In South Africa, the post-apartheid era has seen municipalities tasked with major developmental goals, including addressing economic growth. Such a task must be seen in the context of globalisation and managing service delivery to reduce apartheid era backlogs in poor, former African areas. Harrison (2000) argues that this led to a series of legislation for municipalities to be established which brought to the fore the concept of Integrated Development Plans (IDPs). These are, essentially, long and medium term strategic planning tools.\ud
For the last seven years, IDPs have been topical in the review of local government, as well as in context of assisting municipalities to strategically respond to their developmental challenges. In spite of its wide range of benefits, many municipalities are yet to accept strategic planning as a management tool or an approach to effective management of the organisation-environment relationship. The need to do so was recognised in 2005 by the Panelists at the Gauteng IDP Hearing when it called for a synthesis of strategic planning practices in the IDP process (Department of Local Government, 2005).\ud
This report, however, goes beyond synthesis of the concept of strategic planning. It attempts to analyse the planning and decision making systems that are currently used by Gauteng municipalities. It investigates the extent to which municipal IDPs have gone beyond compliance with legislative regulations to becoming firmly embedded as a strategic tool for decision-making and management, resource allocation and operations of municipal departments. This will be done through looking at the case study of the Westrand District and Emfuleni Local Municipalities IDP processes in the province of Gauteng from 2000-200