How is ACRC designed to drive urban reform

By Diana Mitlin

In previous blog posts, I have discussed some of the key elements behind the effectiveness of ACRC, and the particular importance of trust running through a consortium such as ours. This post explores the added value of the African Cities Research Consortium.

At its simplest, ACRC is a funding mechanism (supported by FCDO) and our respectful, long-standing engagement with our African partners means that we frequently acknowledge our relative lack of expertise and experience within the African context. However, not all aid funding is alike and much has been said about the consequences of one funding modality over another.

How then, does ACRC seek to provide funding to urban reformers with added benefits?

As a leadership, we have to start by acknowledging what we do not know and where our expertise does not lie. The senior management team includes five UK-based members, all from the United Kingdom. This includes myself as CEO, a politics research director, head of project delivery, operations manager and communications manager. The other three members are Africans, the urban development research director is a Ugandan working in the Netherlands in recent years, the uptake director is a Nigerian based in Nigeria and the community knowledge research director is a Zimbabwean now working in South Africa.

Our added value is based on our ability to deliver finance in a way that is sensitive to the trust triad elaborated in the previous blog. It is also based on three non-financial contributions: a collective strategy for learning; a shared commitment to develop the foundations required for further iterations of that collective strategy; and, related to both those things, a collective engagement and commitment to advance urban reform in Africa. These elements are elaborated below.

First, the team is designed to deliver new knowledge through testing both our conceptual framework and theory of change.

This has a number of immediate impacts that change the ways in which colleagues engage with ACRC. It also influences the research and action research collectives that deliver our work.

For example, one immediate consequence of the conceptual framework, and its two pillars of politics and political economy, and urban systems, is to configure new discipline teams which bring together those with scholarship in urban development and those in politics and political science. The urban development scholars (academics and professionals) tend to have disciplinary expertise in planning or architecture, or in social sciences (such as geography, development studies and sociology). In the context of urban development in the global South, this is a new configuration. In some city teams, we have also drawn in economists.

This configuration immediately challenges existing understandings and catalyses new learning. Delivering learning related to the conceptual framework requires transdisciplinary work that builds on the interest among the team in new disciplinary perspectives.

The theory of change (ToC) also requires new transdisciplinary experience. Here there is a focus on the factors that are likely to lead to and maintain urban reform. The ToC proposes simultaneous efforts with respect to securing elite commitment, building state capabilities and capacities, strengthening cross-class reform coalitions and mobilising urban citizens and residents.

The point here is less that we have the answer, and more that we are catalysing a set of discussions and action, that problematise the conditions under which urban reform takes place. Thus far, our ToC has been well received as a good place to start (which reflects the reality that it draws on a lot of African efforts to date) and hence we have a commitment to co-learn to advance our understanding.

In addition to requiring learning about the nature of political aggregation at both elite and grassroots levels – and learning about how to bring urban systems together – the ToC highlights the need to learn across the skillsets of academics, professionals and uptake specialists. Within our action research projects, there is necessarily a direct engagement with decision-makers at the local and city scale. That requires u/s to strategise how engagement can best take place, what are alternative tools and methods, and how can such tools and methods be aggregated. The ACRC city and programme team structure brings that learning to the fore.

Related to the transdisciplinary academic learning, and the research to action uptake learning, is the addition of community knowledge. ACRC believes that building collectives of community researchers at the project and city levels is essential for the following reasons:

• They provide unique insights into grassroots politics and both opportunities and problems in local urban development.
• They have the ability to collect information in low-income neighbourhoods and workplaces in a way that brings out different perspectives from those interviewed which is very different to external researchers.
• They result in grassroots knowledge leaders able to use evidence to support the work of residents’ associations, and trade and worker associations, and hence increase the ability of these agencies to address needs and interests.

All three reasons mean that community knowledge has the potential to add to the work of professional and academic colleagues in the ACRC at the project, city and programme scales.

Second, we’re aiming to build strategic capabilities and capacities to reach new knowledge frontiers.

