Metro form of government in Gauteng

During the 1980s, areas of the country that could be defined as ‘metropolitan’ were governed by dozens of fragmented, racially-divided local government bodies. During the 1990s these mosaics of local authorities were replaced by democratically-elected metropolitan municipalities, initially, in the mid-1990s, by a two-tier metro model and then, in 2000, by single-tier ‘unicity’ arrangements. This was a remarkable achievement. Uniquely amongst countries facing similar institutional legacies, South Africa was, virtually overnight, able to overcome the historical fixity of multiple divided municipalities making up metropolitan areas, and bring about dramatic structural change. In addition, new metropolitan government structures have by-and-large worked as intended to distribute resources across new ‘unicity’ areas: the development recently seen in places like Soweto has largely been possible because it now falls within the same metropolitan area as wealthy nodes such as Sandton.

In 2000, three metropolitan municipalities were established in Gauteng – Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg. The rest of the province was covered by three district municipalities and their associated lower tier local municipalities. But over the last decade a consensus has begun to build that Gauteng needs to move towards a ‘province of metros’, where all two-tier district/local municipalities are replaced by wall-to-wall single-tier structures. Significant background work has been commissioned by the Gauteng Department of Local Government and Housing to define possible new metro boundaries. In 2011 the area of the Metsweding District Municipality (with its two locals, Kungwini and Nokeng TsaTamane) was amalgamated into Tshwane (with a small section also going to Ekuhurhuleni) to form a giant new metro. And the vision of a new metro has been actively promoted in the West Rand, where the district municipality is anticipating a unicity by 2014.

This project aims:

To interrogate the reasoning behind the idea of a ‘province of metros’;
To determine how the idea is being developed and activated in visions and plans for re-demarcation in different parts of the city-region;
To assess the validity of the idea in the light of current national debates around broader local government restructuring in the near future;
To explore the likely benefits in relation to the likely costs of amalgamating municipalities into new metros, considering in particular the transaction costs of this merger process (especially on administrative and service delivery systems) as well as the implications for participatory governance and local government accountability;
Through (1) to (4), to raise and deepen public debate on an issue which has seen plans being developed largely outside of the public domain; and in turn
To assist provincial and local government to (a) reach final conclusions on the advisability of instutionalising a province of metros, and (b) if/when this vision is instituted, how to do so in a way that minimizes costs & risks.

The study will be based mainly on document analysis and key informant interviews. It will be written up as a 50-60 page occasional paper, which will in turn be distilled into a journal article. The research has academic relevance in that there are very few considered academic pieces that objectively and systematically interrogate government reasoning behind a core institutional reform objective ‘from within’, rather than simply proffering policy critique from the outside looking in.

Key partners

This study will be done internally within GCRO.

Outputs in 2012/13

A 50-60 page GCRO occasional paper;
A more concise journal article based on the larger report / paper.