Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai and Sam Hickey gave an overview of our emerging work exploring the politics of informal settlements. Their analysis looks at the linkages between national political settlements and everyday politics experienced by communities. They highlighted the different experiences of informal settlements populated by indigenous communities and more recent squatters, as well as the clear link between rising land values and elite interest in particular settlements. They also propose that the idea of “forbearance”, developed within the Latin American context, may provide a more useful political lens than the traditional idea of clientelism, which tends to be used within the African context.  

Our second session, convened by Daniela Beltrame and Diana Mitlin, looked at community knowledge in academic research: in pursuit of epistemic justice. The importance of community knowledge has been a key facet of our research so far (particularly around informal settlements), and will be led by Beth Chitekwe-Biti as research director during the implementation phase of work.

A wide variety of presenters (from beyond ACRC) highlighted the very real benefits for both themselves as researchers and for individuals working around community knowledge processes – while acknowledging the constant tensions, contradictions and practical issues that had to be navigated along the way. Compensation for community members’ time, institutional barriers and the role of intermediaries within communities were themes throughout.

As Diana Mitlin summarised, recognising the messiness at the interface between community and academic knowledge processes is essential for researchers who reject the premise that knowledge can neatly fit into predefined categories. 

The ACRC experiences around community knowledge were presented by Daniela Beltrame and Smith Ouma. Smith highlighted the fact that for all organised communities, the generation of knowledge is inseparable from action. Compensation, commodification and individualisation of gains were also issues emphasised across the community members who worked as part of the ACRC city research teams. The value of community members’ time, networks and knowledge was reflected in the challenge that “we are not gonna do your donkey work”.

The gatekeeping role of intermediary NGOs, particularly around access and accountability, was another issue to be navigated. Daniela Beltrame, who is currently undertaking her own PhD based on participatory action research, also discussed the positive ways in which research was being seen as a legitimate career option for some community members: “knowledge is a paying business, and it can be a career”.

To keep up to date with all of ACRC’s forthcoming publications, as well as ongoing conversations around community knowledge on our blog and podcast, please sign up for regular e-newsletters.

Photo credits: Chris Jordan. Header photo shows Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai presenting emerging findings around the politics of informal settlements in Accra, Freetown, Kampala and Harare.

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Header photo credit: Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester.

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.

Header photo credit: Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester.

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.

Relationships between local authorities and residents

In addition to the centre–city interface, another set of papers explored the relationship between local authorities and the urban residents they govern. James Mensah (2022) observed that over 80% of Accra’s labour force is employed in the informal sector. However, the government does not give this sector the consideration it deserves. The sector suffers, due to the competition and struggle between the many factions competing for power over the city. Added to this is the contention ensuing from the jurisdictional overlap between the central and local authorities. The sector is also impaired by the way in which municipal regulations are formulated and enforced. Michael Roll (2022) notes that the urban changes implemented in Lagos from 1999 to 2015 were ineffective. He backs this assertion with evidence, by pointing to how the design, planning and implementation of the city’s regulatory framework marginalises the poor.

The last set of papers presented at the ACRC-convened sessions dealt with reform coalitions and how they insert themselves into governance spaces. Alice Sverdlik (2022) shows that urban coalitions played a vital role in the response to Covid-19. She points out that many groups, such as NGOs and business establishments, have allied with the government to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, Badru Bukenya (2022) questions propositions that relate modest Covid-19 impacts to government responses. He highlights that examination of events in Uganda reveals that the government’s pandemic response was ad hoc. He also highlights that the response was instrumentalised as a political tool to weaken the opposition further, with past and current military personnel participating in the exercises in a manner that stifled what little air existed for political opposition in Uganda.

Finally, Hita Unnikrishnan and Vanesa Castán Broto (2022) provided crucial insights into the landscape of co-production in the continent, in a paper investigating the future of urban energy in Africa. The research illustrates how diverse power arrangements, operating across several levels of interaction, impact the implementation of co-production with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Cities under strain

Overall, the papers in the ACRC-led sessions highlight the significant strain that African cities are under. Many of these difficulties are deeply rooted in political economy and governance issues at different levels. Typically, city governments lack the budgetary, political and bureaucratic capacity to manage complex problems because they are placed within multi-levelled systems of governance that are often dysfunctional and do not provide them with resources and authority to address their needs. The discussions concluded that African cities need social, economic and administrative transformation to meet the present and future challenges.

