The creeping crisis of local government in South Africa: Insights from Gauteng municipalities

South Africa’s local government is in the grip of a creeping crisis – a threat to widely shared societal values and life-sustaining systems which evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, and is subject to varying attention and insufficient response(s). We extend this concept in two ways. First, we shift the unit of analysis from government responses to external threats, to threats developing within the governance system itself. Second, we use complex-systems thinking to explore how threats emerge and accumulate across local government’s governance, finance, and service delivery subsystems. We show that those responsible for arresting this creeping crisis are themselves implicated in its development, while political and class-based interests shape how threats are perceived and interpreted. Focusing on Gauteng municipalities, we develop a holistic framework to map and understand these dynamics, enabling reform efforts to identify interventions that can arrest feedback loops and contribute toward stabilisation.