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Paper short abstract:

What forms of politics shape (in)justice in Africa’s informal settlements? Comparative insights from four cities reveals how national political settlement dynamics permeate and shape the everyday politics of informal settlements and prospects for development therein.

Paper long abstract:

Within the growing literature on the politics of Africa’s cities, there is relatively little work that tracks how political factors operate across multiple scales to shape the possibilities for social justice. We investigate how politics shapes the everyday realities of survival and contestation within informal settlements in four African cities, with a focus on market operations, land disputes, responses to disasters and social service deficits. We find that the capacity and commitment of local actors to navigate development challenges within informal settlements is profoundly influenced by national level politics and how this interacts with city-level politics and governance. In particular, the specific configurations of power within each national political settlement – dispersed amongst competing factions in Ghana and Sierra Leone and more concentrated around semi-authoritarian leaderships in Uganda and Zimbabwe – directly shapes the local politics of development in informal settlements. The national political settlement disincentivises the provision of public goods in all four cities, as opposed to the politicised distribution of private and club goods; but this is significantly worse in contexts such as Freetown where the ruling party blocks urban development to avoid the opposition party gaining credit. In contrast, the ruling parties in Uganda and Zimbabwe seek to circumvent opposition-led city authorities, reaching urban residents directly through longstanding political structures that penetrate and define local politics and help ensure political dominance nationally. The role of ethnicity in political mobilisation also differs significantly between contexts. We explore the implications for theorising and promoting a politics of justice in Africa’s cities.