Institutional Leadership and the Challenge of Policy Implementation: The Case of South Africa's Extended Public Works Programme

It's not that one is seeking to advance an elite led institutional approach to development and service delivery by bringing into sharp focus the question of institutional leadership, but it's a matter of fact that a strong well-rounded leadership of institutions, especially in the context of 'young' and emerging democracies is at the center policy implementation and service delivery. Even though South Africa has been a formal democracy for 30 years, the country still bears a lot of characteristics of a young and immature democracy where leadership is highly needed. Institutional leadership is among the big challenges facing South Africa's post 1994 political economy, hence the proliferation of concerns about the state of institutions, especially their functionality and or dysfunctionality hence the poor levels of delivery of services to communities. The question about whether our institutions are performing the way they should is persistent. The drive to professionalize the public services is related even though inadvertently to some of these concerns. Conceptually institutional leadership infers championing in a dedicated and focused way the establishment, advancement, nourishing and protection of institutional processes and values thus ensuring down-to-earth implementation. Honoring delivery commitments made to communities, creating "collective moments" for self-reflection (Laloux, 2014) within the organization are important pillars of institutional leadership. Institutional leadership therefore requires strong individuals at leadership level who can serve as "evangelists" of results-oriented practices in policy implementation. This kind of leadership is more hands-on. Rao (2002) describes this kind of leadership as comprising 'powerful actors' who drive 'the legitimation of practices' much like religion or ideology. The lack of this kind of leadership in public institutions combined with the character of some of our institutions, sometimes defined by pronounced elements of dysfunctionality or divergent development, contributes to the dilemmas of policy implementation and hence poor service delivery to communities. The Expanded Public Works Program, a policy-based program which in all the phases of implementation has encountered, among other impediments, challenges of coordination, provides a useful case study and example of institutional leadership challenges, divergent institutional development hence the muted policy implementation and service delivery