URBAN DEVELOPMENT POVERTY REDUCTION

Urban Development and Poverty Reduction: Towards an agenda for policy research and capacity building A discussion paper for the RAWOO: Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council; Fabio Poelhekke, October 2000

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Urban Development and Poverty Reduction

Towards an agenda for policy research and capacity building

A discussion paper for the RAWOO: Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council

1. Introduction Considering that we are witnessing today some fundamental societal changes in the different continents of the world, in its 11th and 12th Plenary meetings RAWOO has discussed current trends of poverty and urbanisation in developing countries and their challenges to sustainable development and good governance. It has done so with the intention, among other, to contribute to the public debate on urbanisation (and poverty) in the Netherlands, in the aftermath of the Istanbul Habitat II Conference of 1996, as well as to assess the need for further research. The discussion in the 12th meeting (October 2000) was held on the basis of a first draft of the present paper, called ‘Poverty Reduction and Urbanisation’. After a fruitful discussion in the Council, the draft has been circulated by the RAWOO Secretariat to a selected number of experts in different parts of the world. Some of them have provided valuable comments. At the request of the Council, a second draft has been prepared. As far as possible, comments have been taken into account, without rewriting the whole paper. It is hoped that the present second draft can be used as a basis for the Council to decide whether it wishes to continue the process of preparing an advisory report for the Dutch government. The paper can also be used as an input for a future international expert consultation. This paper deals with the contribution knowledge generation can make to a better understanding of urbanisation and poverty reduction, taking into account how various stakeholders involved in this process use such knowledge in combating urban poverty, and exploring the major trends in policy research and research capacity building. Among the many aspects of urbanisation in countries of the South, the specific issue of poverty and poverty reduction is taken up by RAWOO, because it is important to contribute to the expanding efforts towards urban poverty reduction by many stakeholders: the urban poor themselves, local governments, civil society actors, as well as the international (donor) community. In three distinct sections specific questions are dealt with: a) The urbanisation process, its threats and opportunities. b) The interplay of the various stakeholders that shape the process and the implications for good governance aimed at urban poverty reduction and sustainable development . c) The role of knowledge generation, policy research and capacity building, focusing along the following questions: - How can research and knowledge generation support problem solving capacities and initiatives in developing countries concerning the urban poor? - What could be the specificity and added value of a RAWOO initiative on urban poverty research? - How could RAWOO proposals to support initiatives in this field become acceptable to donors? This paper is based upon consultation of some major documents on urban trends in developing countries and interviews (personal, by telephone or by e-mail) with a limited number of experts on


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urban issues. It aims to provide the RAWOO with insights on the subject of research and local research capacity building for sustainable urban development and poverty reduction, with emphasis on the central issue of good governance, so that it can decide whether or not to proceed towards an advisory report to the Dutch government. The paper does not aim at scientific comprehensiveness on the multi-faceted issue of urbanisation in developing countries as such. 2. The urbanisation process: threats and opportunities By birth or through rural urban migration1, the poor of the world are increasingly concentrating in cities, both large and small2. It is expected that very soon the majority of mankind will live in cities. By definition, cities are spatial concentrations of people and their economic and social activities, other than primarily agricultural. They are therefore both a concentration of poverty and wealth, and problems as well as solutions. Urbanisation takes place in the whole world, in poor and affluent regions alike. But in the poorer ones, urban growth is the strongest, nearly half of it caused by migration of poor peasants to the cities. In a way,

“there is a paradox: people are still flooding into these cities, too many children are being born in those cities based on the hope for a better life; but too often they are being cheated.”3

Urban poverty is much more widespread than is often considered, partly because it is systematically underestimated by official statistics, both national and international, and partly because of differing definitions4. The worldwide used official poverty criterion of personal income of less than US$ 1 a day (used for both rural as well as urban settings), does not take into account the fact that urban life is more expensive, certainly in monetary terms. Food, water, sanitation, housing, education, health care and transport require considerable sums, and the lack of physical space in urban slums causes specific problems of mental health and violence, all with their specific costs. Although the exact count of ‘urban poor’ is difficult to make, there is no doubt that their number is very great and steadily increasing. Recent estimates by the World Bank show that in Latin America and Eastern Europe more than half of all poor people already live in cities, and that within the next two decades this will be the case in Africa and Asia too.5 Today, the urban poor amount to approximately 650 million people; within 25 years their number will exceed 1500 million. As can be seen from the table below, regional differences in urbanisation are striking. Latin America is as ‘urbanised’ as North America and Europe, while Africa and Asia have a lower percentage of population living in cities. Considering however the total amount of people living in Asia, even a present-day figure of 38% is a very big figure in absolute terms.

