covered in policy. The data suggests that while the municipality devolved implementation responsibilities to various departments, political and executive leadership tended to set agendas and methods.
This indicates that policy actors had conflicting notions of the extent that decision-making and participatory processes should have been decentralised. While residents and their advocates proposed context-specific processes at an informal settlement level, CoCT opted to retain authority because they were unable to hold residents accountable. Municipal officials additionally struggled with the inherent conflict between CoCT's decentralised structure and centralised decision-making system.
These various constraints suggest that the causal theory of sanitation actors working together in a pipeline manner is difficult, considering competing priorities and perspectives. Political support. As with many public projects, political support is a key variable that affects successful or failed implementation outcomes. Amongst public officials, it was clear that national legislative and regulatory authority significantly influenced municipal design, as municipal officials applied state policy and the self-help approach in sanitation programming.
Infrastructure dysfunction throughout informal settlements, however, prompted CoCT to identify a new policy and approach that improved service reliability. Municipal officials' successful introduction of a janitorial service with support from national policymakers indicates that political support from those with legislative, regulatory and financial authority is instrumental in transforming services.
In contrast, municipal ability to disregard highly critical recommendations from the South African Human Rights Council SAHRC, indicates that the public watchdog lacks both legislative and regulatory authority to enforce change. The public also played a significant role in policy change. Because of the open toilets scandal, sanitation became a regular fixture in South African media, instigating public interest and support for universal access.
Officials subsequently received additional resources to scale-up operations e. Sanitation being at the fore of public consciousness also provoked reform and action at a national level, for toilet scandals throughout the country prompted restructuring within government institutions DHS, and the launching of a state-wide investigation MSTT, These points suggest that public support can affect resource allocation, institutional reform and government agendas.
There were several constituency groups at the residential level that further demonstrated they had an important footprint. FBSan beneficiaries' actions, for instance, greatly affected service provision. Both national and municipal officials had initially presumed that all actors accepted the self-help policy. The fallibility of the community-managed toilet system, however, indicated to the municipality that it was imprudent to expect households in sprawling settlements to use and manage toilets collectively.
The janitorial service suggests that residents' prevailing practice and advocacy motivated municipal policy reformulation. Municipal officials considered 'buy-in' in communities critical to achieving success in sanitation projects. Representative support amongst community leadership was especially significant despite their occasional observances of self-enrichment, nepotism and cronyism, as it facilitated implementation.
Getting paid contributed to the temporarily employed workers' support for janitorial services, though some noted their dissatisfaction with not having longer-term employment. Lastly, as national policymakers had intended, advocacy groups held local government accountable. For example, social advocates criticised CoCT's janitorial service operational policy, which they said contained 'permissive language' and no criteria e.
Advocates, however, had limited effect on municipal processes and systems, because CoCT either aligned its resources with groups that supported its methods, or adopted an adversarial relationship with those that publicised dissent. These impacts indicate a diverse range of viewpoints and interests in sanitation servicing that have affected municipal implementation.
Situational influences next discuss links between informal settlement development and faults in the technological assumption underpinning the FBSan objective. Situational influences. The acceptance of informal settlements being 'here to stay' was critical in changing anti-servicing municipal attitudes and mindsets. The decision to increase sanitation coverage, however, was not always welcomed by residents who wanted housing or job security.
An official, for example, said that, 'It was shit going to the communities, and fiddling with some toilets when you knew that wasn't the problem. Another significant factor is technological feasibility. To date, a technology that improves upon buckets has yet to be identified, and the preferred option conventional sewerage is not always possible to retroactively install. Introducing alternative sewerage is logical, but its management necessitates additional capacity in an already overstretched administration that is reluctant to test new technologies.
These problems illustrate that while technology choice is important, the aforesaid policy-implementation variables that inform delivery and management play a far more significant role in informal settlements sanitation. The impact of the policy-implementation process variables is discussed further in the next section. Two worldviews underpinned Cape Town's sanitation debate. The first focused on redressing historical wrongs according to the lived reality of informal settlement users.
Municipal officials argued that implementation realities have first to be addressed-especially considering their constitutional obligation to realise sanitation rights, thus indicating a bottom-up approach starting at government's lowest level. Additionally, policy actors' interaction and subsequent disputes exposed clashing understandings of why sanitation policy is formulated and how it should be applied.
Officials also established operational policies, though much of this was unwritten, in part to flexibly accommodate for unforeseen responsibilities.
Outspoken residents and their advocates, however, tended to view policy as being populist, and hence often demanded that the government adapt top-down policies and processes to accommodate bottom-up perspectives. Social advocates, as well as the SAHRC, additionally understood policy as prescribed rules that could be used as regulatory tools.
