Rethinking Urban Reform in Africa: Insights from Political Settlements Research

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Comparative Politics of Cities in the Global South

Abstract

This paper summarises the findings of a major research initiative into the politics of urban reform in twelve African cities. It uses political settlements analysis to explain why the underlying political conditions for rapid progress on the numerous current and future crises facing African cities are absent, arguing for a rethinking of what it is possible to achieve developmentally, and, more importantly, the best way to do it.
In recent years, political settlements analysis has proved an influential approach, generating theory and evidence that helps to explain elite commitment and state capability for inclusive development, as well as providing pointers on how to achieve economic and social progress in a range of country contexts. However, with rare exceptions, it has not been applied to problems of urban development. The African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) set out to break new analytical ground by deploying a political settlements framework in eight urban development ‘domains’ across a range of African cities.
In this paper we discuss the benefits and challenges of deploying political settlements analysis at city level. This will include a discussion of:
• How to operationalise PSA’s constitutive concepts at sub-national level
• How the role of the city in the national settlement explains elite attitudes to urban development
• How the nature of national political settlement dynamics enable or constrain opportunities for urban development
• How the political settlement shapes the built environment and spatial configuration of cities, and vice versa, including the politics of informal settlements
• What, if anything, PSA can add to existing concepts such as ‘authoritarianism’, ‘democracy’, ‘multi-level governance’ and ‘vertically divided authority’ [for understanding urban reforms]?

Although ACRC has found some isolated examples of progress on a small or tentative scale in some of its cities, in general, the combination of strong elite commitment and state capability that would be conducive to effective and inclusive urban development, was lacking. This creates a conundrum for urban reformers, inasmuch as the scale of the challenges facing African cities is huge, yet the underlying political settlement conditions for dealing decisively with them are absent. We argue that this should prompt a re-imagining of what it is possible to achieve developmentally in most African urban contexts, as well as a rethinking of how to achieve it. Neither conventional decentralisation nor recentralisation reforms will work: identifying and building on specific pockets of effectiveness by forging and nurturing multi-stakeholder alliances around specific urban development challenges, is a more likely pathway to progress.

Authors

• Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, University of Ghana Business School

• Michaela Collord, University of Oxford