1 According to the World Bank, slightly more by birth than through migration (World Bank, Urban Development Division, Cities in Transition: A Strategic View of Urban and Local Government Issues, December 1999 (www.worldbank.org/urban)) 2 For the purpose of this paper, it is good to agree on a definition of urban areas and cities or towns. The definition of urban varies by country and over time, normally referring to settlements with a minimum population ranging from 2.500 to 25.000 people and with a certain concentration of non-agricultural employment and production. Often, city is a legal designation associated with specific administrative or local government structures. Metropolises normally span several city jurisdictions, administered by local governments or local authorities, generally the lowest echelon of the apparatus of the state (World Bank, op.cit). 3 World Report on the Urban Future 21 (‘Berlin-report’), page 7 (www.urban21.de) 4 David Satterthwaite, Urban Poverty, Reconsidering its Scale and Nature, IDS Bulletin Vol.28 No 2 1997, pp.9-23. 5 World Bank, Cities in Transition, op.cit.


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Table 1: Urban population in % of total population per region:

year region 1980 2000 2020 % % % World 39 47 57 Europe 69 75 80 North America 74 77 82 Oceania 71 70 72 Asia 27 38 50 Central America 60 67 73 South America 68 80 85 Africa 27 38 49 Developing countries 29 41 52 Developed countries 71 76 81

from: World Report on the Urban Future 21 (‘Berlin-report’) (www.urban21.de) Often urban problems are associated with the big metropolises of the world, with population projections for 2015 of incredible proportions: Bombay 27 million, Lagos 24, Shanghai 23, Jakarta 21, São Paulo and Karachi 20, to mention only a few. But of increasing importance are the so-called intermediate and the smaller cities, which absorb a growing number of urbanites. A considerable portion of rural migrants is coming to live in small and medium-sized towns. A striking regional example of how population distribution changes within a lifespan is West Africa: in 60 years (between 1960 and 2020) a predicted tenfold increase in number of towns, and a 18-fold increase in those with more than 100.000 inhabitants (see figure 1, next page)6. Between 1960 and 1990, the number of town-dwellers rose from 12 to 78 million: nearly two-thirds of total population growth. As can be seen, most of them live in smaller towns. In this and other regions, one could speak of ‘the urbanisation of the countryside’. In human history and all over the world, urbanisation is a natural phenomenon, wherever agriculture produces a surplus to feed non-agricultural workers. The most important push factor for people to migrate from rural areas into towns is the lack of possibilities to develop a profitable agriculture where they live. Important pull factors are economic growth in cities and the possibilities this provides for employment, even when for many migrants these possibilities do not materialize, or only after a few generations. Both prosperity and crisis can generate urban growth:

“Urbanisation has been a feature of rich economies such as Nigeria, whose oil boom saw its urbanisation level increase from 15% (in 1960) to 49% (in 1990). Agricultural success in Côte d’Ivoire also resulted in a rapid rise in the urban ratio from 17% to 47%. Urbanisation has equally developed in those countries that have experienced serious ecological crises such as Mauritania (the level rose from 9% to 42%), or those that have fallen prey to serious political problems (Chad’s level rose from 6% to 24%).”7

In other words, urbanisation can be stimulated both by economic growth and by economic failure. This depends very much on regional settings and on the specific history of the urbanisation trends and processes. 6 Club du Sahel, Preparing for the Future, A Vision of West Africa in the Year 2020, West Africa Long-Term Perspective Study (WALTPS), OECD 1998 (www.oecd.org) 7 Club du Sahel, op.cit., page 45.


