Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on research conducted in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to foreground the dominant role played by national government actors and agencies in channelling and territorializing urban development finance in ways that limit the fiscal autonomy of municipal governments.

Paper long abstract:

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the range of different transnational actors and corporations involved in the design, financing and construction of large scale urban real estate and property development in ways that bypass existing cities and urban governance systems in Africa. This paper instead engages with the (literature critical of the) ways in which global actors seek to contribute to the development of existing cities by funding infrastructure development and regulatory reform in order to improve urban service delivery and facilitate local access to new financial tools and global capital. The paper draws on research conducted on the World Bank funded Dar es Salaam Metropolitan Development Project (DMDP, implemented between 2015-2022), as part of a multi-year comparative project on the transcalar politics of large-scale urban development in urban Africa, to interrogate the ways in which the roll out of the World Bank’s growing urban development portfolio in Tanzania is shaped by local political actors and interests. Specifically, the paper foregrounds the dominant role played by national government actors and agencies in channelling and territorializing urban development finance in ways that limit the fiscal autonomy of municipal governments and thereby the pace and form of local government financialization and the type of infrastructural investments and governance that global development finance may produce in urban Africa.