As previously mentioned, we have been investing in a considerable development of strategies linked to our theory of change. The point is not that our ToC is correct, but that it encourages thinking about the best strategies for urban reform. We are actively engaging around what works.

At the same time, our conceptual framework for the research emphasises the importance of thinking and working politically with the need to integrate systems and sectors. We envisage that the relationships within ACRC will be longstanding, leading to a plethora of new and exciting research and action research.

To help provide the foundations for this, we have deliberately sought to strengthen the capabilities of all those involved in our work. Specific attention has been given to African scholars who have, for a long time, been denied access to global knowledge platforms. We invested in a group of ACRC postdoctoral research fellows during the foundation phase. These fellows supported our domain work and also had time to develop and realise their own research projects. The fellows have continued to develop their work following their completion of the fellowships and are still publishing some of their results.

We have an active academic publication and dissemination strategy related to our work in the foundation phase that we are keen to continue with in the implementation phase. This offers small grants for papers that are taken through to journal publications. We also offer visiting writer placements of up to a month that enable aspiring authors to work with mentors and develop their work. And in January 2025, we held our first capability development workshop for academic authors in Kampala, enabling 18 scholars to work with six mentors to advance drafts through a mix of mini-lectures and writing sessions.

Our goal is both to get our findings published, but more substantively to increase the cadre of published authors, with knowledge and information about the opportunities and challenges in African urban development.

Third, we are seeking to build a collectively managed platform to advance more inclusive and prosperous African cities.

Recognising the power imbalances in bilateral funded programmes, we have sought to develop a structure that decentralises decision making from the centre to the city teams. Building on the experience of the foundation phase, we have a structure for the implementation phase that was shared widely in the consortium and then refined.

We have sought to resource city teams with a locally based city manager to develop and realise the city strategy, along with appropriate support from uptake specialists, senior colleagues and researchers, as well as action research project related investments, to advance the reform frontier in that city. Our review process for decisions and action research projects draws on expertise within and beyond the cities, with the city managers playing an active role.

In addition, we convene six-monthly meetings for the city managers, senior management team and operations team to work together to understand each other’s experiences within the consortium, and to plan the way forward. Recognising that the city managers rarely have time to work together (while the two other groups meet regularly), the in-person workshops are designed as a closed space for city managers to come together and consider if they have a collective input that they wish to present to the other two teams prior to the full workshop. There is then space scheduled in the full workshop to hear and respond to such inputs.

Finally…

The African Cities Research Consortium is a bold attempt to change the face of African cities, catalysing a multiplicity of new approaches to urban reform challenges that demonstrate the ways in which cites can be inclusive, prosperous and environmentally sustainable. It is also a modest contribution designed to recognise, and build on, the immense efforts that have been made by diverse groups of committed urban residents, who have sought to create and maintain urban reform trajectories that produce new urban policies, programmes and practices to achieve similar goals.

The design of ACRC respects the historically significant and ongoing efforts that have been made by those groups of committed urban residents. ACRC also recognises the need for local specificity and contextually sensitive interventions across and beyond urban Africa. The significance of local reformers is, in part, to manage the complexities of local and national politics. But it is also to enable local solutions to emerge that are sensitive to local specificities and embedded in local learning processes, and able to analyse, re-strategise, adjust and continue, including nurturing new cadres of reformers.

However, cities and their residents are not isolated entities. We are connected in complex dynamic interactions that cross economic, social and economic domains. The political challenges can be found at the local level, but the drivers of such challenges are, in part, located well beyond city boundaries.

ACRC’s design recognises this. We have sought to nurture peer networks of African urban scholars (including community researchers and professionals). We are seeking to secure a legacy through investing in knowledge creation institutions, including academic departments and learning practices.

But ultimately, success will only be secured when we recognise that achieving prosperity, inclusion, peace and security behind borders is an illusion. There is one world, and we will either thrive and prosper together, or not at all.

Header photo credit: Wirestock / iStock. Aerial shot of colourful buses in Accra, Ghana.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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.