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Figure 1:

From: Club du Sahel, Preparing for the Future, A Vision of West Africa in the Year 2020, West Africa Long-Term Perspective Study, OECD 1998, page 48. From the latest policy consultations it can be observed that the classical idea, present in many donor-sponsored rural development programmes, that successful rural development can stem rural-urban migration and thus slow down urban growth is being replaced by the conviction that city and countryside need each other in order to create economic growth and social well being. Cities need a lot of food and therefore well-functioning agricultural markets, thus stimulating farmers to change from subsistence to market-oriented production. As a consequence, rural areas develop in response to growing demands created in cities. Once-again the West Africa example: while export crops account for a stable 10% of agricultural GDP, between 1960 and 2000 GDP value for the regional (urban) food markets rose from 15 to 40%,


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subsistence produce declining from 75 to 50%, with a further tendency to 40% in 2020.8 Another significant conclusion of the WALTRS study is, that in the long run cities do not necessarily need to rely on food imports. In West Africa, regional agricultural produce appears to need three to five years to adapt to the increase of food demands from growing cities, but catches up with demand once the pace of city growth slacks down. Figure 2: Evolution of the world’s total population

From: Club du Sahel, op.cit., page 35. We are experiencing in our time an extremely rapid pace of urban growth in most developing countries. It is now expected that in less than a century both urban and rural populations will stabilize at a total level of about 10 billion people (fig. 2 above), the greater majority of whom will live in either very big, big, medium-sized and small cities (fig. 3 below). This fact is put at the forefront of international discussions by the Habitat II Conference in 1996 in Istanbul, with a much greater urgency than at the Habitat I Conference in 1976 in Vancouver. Today, the survival conditions of the hundreds of millions of poor in cities appear to be a growing concern of the main international actors. Figure 3: Past, present and projected percentage of the population in the developing world living in cities

From: World Bank, Urban Development Division, Cities in Transition: A Strategic View of Urban and Local Government Issues, December 1999, page 24 (www.worldbank.org/urban) (ECA: Eastern Europe and Central Asia; LAC: Latin America and Caribbean; MNA: Middle-East and North Africa)

8 Idem, page 51, graph 7.


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An example of this concern is the Global Conference on the Urban Future, held in Berlin in July 2000 by the governments of Germany, Brazil, Singapore and South Africa. This conference stressed that cities are both unique and very different, and not only because of their size. They can be grouped according to their broad characteristics. The Conference’s Urban Future 21 report9 makes a basic distinction

“between three kinds of city, representing three typical constellations of demographic-socio-economic evolution: “1. The City coping with Informal Hyper Growth: This is represented by many cities in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Indian sub-continent, by the Moslem Middle East, and by some of the poorer cities of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is characterized by rapid population growth, both through migration and natural increase; an economy heavily dependent on the informal sector; very widespread poverty, with widespread informal housing areas; basic problems of the environment and of public health; and difficult issues of governance. “2. The City Coping with Dynamic Growth: This is the characteristic city of the middle-income rapidly developing world, represented by much of East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East. Here, population growth is reducing, and some of these cities face the prospect of an ageing population. Economic growth continues rapidly, but with new challenges from other countries. Prosperity brings environmental problems. “3. The Weakening Mature City Coping with Ageing: This is the characteristic city of the advanced world of North America, Europe, Japan and parts of East Asia, and Australasia. It is characterized by stable or declining population, the challenge of ageing and of household fissioning, slow economic growth and adaptation, and social polarization. But it does have resources to tackle environmental problems, if it chooses. Its cities are characterized by very widespread dispersion and by reconcentration, leading to the growth of smaller cities and a challenge to the viability of the older central cities.”10

Of course, we are concerned here with the first two categories only. A distinctive feature to add would be that in the first category the non-poor (middle class as well as the (very) rich) is a relatively small part of the population, thus limiting both the financial and the human resources base of the city in absolute terms. In the second, the poor and the very poor are a (possibly big) minority, and the city has probably considerable more financial and human resources that could be used to combat poverty in the city. In other terms, while in the first category there may be an absolute lack of resources to combat poverty, in the second poverty alleviation and reduction may depend more on the degree of local societal and political commitment. This could have important implications for the strategies of the poor (and whoever wants to support them) to strive for a better life. For both categories of city, including all intermediate types, the big question and challenge expressed in all authoritative reports on urban issues is: will they become sustainable and liveable for all, or will they continue to present enormous disparities between pockets of (extreme) wealth and areas of (extreme) poverty, pollution, hunger and violence? Government policies alone cannot solve all urban problems: the bulk of poverty reduction activities shall be borne by the poor themselves, but their efforts should be supported. Fostering the conditions in which the billions of urban poor can help themselves out of a situation of extreme poverty, is increasingly seen by the donor community as one of the most challenging tasks of our generation and that of our children and grandchildren. This is not only because of the imperative of social justice, but also because poverty and social injustice makes cities unsustainable: unhealthy, polluted, and unsafe, for the poor but also for the non-poor. Poverty reduction is in the interest of all urban residents. But

