By Clare Degenhardt, Chris Jordan and Hannah van Rooyen

African cities are dealing with a range of interlocking, dynamic and seemingly intractable challenges – from managing rapid expansion, addressing rising demand for overstretched services and dealing with unpredictable climate events, to trying to ensure decent jobs for their youthful populations.

It’s within this context that the African Cities Research Consortium is operating. Through research that builds evidence and supports coalitions of urban reformers, we aim to show how complex problems in African cities can be solved collectively. We hope these efforts will also be useful to reformers and development organisations beyond our focus cities.

Ultimately, we want to foster the development of prosperous, inclusive cities with enhanced services and more equitable local governance. We want to help improve the living conditions and life chances for all urban residents, especially disadvantaged communities.

In each of our focus cities, we have been undertaking research to deeply understand the city systems, political settlements and urban development domains – and the interplay between them. One of the main aims of this research is to identify the “priority complex problems” within a city, which we can then address in the implementation phase of the project.

But what is a “priority complex problem” in the first place?

We understand priority complex problems (PCPs) as:

A process that is preventing the achievement of poverty reduction and/or economic development and/or exacerbating the climate emergency. Specifically, processes that are related to the political economy and associated political relations, and system failures, particularly those related to the lack of system integration.

We are particularly interested in complex problems that are stopping a city from achieving its potential. Our integrated systems approach is also designed to address political constraints to reform.

As our foundation phase research in many cities concludes, we are actively identifying potential PCPs, with the help of community members, local authorities and other reformers. Along with our focus on political and systemic reform, we are looking for PCPs and approaches to addressing them that:

• Reflect needs across urban Africa
• Are substantive in scale
• Offer solutions that would enable significant improvements to citizen wellbeing and/or pro-poor economic growth
• Are significant to national and local government, civil society organisations and other stakeholders
• Are approaches of interest to epistemic communities, politically feasible and have buy-in from local actors
• Are potential pioneer reforms – that trigger further reform efforts
• Are realisable within the ACRC programme in the short (three years) and medium (six years) term

Approaches to addressing PCPs will form the basis for ACRC’s subsequent action-research-oriented interventions. Ultimately, we are interested in projects that are related to political, political economy or systemic challenges and that have reform implications – rather than projects whose objective is solely technical or social.

Building a portfolio of PCP interventions

We are currently consolidating individual problems identified by researchers, and potential approaches to addressing them. After identifying a range of salient issues, we’ll undertake further feasibility scoping to examine precisely what the ACRC team could do to help tackle them in different cities.

Scoping will examine what has been tried previously and why these attempts have failed. Understanding which solutions key stakeholders and reformers favour – and why – is essential to this process. A clear understanding of the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to scale the chosen solution is also key.

Through this process, we will build a portfolio of different interventions – focused around different domains, and at different scales – in an effort to catalyse research-informed reforms that will effectively tackle the problems we identify. Where they’re successful, we hope these efforts will also be useful to reformers and development organisations beyond our focus cities.

As this process develops, we’ll share more details on what’s happening where – and how efforts to address PCPs are progressing. Do check back on the blog, and sign up for e-news updates so you can follow the story.

Header photo credit: Know Your City TV. ACRC workshop to identify PCPs in Nairobi.

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By Diana Mitlin, CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium

There is a widespread recognition that narrowly focused sectoral urban interventions tend to fail.

Sectoral interventions are particularly likely to fail in the urban context because of the inter-relationship between consumption and production of goods and services. The presence of multiple agencies and organisations – and complex norms, values and practices, which have an overlapping presence on the ground – exacerbates problems. Improvements in one sector frequently have unanticipated impacts in other sectors that may mean the intervention is ineffective, and can potentially create other difficulties.

For example, improved water services are about much more than just laying down pipes and collecting payments for installation and water services. Pipe installation may require regularisation of informal settlements – where between 50% and 90% of urban residents live – and the re-blocking of existing dwellings (to enable pipes to be laid). The lowest income households may find they cannot afford regularisation costs, some residents may be displaced because of re-blocking of plots to ensure that paths follow straight lines and enable pipes to be laid, and tenants who cannot afford associated rent increases may have to relocate to other neighbourhoods.

Installing water pipes is particularly complex where land is privately owned. In terms of water services, regardless of who owns the land, existing informal providers may block utility provision because they lose their livelihoods – and there may be complex negotiations required for installation to continue. With the shift to utility supplies, households may be required to pay connection fees to benefit from supplies directly to their dwelling or plot. And water can only be safely supplied at the household and neighbourhood level if there is also drainage to remove waste water that needs to be disposed of.

