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- Convenors:
-
Marianne Millstein
(Oslo Metropolitan University)
Amanda Hammar (Copenhagen University)
Eric Hahonou (Roskilde University)
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- Location:
- C5.07
- Start time:
- 28 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Many studies refer to 'governance' when they explore urban dynamics in African cities, but these processes are often insufficiently theorised. The panel welcomes papers on everyday practices of urban governing to deepen our understanding of what constitutes urban governance in African contexts.
Long Abstract:
Cities and towns in Africa, as elsewhere, are often intensely concentrated spaces of control and contestation, delivery and decline, with respect to public infrastructure and services that directly - and differentially - affect private lives. Interweaving political and economic dynamics and actors in given times and places critically shape the ways in which such urban services, structures, spaces and resources are handled, accessed, policed, negotiated or transformed.
An increasing number of case studies from African cities refer to 'urban governance' when they explore these complex dynamics. Still, urban governance processes are poorly understood in African contexts where state capacities are limited, alternative authorities and service providers are surfacing, and citizens' positions and access to resources rely on more or less informal relations and processes. Put differently, the "everyday" practices of urban governing and how these shape citizens' access to services and their broader political and economic realities, should be further explored as part of our endeavour to make sense of urban governance processes and practices in African cities.
This panel welcomes papers based on empirically-grounded research on such everyday practices and their implications, to deepen our understanding and theorising of what actually constitutes 'urban governance' in African contexts. The papers are intended to help challenge and nuance the use of this conceptual frame to capture the dynamics of citizens' everyday experiences with public service delivery on the one hand, and of the various authorities, providers and gate-keepers engaged with service delivery on the other.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Adrienne LeBas (American University) Nic Cheeseman (University of Birmingham)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on novel public opinion data to examine how improvements in services delivery have affected Lagosians' attitudes toward government and their willingness to pay tax.
Paper long abstract:
Significant changes in taxation and services delivery have occurred in some Nigerian cities over the past ten years. The most visible reforms have been undertaken by charismatic governors in Lagos and Cross Rivers states: in both states, there have been dramatic increases in tax revenue collected, in the visible delivery of basic services (roads, clinics, etc.), and in public support for taxation. In Lagos State, these reforms were partly fueled by the need to raise revenue. Federal transfers were suspended in 2003 after the sitting governor refused to rescind his establishment of new local government areas. The state government responded by stating that it would find a way of funding itself via tax revenues, and, surprisingly, state government investments in tax collection paid off handsomely with more than a ten-fold increase in tax revenue by 2007. In Lagos State, the initial improvements in revenue collection have coincided with visible expansion of social services, even in slums and marginal areas. Public attitudes toward the government and toward taxation have also altered. Lagosians express higher degrees of government approval and greater support for tax payment than other Nigerians. This paper draws on novel public opinion data collected in Lagos slums, as well as a more representative state sample, to examine how differences across localities shape ordinary Lagosians' attitudes toward the state. This ties to the panel's main concern in urban governance by suggesting that popular responses to policy interventions are mediated by differences in local governance and the characteristics of local communities.
Emma Lochery (University of Liège)
Paper short abstract:
The fragmented electricity market in Hargeisa, Somaliland is dominated by private operators and rooted in dynamics of post-war reconstruction. The nature of competition and government efforts to regulate the sector highlight the ways in which the limits of the Somaliland state are being defined.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the electricity sector in Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared state of Somaliland. The price of electricity today in Somaliland is $1 per kilowatt-hour, one of the highest in the world. After the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, people returning to the ruined city of Hargeisa worked to rebuild their lives and over time, urban infrastructure. Individuals bought generators to supply electricity for their own businesses; soon many began providing power to their neighbourhoods. The most successful grew into private power companies, about 8 of which currently service this urban market.
This paper examines the governance of the sector, focusing on relations amongst private companies and between companies and the Somaliland government. It traces how the battle over electricity provision has happened at a neighbourhood level, and how companies have worked to solve their conflicts over territory and issues of customer choice using both an industry association and more 'traditional' forms of mediation. It looks at the state's role in the sector, both in terms of the heavily indebted government company set up in 2001 as well as current efforts to pass an Electricity Act to govern the sector.