9 World Report on the Urban Future 21 (‘Berlin-report’), page 11 (www.urban21.de) 10 Ibidem.


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who are the actors that will take up this challenge? 3. Urban stakeholders and good governance for sustainable development and poverty reduction The sheer fact that cities in developing countries are rapidly growing implies that many poor people succeed in surviving in them. And this survival means being extremely busy in earning a living and conquering a little space. Whether these poor grow old, are healthy or happy, is an entirely different matter. And whether these cities will be able to survive ecologically, is very doubtful. In too many cases, one and the other will not be so, unless many different stakeholders combine strong and patient efforts for improvement. To discuss the complicated issue of the actors in urban poverty reduction and sustainable development, we will use four ingredients. The first is an example out of many similar experiences all over the world, from Cambodia, written by the Chief Executive of Homeless International, a British fundraising NGO on housing issues:11

“Last year when I visited Phnom Penh, Chamnam and his family were living on a bamboo platform slightly higher than the flooded road nearby. “This year the community of which he is a leader has been transformed. 129 families have moved to a new settlement at Boeung Krappeur and constructed a vibrant village. Over seventy homes have been fully completed and others are well underway. “The process that has led to Boeung Krappeur provides an example of constructive partnership between communities and municipal authorities. The Phnom Penh Municipality bought the land, which community members had chosen themselves and the people built their own houses with loans provided by the Urban Poor Development Fund. Homeless International helped to cover the costs of running the Fund, which uses loan capital provided, by Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) and Misereor12. (…) “The families in Chamnam’s community received loans (…) of up to US$400 worth of building materials to build their houses. Each day repayments are collected with the aim of repaying the loan over a five-year period. The community is divided into teams of roughly fifteen families who work together, and every team appoints a team leader. The community has a Technical committee (…), a Finance Committee (…) and a Construction Management Committee (…). “As people have built their houses they have learnt new skills. Some people have become skilled construction workers as a result and have been able to significantly increase their family incomes. “Perhaps the most important thing that has happened at Boeung Krappeur is the way that the experience of building a new settlement has been shared with so many other communities. When I was there, I visited with representatives from slum communities in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Sharing the experience has meant that the initiative has become a real live laboratory for learning about how families can work together, manage money together, construct affordable housing and install basic services. This kind of open learning and exchange provides an important example in a city where the problems of poverty and inadequate housing remain so acute.”

In this example ‘from the grass roots’, aimed at solving the problem of housing for a community of urban poor, several collaborating actors can be distinguished: an organized community, a credit provider, a local government, a foreign NGO acting both as a donor/fundraiser and as a ‘disseminator’ of the experience, and finally a few foreign urban communities visiting to learn from the experience. The second ingredient is the concept of good governance, as it is understood by the Urban Future21 11 Homeless International, Annual Review 1998/99, Coventry U.K., page 6 (www.homeless-international.org). Emphasis added by us. 12 A big German NGO donor agency.


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report as “an all-embracing concept, with sustainable development as its central objective” (figure 4). Figure 4: Good Governance in the urban context

GOOD GOVERNANCE

Sustainable URBAN ECONOMY:

Work and Health

Sustainable URBAN SHELTER: Decent Affordable

Housing for All

Sustainable URBAN ENVIRONMENT:

Stable Ecosystems

Sustainable URBAN SOCIETY: Social Coherence and

Social Solidarity

Sustainable URBAN LIFE:

Building the Liveable City

Sustainable URBAN DEMOCRACY: Empowering the Citizenry

Sustainable URBAN ACCESS:

Resource-Conserving Mobility

From: World Report on the Urban Future 21 (‘Berlin-report’) (www.urban21.de) As a third ingredient, we refer to the four basic elements of sustainable and functional cities as discerned by the World Bank in its urban policy. According to it, cities

“must be livable – ensuring a decent quality of life and equitable opportunity for all residents, including the poorest. To achieve this goal, they must be competitive, well governed and managed, and financially sustainable, or bankable.”13