Beyond sectoral interventions

ACRC’s analytical framework uses the concept of urban development domains to transcend both sectoral and traditional systems-based thinking, and to recognise that forward-thinking agencies, alliance and reform coalitions have long moved beyond sectoral thinking.

Domains enable us to drill down into sub-city processes, relations and institutions, recognising that the political economy and systems failures vary across domains. ACRC domain studies will be comparatively analysed between domains, and between individual domains and city-level analyses, to deepen our understanding of outcomes.

There are links between our notion of domains and the idea of a “politically-informed multi-sectoral approach”. However, we prefer the term domain because it draws attention to issues of power and authority as ideas about domain reforms are tested and challenged, and better represents the epistemic communities that emerge around specific domains.

Alongside helping us to see the politics of urban development challenges (which are tied to how particular actors frame problems and mobilise around their solutions) domains also help us analyse outcomes and opportunities across the political economy and city-of-system dimensions of our framework.

Defining domains

Domains are fields of power, policy and practice that are relevant to solving particular problems and/or advancing specific opportunities in relation to cities. They are constituted by actors (political, bureaucratic, professional and popular) that seek to claim control, influence and rights over a particular field – such as housing or the contribution of cities to national development – through various means.

Urban development domains are multi-scale and multi-system. Systems interactions help to define what can be achieved by programmes and projects that take place within a given domain. Take the domain of housing as an example; housing improvements can only be secured through improving the performance of water and sanitation services, and ensuring the provision of housing finance.

Housing is also an illustration of the importance of multi-scalar improvements. Residential neighbourhoods need to be connected to other residential areas. Residents need to be able to maintain and develop social and livelihood networks. And the density and compactness of a city affects its contribution to climate change, and to climate change adaptation strategies.

Urban development domains play diverse roles in sustaining the wider balance of power at both city and national levels – for example, providing rents, controlling electorates and/or providing legitimacy to governing elites in ways that in turn shape how authority is contested within domains, and whose interests and ideas predominate. The objectives of urban development domains are part of what is contested. Returning to the example of housing, should housing developments represent the modernisation ideal or should they favour lower cost, incremental style development?

Collective knowledge and action

A particular feature of urban development domains, and policy domains more broadly, concerns the role of epistemic communities, defined by Peter M. Haas as: “… a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area”.

Domain-level actors draw on and further strengthen epistemic communities to expound particular ideas, build strategic alliances or coalitions to achieve strategic objectives, and undertake direct activism, policy reform, new programming approaches and reformulated practices to solve problems and advance opportunities. They provide platforms for contestation, as ideas are tested and refined. Such epistemic communities reach beyond national borders, linking those aspiring to change local outcomes with evolving professional approaches, new academic insights and wider ideologies with which to engage.

Domains are highly political because they involve validating specific forms of intervention and their direction of travel. Expertise is central to this process, and what is legitimated by the expertise within domains potentially affects elite interests in multiple ways, such as, the ability to secure electorate support. Domain platforms enable ideologies to compete for dominance, and personal and political interests to be challenged and/or advanced.

Collective action on the part of those excluded from and/or adversely affected by domain-related processes may challenge the way in which domains function, especially if well-placed members within the epistemic communities take up these causes and represent these voices, and this may lead to reforms. For example, resistance to the demolition of informal settlements has encouraged the growth of informal settlement upgrading in at least some locations and organisations of informal workers have challenged both market-based processes of exploitation and state policies and programmes. Hence, domains are sites of contestation between actors with different interests and ideas, and different levels of holding power within the broader political settlement.

ACRC’s urban development domains

ACRC’s task is to understand how to intervene through policy, programmes and practices to improve inclusive development outcomes in cities.

The extent and ways in which domains perform political roles for powerful interests within the settlement will influence what is possible within them. The way in which the domain is configured (in terms of the balance of power between different actors, and the kinds of knowledge and ideas that are therefore privileged) will suit certain interests and problems, whilst also preventing other problems from being resolved in ways that secure more equitable and sustainable forms of development. ACRC is working with eight domains, which fall into three sets:

• Built environment domains that also play important economic and social roles;
  • Housing
  • Informal settlements
  • Land and connectivity
• Economic domains that focus primarily on income and asset generation;
  • Structural transformation
  • Neighbourhood and district economic development
• Societal domains that affect all citizens and their efforts to secure health, wellbeing and opportunity.
  • Youth and capability development
  • Health, wellbeing and nutrition
  • Safety and security

We have identified a set of domains that reflect both the needs of low-income and disadvantaged groups, and the priorities of city governments. They also reflect the interests of a range of national and international development agencies that have invested in programmes to address urban development priorities.