The former hence preferred precise phrasing to aspirational language, which was difficult to enforce. In hindsight, the policy actors participated in Cape Town's sanitation policy process in various capacities.
As leading policymakers and regulators, national policymakers set agendas, formulated policy and financed strategies that influenced the design of municipal processes and the provision of new infrastructure. Their regulatory impact to date, however, has been minimal. Due to national policy shortcomings, municipal officials developed sanitation policies as per their requirements.
CoCT thus adopted multiple policy roles - as an agenda-setter, formulator, decision-maker, implementer and regulator. FBSan beneficiaries influenced sanitation provision by not fulfilling their intended roles in community-managed toilet schemes.
They also influentially set agendas and affected implementation by communicating dissatisfaction through government platforms or protests. Civil society groups also were agenda-setters and evaluators in the sanitation debate.
Their criticisms resulted in adapted participatory processes and greater municipal transparency. The policy actor with minimal impact, however, was the SAHRC, which lacked legislative or regulatory authority over the municipality. The last section summarises the policy outcomes and offers suggestions for revision based on the findings from the discussion. In August , national policymakers announced that they had to amend unintended policy gaps - such as a disjointed economic regulatory framework DWA, Helgard Muller pers.
Part of the reasons for not having regulatory functions established after 2 decades was the ongoing debate of whether it should be conducted by the national policymaker or an independent institution Camay and Gordon, ; the ongoing shuffle of sanitation duties between 4 national entities from to ; and the need to make 'significant' legislative amendments before developing regulations DWA, p.
These points suggest that there were significant sanitation-specific regulatory gaps in addition to the informal settlement and shared sanitation policy vacuum. CoCT hence implemented the FBSan policy with limited direction and critical oversight from its national counterparts.
National policymakers also notably did not provide criteria for measuring what are accessible, safe and appropriate basic sanitation facilities or shared services. Of course, as Mike Muller pers. For instance, Muller noted that the basic standard 'doesn't deal with security of using a facility outside a house in the middle of the night,' but 'if it did, the sanitation policy would morph into a security policy.
Conflicts amongst Cape Town policy actors suggest that national policymakers' blanket definition was inadequate for implementation. A review by policymakers previously indicated that municipalities across the country struggled with 'vague' policy language, such as what precisely constitutes access DWA, Implementation theorist Matland previously noted that vague standards and mandates without specific goals and indicators to measure outcomes often resulted in general societal norms and values being used as policy's evaluative criteria.
Instead of explicit policy language and benchmarks, the Cape Town example indicates that local actor's norms and values were important FBSan evaluative criteria for informal settlements, as prevailing practice ultimately dominated formal policy. Additionally, CoCT officials could not follow national policy as it was designed. The policy based on rural contexts proved inappropriate for informal settlements, as natural and built environment constraints largely precluded anything but shared services.
Policy beneficiaries and advocates have largely rejected the top-down approach underpinning the decade-long municipal implementation of households being responsible for community toilets. The municipality consequently shifted responsibility for shared toilets from private households to public officials. Residents' practices and advocates' conflicts with municipal officials highlighted that the FBSan vision and definition was unclear.
This suggests that the lack of definition for what exactly was 'free' complicated provision. Considering these shortcomings, CoCT municipality effectively became the preeminent sanitation policymaker and regulator in its jurisdiction and developed a policy that flouted a significant aspect of national policy. The municipality's departure from national policy was to accommodate its implementation realities with residents' lived realities. This outcome suggests that local actors and factors can and have significantly affected the formulation of sanitation policy.
South Africa has made massive strides in establishing a rights-based sanitation policy from scratch in its first 20 years of rule, but universal access has yet to be achieved. National policymakers have recognised that the government requires 'one streamlined' policy to address implementation and regulatory challenges DWA, p.
The then Minister of Water and Sanitation has, moreover, expressed a need to revise norms and standards Mokonyane, To get closer to servicing goals, policy actors should consider using findings from implementation research to inform revision.
For instance, the following recommendations based on the application of an implementation studies framework offers practical advice on how to revise the sector's approach, framework and standard according to municipal experiences. Multi-level governance and multidisciplinary approach. This research indicates the need to incorporate knowledge of lived and implementation realities when reformulating policy, as the present viewpoint of turning national policy into municipal practice ignores the influence and impact local actors have in policymaking and service delivery.
Understanding and addressing the diverse actors involved in multi-level governance is necessary to design a workable universal access policy for highly contested areas such as informal settlements. Similar to water resources management Funke et al. While their expertise is needed, they seem reluctant to accept the politics inextricably tied to the practical and lived realities of service delivery.
To claim that sanitation is apolitical ignores reality, for it cannot be separated from the politics that often drive servicing. Basing provision solely upon technical feasibility also resulted in services that beneficiaries and advocates reject as being technology-driven, top-down and undemocratic.
