Building A Capable State: Service Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan Parnell (review)

In Building a Capable State, Ian Palmer, Nishendra Moodley, and Susan Parnell seek to understand how South Africa's governments—local, provincial, national—have progressed in delivering services. The authors take into account the country's history and recent transition to democracy, as well as its geographical and political challenges. They support their work with data on a variety of basic services and comparisons with similar countries. The study that emerges is both sympathetic and pragmatic.

The authors have built careers in private contracting for the public sector. Their empirical work is driven by an intimate understanding of processes within service-delivery praxis. This serves the book well, as it provides a knowing lens through which they seek to view the postapartheid era's most vexing questions: why increases in service delivery have been so slow, and how this has shaped the legacy of the 1994 transition.

Readers never get a complete answer to the second question, but the first is widely contextualized within South Africa's history, its sociolegal structures, and evidence regarding progress within similarly sized countries. The authors begin globally, introducing the 2030 sustainable development agenda of the United Nations, which sets a target for nearly universal service delivery within fifteen to twenty years of implementation. They remind us that after two decades, the postapartheid "experience provides a touchstone of what might realistically be achieved in the time frames of current global policy ambitions" (p. 1). Given the size of the national wealth gap, the authors argue that South Africa, though they treat it as a middle-income country, could echo much richer or poorer states.

The first three chapters focus on building a consensus for what state capability means and attempting to understand it in the light of history—including, of course, migration, influx control, bantustans, urbanization, and other remakers of human geography. In chapters four, five, and six, they discuss mechanisms for regulation, building municipal capability, and financing municipal services. The following chapters focus on understanding how these services have worked since the early 1990s, moving through water and sanitation, electricity, roads and public transport, and housing.

Finally, the authors ask whether South Africa is a capable state, and the answer is a resounding maybe—or perhaps better stated by the authors themselves: "Yes, but" (p. 252). They conclude that "South Africa is a capable state, but that statement needs to be qualified." The state is technically up to constitutional standards, they say, though localized and more recent realities may throw that into question.

The book's reluctance to answer the second question completely provides an opportunity to frame current service-delivery challenges in their context. Colonialism and apartheid are, of course, invoked early and often, and the authors view subsequent political trends—from GEAR (growth, employment, and redistribution) to state capture (systemic political corruption)—as outcomes within the transition cycle. This is frustrating in a country paying a high price for this transition, but the empirical and comparative evidence leaves readers feeling that the country has managed to do quite a bit during its fraught years—at least, up until recently. The book makes a case for demonstrating flexibility to localized and nationalized concerns when assessing service delivery. Like many observers, the authors argue that state capture will prove detrimental to maintaining and building upon progress made to date.

The authors utilize constitutional rights as a backdrop, noting the gap between what the Constitution guarantees and what the national state actually retains responsibility for. It is perhaps facile to blame the document, but the authors make a compelling case for a discrepancy in understanding between what the national state must provide and the degree to which a constitutional emphasis on local autonomy has hampered it. This is helpful in the authors' reframing of "capability" as limited, not just to the state's financial ability, but, perhaps more importantly, to its ability to...