We’ll be studying three to five domains in each of our 13 focus cities. In addition to providing vital insights into the complex problems they are facing, this will also enable us to explore cross-city comparisons of domain processes, and outcomes.

As we move from our initial research on urban challenges, towards action research to address those problems in the next phase of ACRC’s work, knowledge of domains – and established relations with domain actors – will help to ensure a high quality of design for solutions to the priority complex problems, and the uptake activities around those solutions.

Learn more about ACRC’s research approach in our working paper: ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’.

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Header photo credit: Eisenlohr / Getty Images. Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya.

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By Seth Schindler, co-research director of the African Cities Research Consortium

Too often, the daily reality of African cities is characterised by the failure of systems to offer basic services. Take affordable transport or high-quality healthcare, for example – or by how the poor integration of systems leads to failures of both performance and accountability to users.

The promises and pitfalls of urban development in Africa are strongly influenced by the capability of particular city systems to operate in an effective manner, and deliver equitable and sustainable outcomes.

By approaching cities as systems, researchers have been able to evaluate and compare their use of energy and other resources, which has in turn informed interventions aimed at enhancing efficiency and sustainability. However, this approach risks naturalising their contingent characteristics – for example, social and economic.

Understanding material and social systems

Within ACRC, we seek to avoid these criticisms in two key ways: by complementing an understanding of cities as systems with a political settlements framework and political economy approach; and by focusing on a number of social as well as material systems.

So, rather than a single integrated system of flows and stocks, we propose a “city of systems” approach that accounts for a series of interrelated systems, including those geared towards managing material flows (such as water and energy systems), and those designed to foster social outcomes (such as education and healthcare systems).

Our analytical framework shows how systems have been shaped over time by politics, social relations and struggles, cultural preferences, technical expertise, economic constraints and environmental factors – such as the availability of resources.

We will begin our research by grounding the analysis of each city in historically informed scholarship that identifies the choices, events and geography that have shaped the particular configuration of its systems. This will account for infrastructural path dependency from the colonial era that, in many instances, has locked-in particular development trajectories that continue to influence resource access and the built environment to this day.

Local contexts, local politics

The systems of African cities tend to differ from their OECD counterparts in important ways, so research methods and theoretical assumptions must be adapted accordingly. Most urban planners embrace the “modern infrastructural ideal”, in which citywide systems provide near-universal access to resources and services.

The basic unit in this ideal type is the single-family dwelling, which serves as the interface between individual residents and material flows (such as access to water and disposal of solid waste). Most African cities do not conform to this ideal, for example, with multi-family occupancy in rental units on a single plot, and in this context their systems tend to be characterised by fragmentation and heterogeneity 

To add to this, a city’s systemic profile is shaped by political and technical choices that powerful stakeholders have made – about whether to either incinerate solid waste or inter it in a landfill, for instance – along with the availability of resources, and demands from residents for infrastructure, resources and services. In this way, the evolution of a city’s systemic profile is driven by social relations and political contestations that operate at multiple levels – on street corners and in neighbourhoods, as well as at national and international scales – and in relation to particular domains that incorporate multiple systems.

An account of urban processes in African cities requires not only a deep understanding of the political settlements, but also the (often informal) mechanisms powerful stakeholders use to extract rent through their control over city-based systems, and strengthen their hold over power and/or means of economic accumulation.

Vulnerability and resilience

Systems within cities are subject to exogenous shocks and stresses, which can originate in immediate hinterlands or in places around the world with which cities are connected. Indeed, political upheaval, social unrest, economic crisis and environmental catastrophe can reverberate in cities around the world.

Most recently, Covid-19 demonstrated how quickly localised epidemics can become global pandemics. In addition to its impacts on health, Covid-19’s prolonged interruption of supply and demand for many goods heralds a looming global economic crisis. City-based interest groups seek to limit their exposure to exogenous risks, but as Covid-19 demonstrates, it is impossible to mitigate risk completely.

Many economic, social, environmental and political shocks and stresses constitute push-factors that increase rural-to-urban migration. City systems therefore must be adaptable enough to accommodate increased demand from rural migrants – or reduced demand from urban citizens returning to rural areas – sometimes at very short notice, as a result of conflict or natural disasters, and/or for brief periods (for example, daily commuters and seasonal migrants).