Given that sanitation is a crosscutting concern that a multitude of interest groups are concerned with, a multi-disciplinary approach is needed whereby actors representing various backgrounds and perspectives develop policy together to tackle differences in worldview, motives and approaches that have emerged in the democracy's second decade.
Holistic and inclusive sanitation framework. The findings on implementation highlight Mehta and Mehta's argument for shifting urban sanitation 'beyond the household level facilities to encompass wider dimensions of equity, public health and national environment' through citywide approaches. Such a shift should holistically address sanitation by integrating the provision, collection, disposal and reuse of all domestic water and waste human and animal faeces and urine, greywater and rubbish and stormwater.
Given South Africa's water security concerns, it is also significant to tie urban sanitation planning to water resources and demand management. Global sanitation experts have highlighted city-level approaches as the best way to achieve inclusive service delivery BMGF et al. Adopting a holistic and inclusive framing is relevant to South African municipalities, as they are increasingly tasked with broadening sanitation beyond the provision of a toilet.
Free basic sanitation standard criteria clarification. South Africa's sanitation sector focuses on the adoption, implantation and enforcement of laws and policies that are consistent with national policy.
There hence is an expectation that implementers and beneficiaries should subscribe and comply with policymakers' rules and methods. This legalistic approach is pluralistic and prescriptive and has resulted in little consideration of practical guidance for providing or using free services.
A former municipal manager of Durban's water services explained,. What is often overlooked is what does the "right" really mean in practical terms-how much, what quality, how often, how far, how safe to access?
Neil McLeod, as cited by Muller, p. Muller, Put differently, policy actors need to clarify the criteria of the broadly framed FBSan standard, by establishing what precisely is to be provided at no cost and offer definitions and means to assess what is safe, reliable, private, accessible, sustainable and appropriate.
National policymakers, for instance, have a free water allowance of 6 kL per household, and explicitly defined basic water supply as infrastructure that supplies a stipulated quantity 25 L per person per day ; at a specific distance m from a household ; and at a particular rate minimum flow of 10 L per minute for communal taps DWAF, While the sanitation standard need not be quantifiable, there should be a means for measuring it for implementation and regulatory purposes.
South Africa's democracy has been lauded worldwide for its transformative policies and legal frameworks that have boldly redressed historical discrimination. The government has made massive strides in establishing a comprehensive sanitation policy in its first decade of democratic rule. The ambitious objectives, however, have yet to be realised, for many South Africans lack access to toilets reserved exclusively for their households.
The popular response for this failure is to hold local government accountable for not following national policy and regulations. This focus of realising prescriptive rights-based policy misses how implementers and beneficiaries' prevailing practices can affect policy realisation and overlooks policy gaps. This paper hence puts forward a need to adapt policymaking in South Africa to include implementation framing, by accounting for contestation in policy processes; reformulating policy to reflect lived and implementation realities; and working both inside and outside of government to clarify ambiguous policy and close regulatory gaps.
This paper valuably contributes research on this topic. It uses a multivariate policy implementation framework to analyse a controversial sanitation policy that is regarded as a keystone of progress in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper brings a unique view to discussions, as it contrasts the dominant framing of transforming national policy into local practice.
Accepting that policy processes do not unfold in sequential stages and that policy is not just made by national policymakers is critical to reformulate aspirational policies according to micro-level needs, politics and actions. Similarly, there is a legalistic sector bias for achieving water and sanitation rights at a global scale. As Singh indicated, research and interventions addressing the interface of local implementation and socio-cultural contexts can advance discussions beyond this narrow purview.
The primary objectives of the study were to assess what the problems and challenges related to PPI within the South African Democratic Dispensation are; and to determine the extent to which PPI has a bearing on a democracy or the functioning of a democracy in the South African context.
Collections Humanities []. Related items Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject. The phenomenon of the public policy process, which encapsulates the public policy implementation, has been in existence long before the political transformation that took place in South Africa in However, the ushering Development of public policy is a key role of government. Parliament is the national legislature law-making body of South Africa.
As such, one of its major functions is to pass new laws, to amend existing laws, and to repeal or abolish cancel old laws. This function is guided by the Constitution of South Africa, which governs and applies to all law and conduct within South Africa.
Law is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions to regulate human conduct. It shapes politics, economics and society in many ways. There are different types of laws namely, contract law, property law, trust law, criminal law, constitutional law and administrative law. Constitutional law provides a framework for the creation of law, the protection of human rights and the election of political representatives.
Law also raises important issues concerning equality, fairness and justice. The Apartheid legislation in South Africa was a chain of different laws and Acts which helped the Apartheid-government to enforce the separation of different races and consequently cement power. With the enactment of Apartheid laws in , racial discrimination was legalised.
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