Johannesburg's strategic plan for municipal service partnerships

While many local authorities have been slow to make the transition from traditional methods of service delivery to internationally proven alternative approaches, this is not the case for the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, which is pioneering initiatives around municipal service partnerships (MSPs) in many different areas. This article traces the processes embarked upon by Johannesburg, with a view to examining how and why the private sector became involved in municipal service provision. Given that Johannesburg is the largest and perhaps the most important city in the country, it is expected that the lessons learned from the experiments with MSPs there will be profoundly important for similar efforts by local governments in other parts of the country.