Framing the complexities of city systems

In summary, many factors establish the parameters of possible systemic configurations. In addition to political settlements, such factors include geography, the availability of resources, lock-in, path dependencies, citizen agency and protest, as well as exogenous influences. Additionally, systems are shaped by practices, both governance and organisation “from above”, and “from below” by users who seek to access and maintain systems.

Understanding cities as complex systems offers the potential to identify needs, plan interventions, and anticipate or evaluate impacts in a more holistic way, that recognises the intensely interrelated character of cities and their constituent parts.

Learn more about ACRC’s research approach in our working paper: ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’.

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Header photo credit: TG23 / Getty Images. A busy street in Accra, Ghana.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Tim Kelsall, co-research director of the African Cities Research Consortium

What on earth is a political settlement?

A political settlement can be defined as an agreement or common understanding among powerful groups within a society about the basic rules or institutions of the political and economic game. Such institutions provide opportunities for those groups to acquire a minimally acceptable level of benefits, thereby preventing a descent into all-out warfare.

The analysis of political settlements is, to a large extent, an attempt to explain how that relationship between powerful groups and institutions shapes war, peace, and development outcomes, enriching some people and destroying the lives of others, and how, if at all, those outcomes can be improved.

Settlements and the city

Over the past decade or so, scores of authors have produced hundreds of political settlements analyses of problems ranging from industrial policy to women’s empowerment; but with only a few exceptions, those studies have lacked an explicit urban focus. This is surprising in some ways, since large cities are often crucially important to national-level politics as sources of political legitimacy or dissent, economic dynamism and rent.

ACRC aims to rectify this oversight. It will apply political settlements analysis to a study of urban systems and development domains, and use it to help understand and solve complex problems in African cities. 

It will bring to the table a set of distinct conceptual tools. The first is what we call a “tri-bloc” approach to mapping the configuration of powerful actors. Here, we ask which groups are nationally powerful, in the sense of being able to change or disrupt the settlement – are they gender groups, ethnic groups, occupational groups, religious groups, armed militias, street gangs, or some combination thereof? How do these groups align with the country’s de facto leader to form different “blocs”? Are they “loyal”, “contingently loyal” or in “opposition” to him or her? How strong are these blocs relative to one another? How internally cohesive are they? What strategies does the political leadership use to incorporate them into or under the settlement? And on what rents or resources does it rely?

Then we ask the same sorts of question at the city level. Who are the city’s powerful groups, who are its marginal groups, and how do they align with the city’s de facto leader? How are these groups integrated – or not, as the case may be – into national-level power blocs? What sources of rent and legitimacy do they bring? And what are the implications for the governance of urban development?

Solving complex urban problems

Put differently, by answering these questions, we expect to gain a better sense of how national and urban political power are intertwined, the systems and domains they feed on, and how they combine to make possible the resolution of some urban problems and make probable the perpetuation of others.

Answering these and other questions also allows us to map what we call the settlement’s “social foundation” (the powerful “insider groups” that make up the settlement), and to identify groups that are effectively excluded from, or marginal to, the settlement. In addition, it helps us to map what we call the settlement’s “power configuration” (the degree to which power is concentrated in the country’s top political leadership). These mappings yield a 2×2 typology and a set of working hypotheses about how the breadth of the social foundation and degree of power concentration influence elite commitment to, and state capacity for, inclusive urban development policy. Figure 1 illustrates this typology.

Putting together an analysis of the political settlement, city systems, urban development domains and our typological theory will, we hope, provide insights into where the greatest opportunities for progressive urban change lie, as well as pointers for whom to work with, when, and how.

Learn more about ACRC’s research approach in our working paper: ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’.

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Header photo credit: Abenaa / Getty Images. Kroo Bay informal settlement in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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By Sam Hickey, Deputy CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium

Mainstream urban development interventions in Africa have often been designed through a primarily sectoral and technical lens. But there is abundant evidence that they are also intimately related to questions of power and politics, and that effective solutions must take into account the complex interrelations and interactions between urban processes and systems.

Responding to this, the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) is committed to bringing a fresh, more politically-informed and integrated approach to creating inclusive, productive, safe and sustainable cities – cities, that is, which meet the ambitions of Sustainable Development Goal 11. 

