Playing Numbers or Politics? Approaches to the Prioritisation of Development Needs in South Africa

Abstract

This paper uses a case study to highlight the implicit political and developmental assumptions which underpin an indicator and index based prioriti-sation of developmental needs. A key issue for the successful implementation of development objectives in South Africa is the identification and prioritisation of development needs. Indicators could play an important role in terms of informing the decisions made by various levels of government. An indicator based index supported by a computerised system called the Development Indicators Monitoring System (DIMS) has been used to prioritise housing and service provision need within the province of Gauteng. The article shows that the prioritisation of areas in terms of service need is sensitive to the index construction method employed. It is argued that various choices around the index construction method depend on certain developmental assumptions which are fundamentally political choices. In particular, the choice between absolute and relative indicators of need has a considerable impact on the prioritisation of areas. However, this is not a total rejection of the use of indicators in the planning process. Rather, it is a call for the appropriate use of the tools that are available.

Peter Gill was in the Division of Building Technology og the CSIR, and Peter Hall was in the Development Policy and Planning Unit of the Human Sciences Research Council when this research was conducted. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone.