The Journey to Transform Local Government is about the challenges and opportunities for municipalities in South Africa as they journey towards delivering on the promise of developmental local government. It deals with various issues on the continuum of local government transformation in South Africa, for example, what does Sustainable Development Goal 11 mean for a municipality? Given that good governance is essential for success, are municipalities implementing anti-corruption policies and are the Municipal Public Accounts Committees functioning? How do we staff municipalities with professionals who see local government as their career of choice? And, given that our ageing infrastructure poses risks for the future, what should municipalities do to ensure proper maintenance? How do we manage the overlapping roles of traditional leaders and municipalities? Can traditional land use allocation and building practices co-exist with municipal planning and building regulations? And, when municipalities insist on town planning and building regulations, how does this affect local entrepreneurs? Lastly, how do we measure spatial transformation in practice? The authors grappling with these questions come from universities, government, civil society and the private sector. They fill the pages of this book with some of the latest research on local government, grounded in the reality of today's South Africa.

This book concerns the role of the state in achieving development. In many developing countries conventional wisdom concluded that development is best achieved through a centralised development strategy. The failure of this centralised development strategy has brought about the emergence of decentralisation to local government as one of the means to turn the tide of underdevelopment. This book presents decentralisation not only as a manifestation of 'good governance', but also as an indispensable tool towards development. The central question, however, is the following: how should the transitional state convert this into constitutional and legal arrangements? The author proposes a model for capturing the developmental role of local government in institutional arrangements. The new design for local government, put forward in South Africa's 1997 Constitution, is based on the notion that local government should be the epicentre of development. This has prompted the author to use this South African concept as well as the first experiences with the implementation of the new local government dispensation as a case study.The importance of the book thus lies in the fact that it produces an institutional model for developmental local government that is not only based on development and decentralisation theories but is also tested in practice. It is hoped that those with an interest in the role of the state in development will find the arguments and conclusions useful. The book also provides a comprehensive overview of the South African design for local government, which is of interest to lawyers, policy makers and other parties involved in the implementation of the South African decentralisation strategy. Jaap de Visser teaches public law at the Law Faculty of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Until the end of 2002, he worked as a researcher for the Community Law Centre (University of the Western Cape), specialising in local government law.