This blog post sets out the conceptual approach that we propose to use in ACRC, to frame our investigations into the political economy drivers of complex problems within and around African cities. These investigations will in turn contribute to a new generation of intervention approaches that effectively address complex interactions between problems and opportunities in specific political contexts, and which are attuned to taking on the additional challenges of the climate emergency.

Our aim is to uncover the underlying, interrelated and systemic constraints that are preventing African cities from offering sustainable and inclusive development futures to their residents, and from playing a more productive role in supporting national-level processes of economic development and poverty reduction.

Our framework consists of three main elements:

1. Political settlements analysis offers ACRC a way to understand the political economy of African cities. The notion of a political settlement seeks to go beyond formal notions of governance to uncover the underlying forms of power and politics that shape which institutions emerge and how they actually function in practice. This approach will enable us to explore how the governance of urban development is shaped by both the balance of power at city level and the often contentious relationship between cities and national politics.

2. City of systems. The approach generally taken to “cities-as-systems” thinking in urban studies literature is to frame cities as metabolic systems comprising flows of resources and energy, which enable economic activity and social reproduction. Concerned that this will not allow for sufficiently nuanced and politically sensitive analysis, the approach that we are proposing is to use a systems approach to help emphasise the significance of a city’s materiality (how it is physically constructed and maintained by flows of energy and resources, how its built environment is constituted by material stocks), and to go beyond this to include social systems as well.

Meanwhile, we propose a third concept of urban development domains that can capture the ways in which several systems combine and overlap to produce particular problems and solutions for urban development. The notion of domains also offers a better route to reframing sectors in a broader, more systemic and more politicised way.

3. Urban development domains can be defined as fields of power, policy and practice that are relevant to the solution of particular problems. They are constituted by actors (political, bureaucratic, professional and popular) that seek to claim authority and rights over a particular field, such as housing, through various means.

Domains are highly political, both because they are sites of contestation between actors with different interests and ideas, and because they often play a wider role in sustaining the balance of power within the city and national-level settlements (for example, through providing rent-seeking opportunities, legitimacy and/or votes for powerful players).

Figure 1 illustrates how these core concepts relate to one another. The figure can be approached from any angle, but here we describe it from the bottom up. Within selected urban development domains, such as housing or health, wellbeing and nutrition, we expect to find constellations of international and domestic actors with their own ideas and interests and more or less institutionalised ways of relating to one another.

These span multiple city systems, which will themselves be comprised of actors with ideas and interests arranged in various formal or informal institutional relationships and, to a greater or less extent, embedded in or struggling over various material flows and structures.

Some of these domains will be relatively discrete from one another, as in the examples of housing and youth capabilities in our diagram, while others – like youth capabilities and structural transformation – may interrelate and/or overlap in areas such as actors or activities.

Both the domains and the systems, meanwhile, will be connected in the sense of being interwoven – that is, having complex causal relations with – a city’s politics and the nation’s political settlement, again to greater or lesser degree.

In some cases, these will place a set of more or less loose constraints on what is possible in terms of urban reform, particularly with respect to addressing urban injustice, securing political inclusion and redistributing resources to the benefit of disadvantaged groups. In others, especially those where votes, rents or security are critical to the reproduction of the settlement, the ideas and interests of actors in the city’s politics or national settlement will reach right into these arenas, shaping them directly.

In all cases, we expect that the scope for inclusive urban development efforts at the city scale – and in terms of cities’ contributions to national development – will be influenced by the degree of power concentration and the breadth of the social foundation that characterises national political settlements and the balance of power at city level, though this remains to be tested.

While in some cases the city’s power balance and the national settlement will be closely aligned, in others they will be in tension. The nature of this relationship is also likely to affect the scope for solving problems in urban development domains, as of course will the nature of the built environment and the city systems with which it is involved. 

Simultaneously, all three dimensions will be influenced by exogenous factors, such as climate change, international relations and global health emergencies, while certain other flows of international ideas and finance, for example, will become constituent parts of the political settlements and domains mapped out here. Throughout our research we will examine some key themes that cut across the politics of urban development, with a particular focus on gender, climate change and finance.

The purpose of the framework (and the research it gives rise to) is not, in the first instance, to produce a grand explanatory theory of the problems of African urban development. Rather, it is to diagnose the source of problems, improve understanding, provide pointers for reformers on how and where to focus their energies, and help such reformers anticipate the problems that they will have to address. Our ultimate aim is to inform better decision-making by urban policymakers and reformers.

In the next blog in the series, Tim Kelsall will unpack in more detail the political settlements approach and insights we expect it to provide us with.

