Regulation and facilitation of public‐private partnerships: The MSP policy framework

This article describes the Municipal Services Partnership (MSP) Policy developed by the Department of Constitutional Development (DCD) of the Ministry for Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development of South Africa to help local authorities respond to the great demand for improvement of municipal services. The MSP policy was developed by the DCD, utilising consultative policy making. It defines municipal services partnerships and typical contractual forms of MSPs, and also identifies gaps and constraints in existing South African law that can make implementation of MSPs unnecessarily difficult or more costly for local authorities and service consumers. The policy creates a framework for competitive procurement of MSP contracts and, finally, it describes the capacity needs of local authorities to deal effectively with MSP planning, procurement and implementation, and identifies new and expanded institutional roles at the local and national levels to support local authorities that wish to engage in MSPs

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Chief of Party, CLEAN‐Urban Project: Indonesia, Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the US Agency for International Development, which sponsored the technical assistance project to support the development of the MSP policy framework. Thanks are also due to Dr Crispian Olver (Deputy Director‐General), Ms Gugu Moloi (Chief Director: Local Government Infrastructure and Planning) and their colleagues at the Department of Constitutional Development for their leadership in the development of the framework.