Typically, municipalities are accustomed to working within the limits of well-established in-house or governmental procedures for the delivery of services. Bringing about change to these procedures may require formal waivers or legislative amendments (for legal procedures), or it may simply require the attitudinal change of those responsible for executing the process (to promote collaboration). In most cases, municipalities can facilitate change if they want to.
Municipal systems and procedures regulate the way in which tasks are carried out. Their formality may vary from rigid financial management or procurement procedures to more ad hoc procedures for community liaison. For service-related projects, standard procedures will cover the planning, design specification, contract tendering, evaluation, mobilisation and supervision stages of the works (or the implementation undertaken by a works department). Most systems will affect private sector participation in some way at some time, and many new processes and procedures will need to be adopted. It is rare for a municipality to feel immediately comfortable with the processes required to formulate, design and implement a service partnership, and few will be familiar with the key procedures that take a partnership forwards.
As we have discussed above, the procedural challenge involved in PPPs is also often set within the context of wider municipal reform. Changes to financial management may already be under way and professionalisation, delegation and consultation processes may be being pursued. In some cases the very idea of PPP will have arisen because of this reform. Yet, with the exception of a few rare cases, evidence suggests that municipalities are slow to change. Some will have only limited capacity to make changes and the processes, systems and procedures necessary to address the broad range of partnership issues discussed in this book may seem insurmountable.