By Fia van Rensburg, IPASA Knowledge Manager
IPASA spoke to Tess Nolizwe Peacock, Founder and Executive Director of the Equality Collective about their work in the Amathole District Municipality in the Eastern Cape, about how the communities of the Mncwasa Water Scheme managed to overcome long-standing frustrations and challenges to engage productively with local government.
Local government, civic participation and accountability
With local government elections in November, the global trend of declining trust and participation in democracy is visible locally in low voter registration and low participation in election and democratic structures. South African local government is in crisis: service delivery failures, weak accountability, declining trust and governance challenges have undermined confidence in municipalities.
Communities in the Mncwasa Water Scheme area of the Amathole District Municipality in the Eastern Cape, know from experience what it looks like when trust in local government severely weakened. Like many other communities in South Africa, this community experiences high levels of poverty and unemployment with a district municipality plagued by labour instability, financial bankruptcy, weak governance, and insufficient capacity to deliver much-needed basic services.
In Mncwasa, frustration was justified. Many community members had lived with unreliable water for years, often with limited information about what was going wrong or who was responsible for fixing it. Tess Peacock from the Equality Collective explains that the challenge was to create constructive accountability pathways: ways to turn frustration into organised community monitoring, credible evidence, regular communication and sustained pressure for action.
When the Equality collective started working with the Mncwasa communities, water reliability in the area was extremely poor. Through community-led monitoring, technical diagnostics, constructive engagement with the municipality and sustained accountability work, the reliability of water services improved significantly from 40% to 80%. Through new ways of engaging and working together, the Mncwasa experience shows that is it possible for communities and municipalities to work towards common goals, even with municipalities that are technically in ‘crisis’, while still keeping accountability at the centre.
Principles for working together
Finding a new way of doing things in Mbashe depended on a few simple, but important principles:
- Creating a framework for constructive engagement helped shift the work from generalised frustration to more organised, rights-based participation. “We were quite deliberate in building trust and respectful communication with officials. We had to support our communities, councillors and traditional leaders in a journey of respectful engagement with municipalities.” Importantly, the agreed upon framework for engagement between
- Acknowledging that relationships and trust matter – it is the “connective tissue” between people in a system that enables and enhances how formal structures work. “What we see in reality is a tear in the social fabric, and that connective tissue is damaged. We have had this culture of waiting for government to do things for citizens, or government doing things on their own. We have to go back and think how to build community partnership at a local level. And participation should not only be every five years when there is an election.”
- Being clear on the nature and extent of the problem is necessary so that all involved can work towards a common goal. In Mbashe, a much-needed professional, but participatory diagnostic of water systems paved the way for collective action. “In the beginning we had an engineer that did a diagnostic. We were lucky that the Engineer we used was a very well-considered engineer in rural water – having someone who the municipality deeply respected helped. We gave community members, community leaders and councillors a tour of the water facility, so that people could understand how it worked, what was wrong, and how to engage with the data. It just elevated the whole engagement”.
- Finding something that works in a dysfunctional system provides an entry point for creating shared governance and participation at the local level. In any system, not matter how dysfunctional, there is something that works – pockets of competence and goodwill exist even in so-called failing municipalities. Tess emphasises that “often there are employees inside the system who genuinely want to do their jobs but are working within difficult conditions and broken systems. Our approach is to find and support those people and build trust and strong relationships with them. If things go wrong, we are hard on the issue, but soft on the person. That allows us to hold the municipality accountable while still building relationships with the people inside the institution who we need to get things done”.
- Ongoing monitoring and communication are essential to keep things on track. Ongoing real-time monitoring of joint initiatives and short feedback loops are useful tools to keep all stakeholders up to date, and it provides a basis for celebrating small wins along the way. In Mncwasa an initial survey of 300 community members, followed by a meeting with the municipality opened communication channels. Communication was further improved when community monitoring started producing daily, weekly and monthly reports. “People could see the monitoring reports…when community members started seeing that monitoring [of the water system] was happening, and that there were [municipal] responsiveness and improvement, it changed the whole dynamic… It shifted the way in which people engage with each other.“ Communication was also essential in managing expectations regarding the steps in the process, progress and how long it would take to see results.
- Balancing collaboration with accountability is essential. Having stronger relationships with local government does not mean that the community cannot hold local government accountable. A strategy of constructive advocacy coupled with partnership and pressure is needed to turn citizens’ rights into reality. In Mncwasa, the community has when necessary also successfully implemented vigorous advocacy and media campaigns against the appointment of unqualified candidates in key senior positions in the municipality. “Partnership is not the only way – you have to do this dance between pressure and partnerships. The pressure is sometimes necessary while we continue to work in partnership with municipal officials on the ground.”
- Addressing capacity constraints is crucial. The capacity of the state determines its ability to deliver the service, and while gaps cannot be fixed instantly, civil society and communities should, where possible, look for ways to buttress municipal capacity, and not only expose failures. That may mean bringing in engineers, technical specialists, local businesses, or others who can help solve practical problems.
Community partnership in invited and invented spaces
The Equality Collective, in a recent report, distinguishes between “invited spaces” and “invented spaces”. Invited spaces are the formal spaces, top-down spaces where local government is in control around how communities can engage, e.g., Integrated Development Planning (IDP) participation processes and other processes that are mandated by law. Invented spaces, on the other hand, are those spaces that communities create themselves. Tess describes that “communities can create space to push government to listen, to respond…by employing a wide range of tactics, with community self-help on the one end of the spectrum and protests and demonstration on the other end of the spectrum. In the middle there are social audits, monitoring systems, and research etc.”
Both invented and invited spaces are needed, and it is essential to be realistic about what communities can do. Tess explains it as follows: “We are aware that communities can only do so much. Water services, for example are very expensive, and we need a capable state to maintain and run these services. I equally think that government cannot do this without strong community partnership. Government cannot operate, monitor and sustain these big water schemes without strong community partnerships – people watching for leaks, reporting leaks, giving information . Government cannot do that on its own – they don’t have that number of operators.” The most effective accountability strategy is therefore usually a mix of using both invented and invited spaces.
Replication and scaling
Many of the challenges the Mncwasa communities face also occur elsewhere, and some of them are systemic. This is why the Equality Collective has started replicating this work in two other areas in the Amathole District Municipality, and there are aspirations to roll this model out across the entire Amathole district in time. Tess is confident that this model holds a lot of promise and says that other communities are excited about this work – “communities realise there is something we can do, even in a deep rural context, and that is why this is empowering”. This work has the potential to restore trust in democracy and enhance community agency.
Philanthropy and democracy-building
The story of Mncwasa provides valuable clues about how funders can support restoring trust in democracy, and to enhance community agency and participation in both invited and invented spaces.
Building capacity for partnership projects between communities and local government can take many forms:
- Rights education, so that people can understand the constitution, the rule of law and constitutional obligations to strengthen citizens’ understanding of building a democratic society.
- Promoting community organisation and participation in the local government spaces that exist for planning budgeting and community imbizos.
- Strengthening community capacity to generate their own evidence and data, to conduct their own monitoring and audits.
- Buttressing state capacity with short-term expert support.
In all of these focus areas, it is essential for funders to “play the long game”. Building community partnerships requires “patient capital” to support the deep work that is needed to achieve long-lasting results that are embedded in strong networks of trust and accountability. Local funders can play a meaningful role in strengthening democratic infrastructure and capacity, particularly at a time of uncertainty, when large international funders who have played in this space are shifting their focus.