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Increasingly Geographical Information System (GIS) has been seen as an important infrastructure component for revenue enhancement and urban development management as used for property identification, verification, taxation and spatial development governance. The paper is an attempt to learn from the experiences of developing GIS in Tanzania, which has also taken place in many other Sub-Saharan countries, for the purpose of boosting revenue collection and enhance land governance functions. The paper was developed through the review of the policy and program evaluation documents, discussions in the respective cities, authors' support to established alternative GIS architecture in some cities and evaluations of the same at later stages. Some of the major findings from the study were that although a lot of donor and government resources had been invested in the hardware and short terms training as well as consultants on GIS, there were no comprehensive programmes that ensured coherent capacities and targets on the GIS development. As a result, the GIS has never been fully institutionalized in the business processes of the municipal authorities. Relevantly, system architectures were non-conformable with the legal mandates of some crucial spatial data custodians in cities. Failure to spread GIS and to have proper system architecture is also attributed by a single focus nature of the systems developed, either property tax or revenue or land use planning while ignoring other needs and stakeholders who would contribute in sustaining the systems.

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Towards the turn of the century, Tanzania, like many countries in Africa adopted urban planning approaches that targeted a wider stakeholders' engagement through the use of communicative platforms and inclusive structures for decision making in the planning processes. These approaches are being practised in large and small urban centres, although most of piloting for the efficacy of such approaches was done in large urban centres. However, after over twenty years of these practices, the achievements have been less than optimal with many plans not being implemented. The proliferation of informality and poorly managed small urban centres continue to emerge and grow unabated. This paper examines the planning process in three small urban centres to uncover the level of conformity between applications of the participatory and commutative approaches, and the interests and actions of stakeholders in the planning process. It comes out that although normatively the procedures and institutional structure have adopted the requirements of participatory and communicative planning, the practice has managed to resist the openness and comprehensive inclusions of all stakes in the process. As a result, there is continued discord between the envisaged nature and content of the plans and the motives and demands of those with a stake in the small towns' development endeavours, which contribute to the unwillingness of the developers to heed to the proposals of the plans. It is important therefore not to concentrate on the procedural requirements in the planning process but to improve inclusion of stakes and to focus on honest mediation of self-interests in the planning processes.