Further reading

All papers listed were presented at the DSA Online Conference, “Just Sustainable Futures in an Urbanising and Mobile World”, UCL, London, 6-8 July 2022.

• Abdulai, A-G (2022). “The politics of development in Accra”. Paper presented at P11a panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Bukenya, B (2022). “The politics in the ‘Covid policy domainʼ in Uganda”. Paper presented at P11b panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Hickey, S, Kelsall, T, Mitlin, D and Schindler, S (2022). “Reframing the politics of urban development in Africa: A political settlements perspective”. Paper presented at P11a panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Hitchen, J (2022). “Unpacking the politics of development in Freetown”. Paper presented at P11a panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Machuki, G and Kanyinga, K (2022). “The politics of development in Nairobi City County”. Paper presented at P11a panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Mensah, J (2022). “Institutional and governance of informal markets in Ghana: A political settlement perspective”. Paper presented at P11b panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Mitlin, D (2022). “The contribution of reform coalitions to pro-poor change: Lessons from practice”. Paper presented at P11c panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Roll, M (2022). “Urban reform for or against the people? Reconsidering the case of Lagos and lessons for urban political economy analysis”. Paper presented at P11b panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Sverdlik, A (2022). “Understanding the political settlements and collaborative responses to Covid-19 in African cities”. Paper presented at P11b panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.
• Unnikrishnan, H and Castán Broto, V (2022). “Challenges to co-production in post-colonial cities: A review of the landscape of co-production with focus on urban energy”. Paper presented at P11c panel on “Political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action”.

Header photo credit: peeterv / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). Balogun Ajeniya Market in Lagos, Nigeria.

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The African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) is convening a panel at the upcoming Development Studies Association (DSA) Conference on Wednesday 6 July: The political economy of urban reform in Africa: From analysis to action. It will showcase new work that uses a political economy perspective to understand the challenges facing African cities and the interventions and reforms that can address them.

Convened by Sam Hickey, Diana Mitlin, Tim Kelsall and Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, the panel will comprise three sessions, focusing on political settlements analysis, dealing with Covid-19, and the role of reform coalitions in promoting more just and sustainable urban futures.

Save the date: Wednesday 6 July, 11:50-14:30 BST

1. Political settlements analysis

This session will focus on the use of political settlements analysis to advance understanding of the challenges facing African cities, featuring a conceptual paper and several city case studies. Expert chairs will facilitate an active discussion around key themes.

Reframing the politics of urban development in Africa: A political settlements perspective

Sam Hickey, Tim Kelsall, Diana Mitlin and Seth Schindler

Seeks to reframe the politics of urban development in Africa through applying a political settlements perspective.

Related reading:

• ACRC Working Paper 1 – Politics, systems and domains: A conceptual framework for the African Cities Research Consortium
• Forthcoming open access book – Political Settlements and Development: Theory, Evidence, Implications

The politics of development in Accra

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai

Explores the influence of Ghana’s political settlement dynamics on the governance and development trajectories of Accra.

Unpacking the politics of development in Freetown

Jamie Hitchen

Aims to better understand how “competing” centres of power in Freetown shape development trajectories, who is driving and funding them, and how they are shaped by, and shape, political dynamics.

The politics of development in Nairobi City County

Michuki George and Karuti Kanyinga 

Draws from a historical perspective, to shed light on the nature of Kenya’s political settlement and how this has impacted the political economy of Nairobi City.

Urban reform for or against the people? Reconsidering the case of Lagos and lessons for urban political economy analysis

Michael Roll

Reconsiders Lagos’ urban reforms between 1999 and 2015. Widely regarded as successful, a different picture emerges when assessed from the perspective of slum residents, two-thirds of Lagosians. A political economy analysis is used to explain this outcome and explore alternatives.

Institutional governance of informal markets in Ghana: A political settlements perspective

James Mensah

In Ghana, local governments are legally sanctioned to have control over their jurisdictions. However, in the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, informal actors appear to have more control over Accra’s informal traders than the officially sanctioned institutions, due to the power struggle in the jurisdiction.

2. The politics of Covid-19

A session examining urban management and governance under the stress of the pandemic. It will draw both on “top down” interventions and the remaking of bottom-up coalitions pressing for reform in Kampala, Lilongwe, Mogadishu and Nairobi.

