The analysis makes an analysis of the effectiveness of Integrated Development Planning as the prescribed planning system for South African municipalities. A total of twelve (12) considerations were included in the analysis. These considerations are focused on the outcomes that an Integrated Development Plan is supposed to promote (or achieve) in local government.

The system of integrated development planning is too complicated, too dependent on sophisticated data collection and integration methodologies, to be useful in a country with South Africa’s development status. Officials, councillors and (less of all) communities do not properly understand it, and supervisory spheres of government (both provincial, as well as national) use it to pile on bureaucratic requirements that have eventually turned IDPs into volumes of unimplementable