This story of regeneration, fragmentation and ongoing efforts to regulate the sector by both private companies and government highlights the processes of conflict and negotiation which are shaping the limits of the state in Somaliland and more specifically, drawing the lines between private and public roles in service provision in the urban arena.
Mariana Matoso (University of Nottingham)
Paper short abstract:
Empirically-grounded research paper focusing on the role SSIPs had in shaping Maputo’s current peri-urban water governance model; and on how the inherently political and economic consequences of the water access modalities it produced affect the citizens/consumers of the capital’s poorest areas.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on a contemporary issue affecting Maputo which relates to the proliferation of informal water businesses, the process of their inclusion into the legal framework of the water sector and how these have transformed the political landscape of access to water. As a common trait of other African peri-urban areas, the emergence of small-scale informal providers (SSIPs) here derived from the need to compensate for a void left by the state in infrastructure and basic service provision. Evidence from a review of the past ten years shows that the prevalence of such agents completely altered the flows of power within the urban water governance model, proving to be a key component of the sector's reform initiated in 2007. Since then the government has attempted to create opportunities to engage and include the SSIPS in the official frame through the provision of licenses and partnerships. Public recognition of their social value allowed SSIPs to accumulate some a certain degree of interventional power (capitalised by the concerted action of two SSIPs Associations). The paper thus reviews the governance model's evolution and the role of the stakeholders involved. It also analyses in which ways the political, social and economic dynamics of this institutional framework might have affected citizens' (or consumers?) everyday experiences with the provision of water as a 'public' service. The research is based in two fieldwork trips, semi-structured interviews, published and unpublished reports from several organisations, local conferences and governmental workshops.
Fassil Demissie (DePaul University)
Paper short abstract:
Since the beginning of the 1990s, large-scale urban renewal programme has been undertaken by the municipality of Addis Ababa to demolish areas of the city considered slums, resulting in a new redefinition of urban land and housing markets in the city.
Paper long abstract:
The article examines the expansion of the major urban renewal projects by the municipality of Addis Ababa to demolish slums in the inner city. Three principal arguments are advanced by the article. First, the urban renewal program carried out by the municipality is part of a major effort to remake the city as the "diplomatic capital of Africa". The underlying legal and institutional mechanism adopted by the municipality to impose a neoliberal governance structure was to extend market forces whereby the local government assumes an entrepreneurial role in partnership with private actors. Second, the large-scale urban renewal initiatives were directed to open up part of the city for highly profitable investments by a host of national and transnational actors to recapture the devalorization of older fixed capital to build office towers, leisure hotels, condominium development as well as shopping complexes. These urban policy strategies were designed to mobilize the urban space as an arena for market-oriented urban economic growth and as spaces for elite consumption practices. Finally, the paper will assess these developments and how the municipal authorities have negotiated with different stakeholders as well as how the inhabitants of the demolished areas have responded to the ongoing processes of urban transformation.
Pétur Waldorff (Nordic Africa Institute/University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnographic case, this paper describes power dynamics between community based organizations and informal governing institutions, who are locked in a struggle over services and resources and the economic and political power they yield at the peri-urban neighbourhood level in Luanda, Angola.
Paper long abstract:
Luanda, Angola's capital is largely made up of areas and neighbourhoods categorized as informal or peri-urban and are severely lacking in public infrastructure and services. In some of these peri-urban neighbourhoods of the city, community based organizations (CBOs) are working towards improving basic infrastructure and services such as water and electricity. However, during my 2009-2010 ethnographic fieldwork, I witnessed how these organizations were locked in power struggles with other institutions claiming to have the sole right to develop these peri-urban neighbourhoods.
This paper describes how institutions such as residence committees, which are not necessarily part of the state apparatus in Angola, take on the role and authority of "the state" to govern in peri-urban Luanda. The paper provides an ethnographic case of local level power struggles in a peri-urban neighbourhood in Luanda and the implications of such struggles. It describes a clash between community based organizations and other older informal as well as formal institutions of urban governance. In essence it describes a contest for power at the neighbourhood level as well as a struggle for control over the services and resources in the peri-urban neighbourhoods of Luanda and the economic and political power they yield.