Finally we have as the fourth ingredient figure 5 (on the next page): a ‘city map’ with its surrounding world, with all important categories of actors, as seen from the perspective of the poor. It is the way how all these actors: those present in the city but also the more remote ones in the ‘outside world’ interact locally, that defines whether there is or not an ‘enabling environment’ working towards urban poverty reduction and sustainable development promotion. With these four ingredients, we try to present a concise picture of the complexity of actors working towards poverty reduction in the urban context. In the first place, there are actors working at the macro-level of national and international relations. This level is depicted in figure 5 as ‘outside’ the city. It is important because urban poverty reduction is related to sustainable urban development. Sustainable development concerns all urban residents directly, and due to their much higher level of consumption especially the non-poor, including those in the rich countries. And this has much to do with the ‘global economy’: economic relations between cities in a country and between countries in different parts of the world. As the World Bank / CNN documentary Creating Sustainable Cities puts it, cities occupy 2% of the physical space of the Earth, but use 75% of its resources. The ‘ecological footprint’ of cities is enormous, and still growing. Effective poverty reduction will enlarge this ecological footprint, thus contributing to even faster ecological degradation. The poor can hardly be blamed for striving towards a similar pattern of consumption as the television shows them. This is one of the many urgent reasons why other, less damaging patters of consumption among the non-poor have to be developed, both in the South as in the developed world. These global issues are tackled by the international conferences of the U.N. (see for instance the 1996 Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements of Habitat II in Annex B), as well as by many multilateral, governmental and non-governmental actors. 13 World Bank, Urban Development Division, Cities in Transition: A Strategic View of Urban and Local Government Issues, December 1999, page 7 (www.worldbank.org/urban)


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Figure 5: Principal actors in a city and outside of it, affecting low-income households and organized communities

Micro-level: Low income urban households and organized communities, experiencing a

combination of poverty aspects: inadequate income, high risk of violence, inadequate food, poor health, lack of education, inadequate access to water, sanitation, housing and energy.

Meso-level: a) The city, including the city government, the non-poor (elite and middle-class), informal sector

businesses, formal sector businesses, civil society (NGOs, charities, churches, etc.), knowledge centres (schools, universities, research institutions, etc.)

b) The city’s surrounding countryside, with agricultural and other rural businesses and communities.

Macro-level:

a) The national environment of the city: national government, other cities, other economic actors. b) The international/global environment: global economic actors, foreign governments (bilateral relations), multilateral organizations (World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, WHO, etc.), international operating civil society actors (NGOs, churches, trade unions, etc.). The arrows are only a few examples of the multitude of relationships between all actors within and outside a city.


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At the micro-level we see innumerable individual households, as well as organized communities in cities trying to cope with their immediate needs (like in the example of Phnom Penh), using whatever inputs they can get, and not necessarily with a preoccupation of sustainability. For them, poverty has to do with inadequate income, security, health, education, water & sanitation, housing & energy. And not as isolated items, but in a combination that is often a vicious circle: water & sanitation influence health, bad health and poor education mean poor income opportunities, poor income means poor housing, affecting security, etc. To the poor, many forms of external assistance are welcome, but not all of them will contribute to poverty reduction (as distinguished from poverty alleviation). For poverty reduction the problems of the poor should be approached by the city government and other actors in their totality, because each “sector” affects and is affected by all others. It is here that the starting point should be a participatory analysis of the most pressing problems in each distinct community. This is based on the principle that poverty reduction can best be attained taking the needs, aspirations, initiatives and organizational capacities of the poor themselves as the starting point. And in every individual city, there will be hundreds of such communities, competing with the non-poor (and with each other!) for scarce resources, often in conflicting ways. The meso-level in our analysis is each individual city as a whole, including its immediately surrounding countryside, comprising all the actors and activities depicted within the ‘city limits’ in figure 5, and being influenced by those beyond them. The challenge to every city government, economy, elite and middle-class is to structure its relationships with the ‘outside world’ in such a way, that there will be sufficient prosperity and reallocation of resources to guarantee a decent (and sustainable) life for everybody: the non-poor and the poor. It is here that the maxim of the ecology movement: Think Globally, Act Locally, is most relevant. Attaining sustainable prosperity and reallocation in a city is by no means conflict-free. Today we see fierce competition between cities, as well as political struggle and violent crime within cities. Some cities have so many poor and so little productive assets that they have to expand their economic base first14. Other cities are much richer (but unsustainable?) and there the principal issue is not so much the creation as well as the reallocation of resources towards the poor15. Two issues in the complex world of interactions between very different urban actors deserve a special mention: the problems involved in establishing and maintaining effective partnerships between all relevant actors, as well as the need for more effective and efficient capacity building to tackle urban problems and urban poverty. Both partnerships and capacity building are essential elements in the practice of good governance and urban liveability for all, including the poor. Important types of partnerships in urban settings are those between government and private sector companies, between communities and the private sector and those between CBOs (community based organisations, NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and local government.16 If certain conditions are fulfilled, partnerships can play an effective role in improving the livelihood of the urban poor. Essential is a combination of a bottom-up and a top-down approach. Bottom-up means taking first and foremost into account the ways in which poor households pursue more secure living and working conditions. In this pursuit, in certain occasions these poor engage in collective action, both short-term, one-issue (i.e.: a movement towards better urban transport in their neighbourhood), as well as long-term, multiple issue, then forming a more or less permanent CBO. In many, but not all cases, such movements and CBOs receive support from professional outsiders, often NGOs. Together, CBOs and NGOs act vis-à-vis local government and other urban actors, striving towards a local public policy that is better geared towards the needs of the urban poor. The response, if any, of local government is necessarily part of a top-down approach of decentralized 14 See ‘The City coping with Informal Hyper-growth’ in section 2. 15 See ‘The City Coping with Dynamic Growth’ in section 2. 16 Baud, I.S.A., Collective Action, Enablement and Partnerships: Issues in urban development, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2000 (inaugural lecture).


