Integrated Development Planning (IDP) in South Africa

Planning Approach and Methodology

1. Legal and Policy Requirements

According to the White Paper Local Government (WPLG), the integrated development planning approach is to help municipalities fulfill their developmental mandate by:

• helping them to understand the various dynamics operating within their area;
• requesting them to agree on a joint, concrete vision for the area;
• enabling them to develop strategies for realising that vision in partnership with other stakeholders;
• enabling them to align their financial and institutional resources behind agreed policy objectives and programmes;
• ensuring the integration of local government activities with other spheres of development planning, by serving as a basis for integration and interaction;
• serving as a basis for engagement between local government and citizens; and
• enabling municipalities to systematically prioritise programmes and resource allocations.

In short: integrated development planning needs to be a consultative, analytical, strategic and objectives oriented approach of decision-making on issues related to municipal development. The WPLG proposes concrete planning steps for the process:

• An assessment of the current social, economic and environmental reality in the municipal area - the current reality.
• A determination of community needs through close consultation.
• Developing a vision for development in the area.
• An audit of available resources, skills and capacities.
• A prioritisation of these needs in order of urgency and long-term importance.
• The development of integrated frameworks and goals to meet these needs.
• The formulation of strategies to achieve the goals within specific time frames.
• The implementation of projects and programmes to achieve key goals.
• The use of monitoring tools to measure impact and performance.

The WPLG is less clear on the "product" of the process, and on the nature of the integrated development planning document(s):

"While the idea behind IDPs is to build up a comprehensive integrated plan, municipalities cannot plan everything in detail in the first year. Rather, IDPs should empower municipalities to prioritise and strategically focus their activities and resources. An attempt to plan too comprehensively may result in unrealistic plans that lack the human and financial resources for implementation."

The question of how comprehensive and how detailed the outcome of the integrated development planning process should be, is still to be answered.

The MSB defines the legal minimum requirements with regard to the contents or "core components" of an IDP which include (by and large in line with the steps suggested by the WPLG):

• a vision (internal and external);
• an assessment of the existing levels of development;
• development priorities;
• development objectives;
• development strategies;
• a spatial development framework;
• operational strategies;
• disaster management plans;
• a financial plan (including a 3-year budget projection); and
• KPIs and performance targets.

This list of contents provides clear indications on the design of the integrated development planning process.

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2. Experiences to Date

Most municipalities and their planning consultants found it difficult to cope with the various methodological challenges related to the requirements of the WPLG and the MSB:

• Most found it difficult to organise public participation processes in an appropriate manner.
• Many municipalities spent most of their planning funds on comprehensive, unfocused approaches of situation analysis (usually misguided by provincial regulations which prescribed the contents of such analysis in detail) which were not helpful for understanding the dynamics in the area.
• Most planners found it difficult to relate the results of data-based analysis and of participatory needs analysis to each other.
• Hardly any municipalities managed to cope with drafting development strategies, making strategic choices, prioritising systematically and answering the HOW-questions.
• Most IDPs are not concrete enough to guide implementation and are far from being a useful management tool.

Most of the challenges were new. Appropriate training and support systems were not yet in place. The IDP Manual, which tried to assist municipalities to cope with the new challenges with a very detailed step-by-step, and tool-by-tool approach, turned out to be too complicated. It tended to encourage a mechanistic approach that discouraged a broad and open strategic discussion process on the "real issues" and the most appropriate ways and means of dealing with them.

In short: Most municipalities and their planning consultants have not yet found appropriate ways to cope with the new challenge of combining the approaches of participatory, strategic and implementation-oriented project planning. The available guidelines did not give an adequate answer to this crucial question.

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3. Priniciples for the Planning Approach

In line with the WPLG and the MSB, the IDP approach has to conform to the following methodological principles:

1. An IDP has to reflect the priority needs/problems of the municipality and its residents.
2. Available resources must be used in an objective-oriented manner.
3. The plan has to be strategic, i.e. it has to be based on a process of informed choices and searches for cost-effective solutions with high synergy and leverage effects.
4. An IDP has to be implementation-oriented, i.e. it has to be specific enough to inform budgets, business plans, land use management decisions, etc.

In short: The integrated development planning process has to provide a forum for identifying, discussing and resolving the "real issues" in a municipality (which may be over-arching issues for the whole municipality, as well as issues of specific communities or stakeholder groups) to a level of detail which is required for realistic costing and which helps manage the implementation process without much delay.

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4. Guidelines for answering the How-Question

It is not the function of integrated development planning guidelines to provide methodological guidelines that can help answer all the HOW-questions in detail. This will be done in Guide 3. However, there are some basic questions related to the methodology which have to be considered as policy issues, and need to be dealt with in this section.

1. Participatory approach
   Municipal planning within the enlarged municipalities (with nearly 100 000 residents on average) cannot be based on direct participation through public meetings, but requires structured participation with institutionalised participation channels (see section 8).
   
2. Analysis
   This should not mean a comprehensive compilation of all kinds of data. It should, instead, be focused on identified priority issues and help clarify the causes and dynamics of these issues. This requires an amendment of most provincial regulations.
   
3. Data-based analysis and participatory identification of problems/needs/issues
   These processes must inform each other. Participatory dialogues with communities or stakeholders should be related to facts and figures, while the priority issues resulting from participation processes should be the topics for in-depth analysis.
   
4. Objectives and strategies
   The process of arriving at objectives and strategies for each of the priority issues should allow for a strategic multi-sectoral discussion process on ways of dealing with the issues. It is meant to be a process of discussing strategic options, taking into account policy guidelines and framework conditions.
   
5. Implementation orientation
   If integrated development planning processes and products are to help speed up and improve delivery, if they are to inform budgets, business plans, land use management and programmes of sector line agencies, they must become sufficiently specific to allow for cost calculations, quantified targets and decisions on locations. This requires decisions on, for example, technology standards and designs. Consequently, technical project planning has to be, up to a point, part of integrated development planning, for it to become part and parcel of the municipal management system. This implies that an IDP has to:

• include a binding spatial development framework which is sufficiently specific to form an operational basis for speedy land management decisions and for guiding investment decisions of private and public investors;
• include project proposals which are sufficiently detailed to allow for a feasibility and viability analysis and can, thus, attract funds from financing institutions;
• include an action programme for economic promotion and income generation aimed at the establishment of an attractive institutional/infrastructural environment for economic ventures;
• include clearly specified targets and indicators as a basis for transparency and accountability of local councils and as a performance management system; and
• prepare the ground for municipal service partnerships, including community partnerships, by involving community and stakeholder organisations in the designing and decision-making process of concrete localised projects.

More about the Roles and Responsibilities of District and Local Municipalities, Public Participation, and Strategies (Part 1 and Part 2) in the IDP approach

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