Antonio Pezzano (University of Naples "L'Orientale")
Paper short abstract:
The process of informal trading policy in the Inner City of Johannesburg is crucial example to better understand the complex dynamics of governing spaces, people and activities in an aspiring “world-class” city and to explore different analytical approach in terms of urban “governance” and politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the relationships between municipal authorities, informal traders and other stakeholders in the process of informal trading policy in the Inner City of Johannesburg.
In a neo-liberal framework, municipal authorities considered informal activities as a temporary phenomenon to be phased out with a "sustainable economic growth" fostered by "a stable and predictable regulatory and management environment". But informal traders agency was resilient. In the last few years, the City moved to more "integrated" discourses showing evident contradictions between normative and empirical models of governance. In the production of public policy, a plurality of state and social actors interact at different stages. The municipal agencies and corporatised entities formulate strategies and drive the agenda of the inner-city renovation in concert with private interests, while the bureaucratic apparatus of municipal officers and most of the political councilors simply react to the social issues without a comprehensive strategy. The lack of dialogue and coordination between the metropolitan authorities causes an asymmetric system of governance. On the one side, new empirical models of management driven by "non-state" actors - the CIDs linear markets - integrate restricted numbers of informal traders in a closed, not participated system; on the other side, a chaotic mismanagement leave the majority of informal traders in unmanaged and unregulated congested areas in the CBD where they are excluded from a full access to socio-economic citizenship. This situation is not conducive to coalition formation of informal traders who struggle to achieve unity, to demand their rights and to protect their activities.
Hannah Elliott (Copenhagen Business School)
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes camel milk markets in Eastleigh, a Nairobi enclave with a large and diverse Somali population, as a case study through which to explore urban governance and Somali women’s social, economic and political integration.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores modes of urban governance in Eastleigh, a Nairobi enclave with a large and diverse Somali population and dynamic market economy. As an outcome of Eastleigh's discordant relationship with the Kenyan state, the estate's dynamic economy and markets are fertile ground for the production of alternative institutions which govern and regulate market activities and engagements. I take the informal market in camel milk as a window through which to observe the formation and workings of such alternative institutions. I explore how the milk market functions as a resource for Somali women's social, economic and political integration in a context of displacement. Trading camel milk enables Kenyan Somali women to cash in on and maintain their ties to the pastoral economy, and newly-arrived refugee women to carve out livelihoods, gain some economic independence and be part of a community of traders. At the same time, an order of things is maintained through the milk market that privileges Kenyan Somali women as decision-makers and determiners of who is and is not allowed access to the informal market and the nature of the engagements occurring within it. While national identities and citizenships can appear insignificant in the Eastleigh context, then, they may not be entirely redundant; gender, religious and ethnic identities are crucial bases for accessing the resources that are available through the camel milk market, but national identities and citizenships continue to serve a purpose.
Natalie Moss (Durham University )
Paper short abstract:
As with all Local Authorities in Kenya, Nakuru Municipal Council has since independence, been systematically disempowered by central government. This paper examines the strategies the council has pursued for economic and political survival in the absence of official responsibilities.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary studies of urban governance in Africa often explore the emergence of alternative actors and service provides in cities across the continent. Notwithstanding the value of such contributions, they tend to neglect conventional authorities and their shifting roles and relationships with urban dwellers. Specifically, the position of local government in Africa remains under-theorised and poorly examined. This paper attempts to redress this by considering the experience of Nakuru, Kenya's fourth largest town, and the activities of its Municipal Council since 1963.
Empowered by the departing colonial government, Local Authorities in Kenya had, by 1970, lost responsibility for all major services. In the absence of duties - and attendant funding - councillors and staff have had to carve out alternative ways to provide meaning and reward to local office. This paper describes, historically, Nakuru Municipal Council's attempts at establishing itself as the primary gatekeeper to the local economy. Through decisions over licensing, taxation, levies and rates, the Council has controlled access to the town's market economy. This has simultaneously imbued the Council with authority and satisfied the rent-seeking prerogative of politics in Kenya. But as general service provision in the town declined in the 1970s and 1980s, how and to what extent was the Council able to retain any legitimacy for those who lived and worked there?
