Local Economic Development as a Permanent Management Strategy Without Solutions: Why Led Perpetuates Conundrums Without Solving Them? Perspectives From Social Entrepreneurs in Polokwane Local Municipality

Abstract

This paper aims to critique how Local Economic Development (LED) as a permanent management strategy fails to address the challenges facing the most underserved communities in Polokwane Local Municipality. Understanding that LED is part of the central policy mechanism for local government with an aim to address entrenched structural constraints such as poverty, corruption, unemployment and inequality, persistence social and economic woes continue to characterize Polokwane Local Municipality. The paper critically argues that LED is perceived to be more of a management tool for bureaucratic processes rather than a tool that solves the challenges in the communities. Hence, most of the communities continues to endure social and economic problems. The unfortunate tragedy and milieu are that young people bear the brunt of such management tendency of LED, rather than using it to advance people’s lives and livelihoods. Thus, the current status-quo in Polokwane Local Municipality is that LED provides short-term relief rather than providing long-terms sustainable solutions to challenges. Using a quantitative research approach, this paper collected primary data to critique the dynamics of LED from social entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that while LED offers promising interventions to address socio-economic challenges, it falls short of offering long-lasting and sustainable solutions for economic and social transformation. This paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate on LED policy and implementation and calls for stringent measures to improve LED initiatives and have community-embedded solutions such as having the interventions of social entrepreneur in LED pillars.