Local Government Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Chaos and Complex Adaptive Systems theory, principles of organisational readiness, as well as risk, change and strategic management provide complementary perspectives to organisations that need to adapt to severe environmental shocks and stresses. These perspectives combine in the overarching notions of organisational resilience. Organisational resilience can be defined as the capacity of organisations to survive and thrive amidst ongoing change, disruption and adversity (cf. Global Resiliency Network 2010; Bhamra 2016; MacMillian 2017). Since the national lockdown, the local sphere of government had to adapt their operations to adjust to new realities that the COVID-19 pandemic introduced. From media reports, social media, political parties, and other interest groups, it soon became apparent that the resilience of municipalities are severely strained by a multitude of factors. These factors include the relative inability to provide crisis leadership, limited capacity to maintain essential services, partial revenue collection capability, as well as kerbed council decision-making and approval processes. The corpus of knowledge pertaining to urban and organisational resilience offers a number of principles and best practice models that local government in South Africa could adopt to effectively adapt to the 'new normal'. Especially the so-called 'five disciplines' of organisational resilience (The Gartner Group 2002; Lazcano 2011; Duchek 2019) serve as valuable parameters against which local government's response to the pandemic could be gauged. These 'disciplines' in local governance settings are: • Crisis leadership and effective communication (e.g. ability of political and administrative leadership to direct, influence, prepare, and guide new municipal praxis) • Critical supply chains and critical vendors (e.g. instability of supply and demand, use of SMART technology, revenue collection, insurance, security protocols, contingency plans and enterprise risk management plans, avoidance of 'hot spots') • Business continuity and the ability to manage issues (e.g. define the new business model, identify uncertainties, assess impact, design changes for operational resumption, disaster recovery, reprioritisation of budget allocations, etc.) • Workforce resilience (e.g. essential worker readiness, adaptive organisational culture, trust, stress, absenteeism, health problems, labour union concerns) • Community (e.g. engagement with local communities regarding the impact of the pandemic on their livelihoods, assessments of vulnerable communities, knowledge and education of communities, enhancing the legitimacy of councils, involvement of traditional leadership and local businesses in pandemic-related decisions, etc.)