JoAnn McGregor (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the politics and practices of urban governance under Zimbabwe’s power sharing arrangement, analysing the nature and effects of irregular surveillance on the everyday experiences of MDC-T urban councillors and activists in contested city spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the politics and practices of urban governance that have emerged in the course of Zimbabwe's power sharing arrangement. It examines ZanuPF's strategy for retaining authority in the cities despite losing urban democratic space to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parties, and explores the reconstitution of ZanuPF urban powers. These powers hinge partly on the law and ZanuPF's on-going control of the Ministry of Local Government: legal-structural changes dramatically recentralized control over local authorities, allowing the Minister to use the courts to harass and suspend MDC councillors. But ZanuPF authority also depends on an irregular politics of patronage involving a range of measures of enticement and coercion - fostering corruption, deploying proxy urban militia, developing parallel structures of authority and taxation. The paper argues that the power-sharing arrangement has allowed a façade of MDC-T control of local level urban democratic bodies, while the realities of reconstituted ZanuPF power work to undermine them. It aims to theorize the nature and effects of irregular surveillance, as it shapes calculations of risk and self-censorship, with a particular focus on the everyday experiences of MDC-T urban councillors and activists in contested city spaces controlled by ZanuPF militia.
Molly Sundberg (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
In the highly governmentalised country of Rwanda, one of the recent governance innovations is called 'imihigo' contracts which every citizen is supposed to sign to contribute to national development. Imihigo hence plays a central role in shaping the meaning of the state and citizenship in Rwanda
Paper long abstract:
Rwanda is often described as a highly 'governmentalised' country where social control is often as tight in the capital of Kigali as it is in rural areas. One of Rwanda's recent governance innovations is called imihigo, or 'results-based performance contracts'. The imihigo structure serves as the public sector's main system for planning, implementation and follow-up of government interventions and was introduced as a key element in the decentralisation reform of the state apparatus.
Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research of the everyday life and operations in one of Kigali's residential areas, this paper addresses the central role of imihigo contracts in shaping the meaning of the state, the nation and the implications of citizenship in the day to day interactions between the state and its subjects in Rwanda. The imihigo structure serves to institutionalise and formalise many existing forms of civic duties which have been formulated by the central government and which have trickled down to the local levels in the name of 'grass-root' participation. Based on centrally formulated imihigo, local committees and individual positions of responsibility are regularly established whereby residents are charged with providing services that would otherwise be carried out by salaried public servants. Hence imihigo contracts serve as a form of co-option of citizens into the state apparatus, which has come to blur the boundaries between the state administration and the citizenry. However, state penetration much depends on each person's socio-economic and cultural capital, as well as his/her ties to the ruling political party and local government officials.
Marianne Millstein (Oslo Metropolitan University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses dynamics between relocation and government’s use of temporary relocation areas in response to housing emergencies, and community politics in Cape Town. Exploration of this politics of relocation can provide nuanced understandings of everyday experiences of urban governance
Paper long abstract:
Since 2004 the City of Cape Town has built temporary relocation areas (TRAs) in response to housing emergencies. TRAs are part of governing strategies to regulate and formalise housing development, but are also spaces of conflicts and contestation. Relocation to TRAs affects residents' movements and place in the city. It can disrupt and/or reconstruct social and political networks. Relocation has happened in cooperation with citizens, but it has also led to tensions and conflicts: between affected communities and state actors, between groups of residents within affected communities, and with residents and/or organisations in the communities where TRAs are located. As a governing strategy for urban development, relocations and the TRAs are thus deeply entangled with community politics. Exploring these processes and practices at community and city level can inform new understandings of everyday politics of urban governance in the city.
This paper discusses this politics of relocation and TRAs. One aim is to explore citizens' voice and concrete experiences in being 'governed' through the relocation process itself. This includes a focus on prospects and practices of getting access to permanent housing and/or other state-provided services. Housing is scarce and not all TRA residents are eligible for housing. Some residents thus risk being trapped in a 'permanent' temporary situation. The paper will also discuss community organising and politics within and beyond TRAs. Here I will explore the relations between TRAs and community actors in the 'host' community and how social and political networks are disrupted, continued or constructed.