The University of Johannesburg’s (UJ’s) Public and Environmental Economics Research Centre (PEERC) and the South African Local Government Association (Salga) on Tuesday launched a new partnership to contribute to improving policymaking at local government level.
PEERC was established this year and is dedicated to basic, applied and strategic research in environmental economics.
Speaking at the partnership launch, at UJ’s Kingsway campus, PEERC director Johane Dikgang noted that the centre would aim to address challenges in the economics of local government, the environment and sustainable development.
“We do not just want to do research for the sake of having journals, but research that will influence policymakers. This should all be done to the benefit of the public.
“We rely heavily on stakeholder involvement to ensure our research is relevant and useful for decision-makers. Once research is produced, we hope that stakeholders are more likely to actively use and disseminate the information that they helped produce.
“There is a gap between the research we are doing in academia and what the policymakers actually require,” said Dikgang.
He further pointed out that the research centre would also focus on agricultural economics, resource economics and public finance. “PEERC is the first centre of its kind on the continent.”
“We are consulting with different stakeholders to ensure that whatever we put out as short programmes, that there is real demand out there,” Dikgang said of the new venture.
Also speaking at the launch, Salga CEO Xolile George said the collaboration would assist the association in reaching three key goals over the next five years, including economic inclusion, spatial justice and fiscal equity and sound financial management.
Salga and PEERC highlighted that municipal debt, its associated challenges and how it can be resolved would be key focus areas of the research to be undertaken.
In its ‘Debt owed to municipalities, poor billing and critical success factors to billing’ report of 2015, Salga pointed out that consumers owned municipalities almost R100-billion.
He added that the partnership was one of the ways which research could be undertaken and disseminated, making all stakeholders aware of some of the fundamental and structural challenges facing local government. “It is through research that we can collectively identify remedies to these challenges.”