The Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington’s Health and Wellbeing distinctiveness theme steering group, hosted a symposium on ‘The Four Wellbeings for Local Government’ on 26 February 2019. The symposium heard brief presentations from eight invitees from local government, central government, the private sector and NGOs: Justin Lester, Lyn Patterson, Karen Thomas, Peter McKinlay, Wayne Mulligan, Meg Williams, Danielle Shanahan and Suzy Morrissey. Inspired by these addresses and by the ensuing discussion, this article considers what the reintroduction of the ‘four well-beings’ into the Local Government Act might mean for local decision making.

Localism is about citizens, not town halls. It engages, encourages and empowers citizens and their formal, semi-formal and informal groupings, street level to citywide, including not-for-profits. To be effective and constructive, citizen-centric localism needs to be bottom-up, not just top-down, driven by iterative interaction to fashion thought-through decisions. Digital technology enables this in ways not possible a decade ago. Local councils are the right level of government to develop and refine that interaction and thereby revitalise local – and in time national – democracy.

Project management can be both complex and challenging. And when projects span multiple areas, are interdependent, and cost many millions of dollars, project managers play a mission-critical role.

In effort to bring its technological capabilities in line with other major cities, the City of Regina, Canada, built a portal powered by Microsoft Azure to handle community sign-on for accessing city services and viewing public utility bills. The city also adopted Microsoft Office 365 to increase productivity of government employees and serve citizens more efficiently. As a result of its move to the cloud, the city enhanced municipal worker output and saved taxpayer dollars in IT infrastructure costs.

The new democratic government of South Africa came into power in 1994 and it inherited a dysfunctional municipalities. In fact it inherited a country with high levels of poverty, growing levels of inequality and also social dysfunctionality. The local government sphere was established in South Africa with the main aim of addressing inequality, segregation, inequity, discrimination in the provision of municipal services and eradication poverty within communities. However, ever since the establishment of local government sphere in South Africa, the sphere of local government is fraught with many challenges which make it impossible for municipalities to render proper municipal services to the members of the public. This is evident from the protests which were observed in the country ever since the year 2008 were communities demanded better services from their municipalities. This mini-dissertation therefore discusses the application of the principles of corporate governance in delivering and improving municipal service in South Africa. It further discusses the legislative framework and the institution of government which are responsible for the effective implementation of corporate governance in the local government sphere. Pursuant to that it also explains the concept of Corporate Governance within the local government. Furthermore, it discusses the parameters of the challenges that are faced by the municipalities which are ranging from fraud, nepotism, corruption and poor financial management which result in poor service delivery.