What is Community Based Planning?
Community Based Planning is a form of participatory planning which is designed to promote community action. It is a convergence of planning and community participation targeted towards addressing mounting urban and social problems at the local level.
Empowering communities
- Poor people must be active and involved in managing their own development (claiming their rights and exercising their responsibilities);
- The need for a responsive, active and accessible network of local service providers (community-based, private sector or government);
- Empowering local governments and district level service providers (meso)
- At local government level services need to be facilitated, provided or promoted effectively and responsively, coordinated and local governments should be held accountable for quality delivery of the services.
The first of these requirements implies that communities need to be involved in planning and management of local development.
How do you get involved in CBP ?
Contact your local municipality or your community leader or local ward councillor.
Background to Community Based Planning
The South African government system consists of three spheres of government, national, provincial and local government. The provincial sphere is responsible for most developmental services but local government is taking an increasing role, both at district and local municipality levels. Beneath this are wards, and a ward committee system has been introduced to give effect to the principle of participatory local governance.
Community Based Planning (CBP) was adopted in 2009 by the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (DCOGTA). This methodology is aimed at enable local government to deepen democracy by allowing citizens to be active participants in their own development.
It is important to enable communities to participate in the Integrated Development Planning Process (IDP) and its related budgeting processes so that their priority developmental needs would be taken on board. Potentially therefore, an effective CBP machinery is one of the mechanisms that can advance the goals of developmental local government. Effective community-based planning may well lead to changes in the ways municipalities deliver their services. IDPs could consider community involvement in service delivery, e.g. partnerships with social groups in delivering services.
There has been disappointing progress with regard to community participation in the IDP process. Even among municipalities that prioritised participation, community and stakeholder attendance often dropped off significantly as the process continued.
The success of CBP will to a great extent be influenced by the recognition of various structures involved in CBP and the linkages between them. Such structures include the three spheres of government, NGOs, CBOs, and the business sector. At the moment these linkages are not very clear, as the distribution of the roles and responsibilities of different actors is not clearly defined.
The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was “focused on our people’s most immediate needs, and it relies … on their energies to drive the process of meeting these needs … Development is not about the delivery of goods to a passive citizenry. It is about active involvement and growing empowerment (1994:5).
Other key policies include The White Paper on Local Government which introduced the notion of “developmental” local government, including the concept of community empowerment. Subsequently the Municipal Systems Act (MSA) introduced integrated development planning (IDP).
Chapter Four of the MSA deals with “community participation” in local government saying that municipalities must develop “a culture of municipal governance that complements formal representative government with a system of participatory government”. Municipalities must “encourage, and create conditions for, the local community to participate in the affairs of the municipality” – including the drafting of the IDP. Municipalities must also contribute to “building the capacity of the local community to enable it to participate in the affairs of the municipality, and of councillors and staff to foster community participation”.
National planning includes the National Spatial Development Framework, and Provincial Growth and Development Strategies. Municipal planning processes are defined in the MSA. There is a considerable challenge for IDPs in transcending sectoral boundaries and involving and committing provincial and national departments to the IDP process and product. According to FCR the envisaged IDP processes have not catered sufficiently for active and sustained community involvement in planning processes. Partly this is due to the IDP falling between different approaches to development management, ranging from existing traditional approaches, new public-management approaches with their private sector orientation, and governance approaches. The governance approach is most relevant to CBP, as it emphasises accountability and rebuilding democracy through creating new patterns of consultation with local stakeholders, constructing inclusive decision-making mechanisms, and building the capacity of communities – especially the poor – to interact with them.
NDP – The National Development Plan
Contextual analysis The NDP is set on a vision to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030 (NDP, 2012) through “hard work, leadership and unity”. Chapter 8, entitled ‘Transforming human settlement and the national space economy’ begins “where people live and work matters” (NDP, 2012: 260). For development that matters to occur (i.e. one which improves the livelihoods of people within their own localities) active citizenship needs to be supported and incentivised. Reoccurring community struggles in the pursuit of development (increasingly taking the form of violent protests in the face of inadequate government service delivery) demonstrate that South Africa, indeed, has an active and vocal citizenry (van Donk, 2013).
The NDP recognises the existence of this energy and the need to direct it constructively towards a range of interventions that include citizen led neighbourhood visioning and planning processes (NDP, 2012). Improvements to the livelihoods of poor people are contingent on a greater understanding of ‘community’ and the ways by which communities develop (Theodori, 2009: 6). However, weak linkages between the micro level (community) and the meso level (local government and district service providers) (DPLG2, 2004) are an ongoing hindrance. In acknowledging this, the NDP notes that support needs to be provided to the wider community in their engagement with the state on the future of the spaces and settlements in which people live and work, whilst improving processes that enable local governments to implement strategic spatial interventions (NDP, 2012: 260).
A fundamental reshaping of the colonial and apartheid geography forms part of the core vision of the NDP. To facilitate this, available instruments for local development planning need to be sharpened together with building the required capabilities of the state and enhancing active citizenry (NDP, 2011: 260).
Community based planning is one such instruments that can be used to achieve this vision of a spatially and socio-economically integrated and vibrant society. Community based planning directly engages community leaders and the broad-based citizenry in an effort to move their community from today’s reality to tomorrow’s possibilities (Theodori, 2009: 5).
CBP supports the participatory objectives of integrated development planning through giving ‘bottomup’ legitimacy to municipal decision making grounded in IDPs, this while empowering communities to take on development responsibility and making local government more accountable (Chimbuya et. al, 2004).
The NDP recognises the need to rethink planning if society is to address the current deficiencies within the local system, allowing for the progressive development of sustainable governance and administrative capabilities. ‘Top-down’ planning, through influence from modernist planning ideas of ‘the imagined city’ which does not understand ‘community’, has led to the entrenchment of poverty and the exclusion of many. Theodori (2009:7) defines community as “a place-oriented process of interrelated actions through which members of a local population express a shared sense of identity while engaging in the common concerns of life”.
Source – Community Based Planning in the context of the National Development Plan
