Integrated local governance and development planning : a case study of the greater Louis Trichardt transitional local council.

Abstract

With apartheid having left an imprint of spatial fragmentation in the South African urban and rural landscape, there is a major challenge in most places in South Africa to create integrated systems of local governance. Achieving integration of the remnants of selfgoverning territories, independent homelands, old provincial administrations and tricameral structures, is very difficult. The new political dispensation has raised the aspirations and expectations of both the rural and urban areas but more especially poor rural dwellers. Transitional Local Councils, appointed in 1995, inherited the task of integration and service delivery. This was to be achieved, in part, through the fannulation of an Integrated Development Plan for each TLC. This study examines local governance and development planning in the Transitional Local Council area of Greater Louis Trichardt in the Northern Province. The study provides a background to the history of urban planning and changing urban space in South Africa and in Louis Trichardt in particular. Structuration theory, Local Economic Development theory and literature on public participation and local governance, were used to raise questions about the planning and delivery of development in Louis Trichardt. These questions were then answered through an intensive and extensive research process in which both the residents of the TLC area, and the members of the TLC structures, were interviewed about their perceptions. The study found that there are still major constraints to the achievement of effective development, integration and service delivery in the Greater Louis Trichardt Transitional Local Council area.