Urban Governance and Service Delivery in African Cities: The Role of Politics and Policies

Resnick, Danielle

doi:10.1111/dpr.12066

Cited by 97 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Even under conditions of devolution conflicts are possible. For instance, where a central government is controlled by the ruling political party while mayors of cities belong to opposition parties, a situation called “vertically divided authority” in the literature (Resnick ,b) can arise. In such cases, disagreement between opposition city mayors and national presidents can lead to situations where either the mayors or the presidents seek to undermine the other for political advantage (Resnick ,b).…”

Section: Reframing Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second has been the shift in the influence of mainstream neoclassical economics with its emphasis on rational, utility‐maximising individuals (the economics of choice) to mainline or new institutional economics (economics of exchange) with its emphasis on institutions and how they (need to) support or look up to the market (Boettke, Fink, and Smith ). The third significant shift has been the greater acceptance, indeed promotion, of cities as a springboard for social change and development (Resnick ), a shift that Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser calls The Triumph of the City (Glaeser ). All these shifts are different in their details, of course, but they share one thing in common: the emphasis on governance as instrumental in the pursuit of growth, poverty reduction, and inclusive development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The World Bank, for example, invested nearly $11 billion between 1990 and 2006 (Resnick :s12), while in 2008, the Cities Alliance reported that its contribution to the promotion of urban governance was more than $113 million (Obeng‐Odoom :18). Other donors and international agencies have also been supporting urban governance: UN‐HABITAT is the obvious example but there are others that are not so obvious, the French Development Agency, for example (Resnick ). To what extent urban governance is a successful development paradigm is unclear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These binaries have created much analytical fog which has (mis)led researchers to equate governance with the “state” or “government” performance (Holt and Manning ), leaving out a broad sweep of actors and processes in urban governance. Recent effort in Development Policy Review significantly advances the debate by drawing in the role and experiences of opposition political parties or highlighting 1) the tensions between mayors and national presidents in political regimes in which mayors of cities belong to opposition political parties and 2) showing how donors, in turn, navigate these tensions (see Resnick for an overview). Yet, the tendency is still to equate urban governance with decentralisation and to focus on service delivery without engaging the bigger outcomes of growth, poverty reduction, and inclusive development and how diverse arrangements of institutions at different and differentiated scales combine to mould and be moulded by outcomes over time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban Governance in Africa Today: Reframing, Experiences, and Lessons

Obeng‐Odoom¹

2016

Growth and Change

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Progress in analysing the instrumental view of governance as an engine for growth, poverty reduction, and inclusive development has been held back by the difficulty in framing governance. This essay seeks to address this problem by 1) reframing urban governance 2) evaluating its aims, processes, and outcomes, and 3) explaining those outcomes on the basis of which some lessons are teased out. Using examples from Africa and an institutional political economy approach (based on institutional economics, Marxist political economics, Georgist political economics, and Polanyian political economy), I show that, overall, while urban economies are growing; both urban poverty and inequality levels have risen substantially. Urban governance has paved the way for new forms of urban development that only benefit the few. Not only are there differences in how urban services and resources are experienced, accessed, and controlled but the varieties are also socially differentiated. I argue that the underlying reasons for this disjuncture between “urban governance” in theory and “actually existing urban governance” are 1) difficulties in implementing urban governance theory consistently in practice, 2) problems arising because urban governance theory has been implemented in practice, 3) tensions that would entangle most policies which do not address historical and structural economic issues, 4) restrictive assumptions, and 5) incoherence among the different dimensions of urban governance. To resolve these contradictions, I put the case for major structural and institutional change involving: 1) the re‐ordering of the roles of the state, market, and society as institutions of change; 2) re‐working the relationships that bind together land, labour, capital, and the state, and 3) re‐organising the channels for keeping the attainment of the ends of urban governance in check.

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Section: Reframing Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban Governance in Africa Today: Reframing, Experiences, and Lessons

Obeng‐Odoom¹

2016

Growth and Change

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“…As this trend has major implications for the distribution of the urban commons and the sovereignty of African peoples and their territory, it warrants careful study. Research on urban governance has grown, but the growing uneven relationship between transnational corporations and urban authorities has received little empirical attention (Obeng‐Odoom ; Resnick ; Fuseini ). Obeng‐Odoom (c: 52–53) has identified “the growing sphere of influence of transnational corporations” as the least understood issue in research on cities that are affiliated with the development of natural resources, which we shall henceforth refer to as “resource cities.”…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational Corporations and Urban Development

Obeng‐Odoom¹

2018

American J Econ Sociol

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Transnational corporations (TNCs) in Africa play significant roles in controlling utilities, privately appropriating common resources, and planning urban space. On the one hand, the extralegal powers of TNCs are legitimized with patronizing discourses about the incompetence of African nations in managing their own affairs and with the specter of a “resource curse” that supposedly immobilizes the self‐governing capacities of Africans. On the other hand, TNCs arrogate to themselves statutory municipal power, ignore or manipulate various channels of accountability, and privately appropriate sociallycreated rents. Some critics of TNCs propose a withdrawal from globalization or greater regulation to limit the power of TNCs. But protectionist or isolationist approaches are entirely mistaken and further undermine the social management of the commons in Africa. Instead, Africans should seek directly to break the chains of monopoly and oligopoly, especially over natural resources. They should also strive to use land for the common good and to systematically build social states in Africa to overcome subservience to TNCs. While previous attempts at autonomous development in Africa have sometimes led to military action by former colonizers and current neo‐colonial imperialists, recent evidence from Africa suggests that such a strategy might succeed now. This article proposes to extend the politics of urban reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States to contemporary Africa. In doing so, it shows how African cities today are working to create local capacity by municipalizing services that have been privatized, such as distribution of water. Despite many obstacles posed by TNCs and their home governments, Africans are making great strides to overcome the enduring legacies of colonialism.

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