Learn more about ACRC’s research approach in our working paper: ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’.

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Header photo credit: derejeb / Getty Images. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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By Diana Mitlin, CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium

All cities are complex, dynamic, political systems. But with a fast-growing, young urban population, Africa’s cities in particular present a whole host of unique and critical challenges.

The African Cities Research Consortium is seeking to address these challenges by bringing together community organisations, local government and agencies, along with other kinds of urban reformers. Our goal is both to co-produce knowledge and evidence, and to turn this into meaningful action.

Why African cities?

Many African cities are at a crossroads. Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa – at the national level – has improved over the last 20 years, with an annual average of 4.9% (compared to 2.8% for the rest of the world). But that growth has been too dependent on the extraction of natural resources. Increasing growth may have led to more opportunities for some; and has increased the potential to reduce poverty.

Yet livelihoods remain precarious for many people and there are few opportunities to secure better development options – especially those in low-income households in informal urban settlements. As urbanisation has grown without significant structural transformation, it has failed to lay the foundations for future prosperity in many countries.

To compound these difficulties, the Covid-19 crisis is having a disproportionate effect on urban areas. Economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to have contracted by almost 2% in 2020, while the IMF estimates that per capita income will not return to pre-crisis levels until 2025. And Covid-19 has highlighted a reality that has been known for a long time. Over 50% of Africa’s urban population live in informal settlements without access to the basic services (piped water, safe sanitation, health centres) that higher-income households take for granted.

Policymakers increasingly recognise the need to address conditions in overcrowded, low-income urban neighbourhoods. These areas have faced a “double whammy”, with both acute health needs (including poor access to essential services and an inability to socially distance) and an economic crisis (with no savings, daily wages and a preponderance of employment in the service sector).

Pressure for change is pervasive across Africa’s cities. While frustrated residents need services, homes and better employment options, entrepreneurs’ efforts to contribute to economic growth are stymied, civil society agencies seek more inclusive development approaches, and aspiring politicians think they could do better.

Urban reform challenges

Over the last decade, international, national and local policy actors have increasingly recognised the challenges raised by growing urbanisation in Africa. But for most city residents, progress has been minimal. Interventions often fail to address core challenges of economic development, social exclusion, city governance and poverty reduction in ways that are responsive to climate change and biodiversity loss.

Despite some efforts to adopt multi-sectoral approaches to urban governance and development in Africa, too many programmes remain siloed. They fail to deal either with the complexity of urban development problems, or the unintended consequences that one improvement project may have on closely related systems and livelihoods.

International development agencies have so far had a relatively insignificant role in shaping and financing interventions within African cities. Many northern NGOs also have limited experience with urban projects and lack the capacity to conduct major infrastructure projects.

Despite the growing traction of the “thinking and working politically” agenda, official development assistance actors have yet to systematically apply insights from this approach to urban programming. With a few exceptions, donor assistance remains predominantly technocratic. Although civil society efforts have been more grounded in political economy analysis, relatively short project timescales reduce their capacity to navigate the intrinsically political dimensions of urban reform.

The potential of reform coalitions

Growing evidence shows that some of the most complex and politically intractable problems in African cities are more likely to be addressed effectively when guided by reform-based coalitions. These coalitions operate across public-private divides, incorporating interests, ideas and actors from the low-income communities and groups most directly affected.

While some of their work may be conducted through formalised networks, it necessarily has a less formal component, presenting challenges around scaling up and sustaining responses over time. Development actors are often resistant to engaging with such approaches – perhaps due to a perception they are too time-consuming and/or “political”, along with a reluctance to involve low-income communities in developing solutions to complex problems. 

Finding effective, politically feasible solutions

Urban transformation is realised through deeply political processes – involving the changing balance of power between different social groups and how this shapes, and is shaped by, the distribution of benefits and ideological struggles.

In our research, we will analyse the drivers of complex urban challenges through a political economy approach, examining how multiple sectors and systems combine to produce complex, intertwined and apparently intractable problems. We will engage with multiple policy actors, to identify and implement more effective and politically feasible solutions to these problems.

We have recently published ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’. Over the next few weeks, we will continue this blog series, unpacking how the different conceptual elements fit together – and how we’ll use this research approach to assist the reform efforts of urban actors in our 13 focus cities.

In the next blog, Sam Hickey will outline the key concepts of our research approach. 

Learn more about ACRC’s research approach in our working paper: ‘Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium’.

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Header photo credit: Moiz Husein / Getty Images. Aerial view of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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