Governing Beyond Cities: The Urban-Rural Interface

Abstract

If 70 % of the global population will reside in metropolitan regions by 2050, this poses new governance challenges related to urban-rural interfaces and linkages. It calls for governance that stretches across scales and beyond urban boundaries, taking into account both problems and opportunities of urbanization. This chapter reviews the literature on urban-rural interfaces and linkages and discusses suggestions for dealing with them. It also addresses three governance problems that hinder a more integrated approach towards the urban-rural interface, specifi cally fragmentation, institutional inertia, and the inability to realize inclusive development. Based on potential governance approaches to address these three problems, we present six institutional design dimensions for a more inclusive governance approach for urban-rural regions. Bridging organizations, nested issuebased platforms, and combining governance with strong government are identifi ed as pathways towards inclusive urban-rural governance.

From Synergy to Complexity: The Trend Toward Integrated Value Chain and Landscape Governance

“…Such actors function as bridging organizations and can be a research organization, NGO, “ecomuseum” (Hahn et al 2006) or an agro-ecological partnership (Prager 2015). They mobilize actors, funds, and political support; broker information and different knowledges; build trust and social capital; mediate conflicts; network and communicate across scales; facilitate linkages between different actors; and create platforms for collective learning (Folke et al 2005; Cash et al 2006; Hahn et al 2006; Berkes 2009; Leys and Vanclay 2011; Rathwell and Peterson 2012; Crona and Parker 2012; Ros-Tonen et al 2014; Ros-Tonen et al 2015b; Prager 2015). Examples from the papers in this issue include the Stockholm Water Institute that mobilized stakeholders for integrated forest and water management (Eriksson et al 2018); the State-led Yong’an Volunteer Association for Promoting Ecological Civilization that mobilized funds and actors to implement a forest landscape restoration program in a municipality in China (Long et al 2018); the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which mobilized actors and funds to implement REDD+ in Cameroon (Brown 2018); and the NGOs (Tropenbos International and EcoAgriculture Partners) that piloted the platform methodology in Ghana and Indonesia (Kusters et al 2018).…”

Urban Transformations and Land Governance in Peri‐Urban Khartoum: The Case of Soba

“…In studying the possibilities and challenges towards this inclusive urban transition, one of the core frontiers is at the urban fringes where contestation over space (at the root of many urban inequalities) and the struggle for gaining access to adequate housing and sustainable human settlement is very visible. Peri‐urban areas are commonly defined as transitional zones between rural and urban areas, characterised by a high heterogeneity of land uses, mixed livelihoods, population densities and pressures on land resources (Simon et al ; Simon ; Trefon ; Rauws & de Roo ; Ros‐Tonen et al ). For a long time, these peri‐urban fringes have been considered as zones of survival where people of the rural hinterlands come to settle in the hope of finding better livelihoods in the city while maintaining strong linkages with their rural livelihoods (Briggs & Mwamfupe ).…”

“…In a peri‐urban context, we can see that different governance structures overlap and that urban expansion is often very chaotic, because powerful plans to restructure these transition zones are often lacking (Balestri ). Due to institutional fragmentation, legal pluralism and overlapping jurisdictions (Evers & de Vries ; Ros‐Tonen et al ), hybrid approaches arise to deal with the different socio‐economic developments and the heterogeneity of land dynamics in these territories. As argued by Ros‐Tonen et al (, p. 87), this complex and hybrid institutional structure calls for governance approaches that stretch ‘across scales and beyond urban boundaries’, which have a flexible and adaptive character, and which emphasise the need for not working with exclusively rural or exclusively urban policies.…”

“…Due to institutional fragmentation, legal pluralism and overlapping jurisdictions (Evers & de Vries ; Ros‐Tonen et al ), hybrid approaches arise to deal with the different socio‐economic developments and the heterogeneity of land dynamics in these territories. As argued by Ros‐Tonen et al (, p. 87), this complex and hybrid institutional structure calls for governance approaches that stretch ‘across scales and beyond urban boundaries’, which have a flexible and adaptive character, and which emphasise the need for not working with exclusively rural or exclusively urban policies. Instead, they argue that an integrated urban‐rural governance structure is needed – one that works across governmental institutions (e.g.…”

Multi-temporal transect analysis of peri-urban developments in Faridabad, India

“…They are hybrid and multifunctional spaces, which pose great challenges for governance as they often collide with non-matching administrative boundaries, widespread institutional multiplicity, and fragmentation, as well as legal pluralism (Allen, 2014;Ros-Tonen, Pouw, & Bavinck, 2015). A critical analysis of peri-urban dynamics is, therefore, in great need of 'contextual spatial knowledge' (Pfeffer, Martinez, O'Sullivan, & Scott, 2015).…”