Service Delivery and Accountable Governance in Urban Zimbabwe: The Issue of Policy Implementation

Abstract

The role of urban local government in Zimbabwe in producing public goods and services such as water supply, solid waste management, primary health care, road construction and maintenance and others is beyond contest. In generating these services that ordinary urbanites cannot do without, urban local government has become not only a frontline service provider but an indispensable subnational government playing a crucial role in improving the quality of human life. Yet, service delivery is seemingly characterised by chronic backlog that appears to suggest that urban councils are not dispensing their duties as well as they should but that they are also failing to meet the expectations of communities in their jurisdictions. The explanations for the policy failures include the inability to collect revenue due a municipality, notable legislative weaknesses, and possibly inter and intra political friction impacting urban service delivery. With the assistance of a hypothetical process model, the article focuses on the lack of implementation capacity or the inability to implement policy as one of the major reasons that is often overlooked or ignored when explaining policy failure at the local sphere of urban government.