Political settlements and collaborative responses to Covid-19 in African Cities

Alice Sverdlik and Tim Kelsall

A comparative analysis of the impact of political settlements and collaborative responses to Covid-19 in Kampala, Mogadishu and Nairobi.

Related reading:

• ACRC working paper 4 – Understanding the politics of Covid-19 in Kampala, Nairobi and Mogadishu: A political settlements approach
• ACRC working paper 5 – Towards a comparative understanding of community-led and collaborative responses to Covid-19 in Kampala, Mogadishu and Nairobi

Politics in the “Covid policy domain” in Uganda

Badru Bukenya

An investigation of the politics of Uganda’s Covid-19 response, exploring the major players, their motivations, and the implications of their (in)actions on the response.

3. Reform coalitions

A roundtable session featuring a panel of both academic and policy experts, including from the global South, to discuss the papers and their implications for a new generation of reforms in African cities. Chaired by Jo Beall, the discussants for Diana’s paper will be Beth Chitekwe-Biti and Caroline Skinner, and for Hita and Vanesa’s paper will be Lorraine Howe and Getachew Bekele.

The contribution of reform coalitions to pro-poor change: Lessons from practice

Diana Mitlin

Explores and analyses the role that reform coalitions can play in navigating the politics of African cities in pursuit of more just and sustainable solutions. Discusses the ways in which transformative change can be secured to address inequalities and create opportunities for low-income and marginalised groups.

Related reading:

• Diana Mitlin for The Conversation Africa – Citizen-government coalitions could hold the key to the reform of African cities

Challenges to co-production in post-colonial cities: A review of the landscape of co-production with focus on urban energy

Hita Unnikrishnan and Vanesa Castán Broto

Reviews over 150 published articles on co-production, to demonstrate subtle differences in the landscape of co-production across different sectors such as green and blue commons, transport, housing, and energy. 

In addition to the ACRC panel, two of our postdocs, Elizabeth Dessie and Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael, are presenting papers at conference sessions on Friday 8 July.

Being young and rural in the city: A longitudinal study of gendered livelihoods in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Elizabeth Dessie

A postdoctoral research proposal that draws on intersectionality to examine the livelihood strategies of migrant youth in post-pandemic Addis Ababa, in a post-conflict national setting. An intersectional perspective can generate new knowledge on subjective experiences of urban space. The paper emphasises the importance of such knowledge in integrating the voices of vulnerable youth into development interventions.

Workshop: Intersectional approaches to adolescent voice and agency: Gender and participation in the context of multiple crises | 11:50-12:30 BST

Elizabeth is part of ACRC’s youth and capability development domain team.

Strategic response to clientelism: Seeking formal housing through partisanship by quite encroachers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael 

An exploration of how Addis Ababa informal settlement residents, threatened with eviction for state-led redevelopment, sought formalisation through partisanship, working with the ruling party to gain favours in the allocation of replacement formal housing. The paper examines how, rather than resist displacement, they actively manoeuvred clientelist relations to defend and expand their informally secured gains.

Panel: The role of formal and informal political networks in the context of Development-Induced Displacement in urban areas and its impact on sustainable futures | 11:00-11:40 BST

Read more by Ezana in his article for The Conversation Africa about Addis Ababa’s urban development challenges, and in his write-up of ACRC’s session at the 2021 DSA Conference.

Header photo credit: peeterv / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). Overlooking an informal settlement in Lagos, Nigeria.

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.

Header photo credit: Kwame Kwegyir-Addo / Getty Images. Aerial view of the Tetteh Quarshie to Aburi road in Accra, Ghana.

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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.

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.

Catch up on our webinar introducing the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) and outlining how the Consortium and its international partners are planning to tackle complex, political and systemic problems in some of Africa’s fastest-growing urban areas.

ACRC has been awarded a contract of £32 million from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) over the next 6 years. Building on the political settlements analysis established by the Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre, ACRC will adopt a city as systems approach to addressing complex urban problems. Through engaged action research we aim to catalyse progress for disadvantaged communities in a number of focus cities and beyond.

Speakers

• Professor Diana Mitlin, The University of Manchester
• Professor Sam Hickey, The University of Manchester
• Dr Martin Atela, Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, Nairobi
• Chaired by Dr Admos Chimhowu

Find out more

• The African Cities Research Consortium
• The Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
• Follow the African Cities Research Consortium on Twitter
• Sign up to the African Cities Research Consortium newsletter

This post originally appeared on the Global Development Institute Blog.

Note: This article presents the views of the author 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.