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(urban) planning, in which not only movements and CBOs of the poor are taken into account, but all other urban actors (enterprises, the non-poor, etc.) are taken into account. Present trends are very much ‘outsourcing’ of local government tasks like garbage collection, urban transport, water and energy provision to private companies, in so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs). Lack of resources and local power relations often limit the effective attention local government gives to the claims of the poor. A permanent political power play between the bottom-up claims and the top-down willingness and capacities to adhere to such claims can be discerned in most cities of the world. In this complex interplay of partnerships for improvement of the living conditions of the urban poor, capacity building is extremely important. Good intentions of all actors concerned are a necessary but not a sufficient prerequisite for effective improvements. In many instances, capacity building with urban actors as it is presently conceived and practised is not adequate enough to contribute adequately to success.17 Capacity building, as it is often done and mainly funded by international cooperation, is pursued principally by training individuals working in city administration or city services, in the hope that in this way this administration or service will perform a better job (including for the poor). Here important problems arise, because training alone is not enough. Training can (and often should be) a part of the urban management capacity building process. It is essential that capacity building be linked with more general institutional reforms and that it should be demand-driven. Four conditions are essential for capacity building efforts18: they should be used, in the sense that city elected representatives and city management are convinced that the results are worth the investments; they should be relevant, meaning that they are focussed on issued to be tackled in the city or in a specific community; they should be accessible, allowing participation by all stakeholders; and they should be sustainable even without (continued) external donor assistance, as a constant activity in permanently changing situations. Often, such conditions are only partly met, causing a waste of efforts and resources and even stimulating public servants to leave public service and enter the private sector after training. In addition to these considerations, all stakeholders engaged in city development and in poverty reduction need adequate knowledge and information to do a good job. This certainly applies to efficient partnerships and in order to make capacity building activities demand-driven and tailor-made. In the next section of this paper we shall try to focus on the many existing initiatives, proposals and ideas for knowledge generation and dissemination. Our focus will be on the meso- and micro-levels (city and poor households/ communities), keeping in mind that they are all influenced by the macro-level. 4. Knowledge generation, policy research and research capacity building: examples of existing practice Because urban poverty reduction and sustainable development are our main preoccupations, knowledge generation through research, information dissemination and capacity building should give priority to the knowledge and information needs of organized urban communities, committed city administrators, as well as other pro-poor actors (at the micro- and meso-levels: see figure 5). This means that the research agenda should be defined in close consultation with them and to be closely linked to their requirements. This certainly does not mean that other research (especially the ‘macro-level’ oriented) is not relevant: such knowledge can be an important input for local initiatives. A good example would be the WALTPS (see section 2, fig. 1 and 2), where between 1991 and 1997 a multidisciplinary team of primarily non-African and some African experts, coordinated by geographers and supported by many

17 Peltenburg, M., J.de Wit, F.Davidson, Capacity building for urban management: learning from recent experiences, Habitat International, 24 (2000) 363-373. 18 idem, p.371.


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multi- and bilateral donors (including the Netherlands), presented a picture of West Africa’s future. This picture is both realistic and hopeful, and in it, cities are depicted as engines of economic growth and social development, also for ‘their’ countryside. Such macro-level studies do not present solutions for immediate problems, but are essential in stimulating thinking and providing hope for a better future. Here, however, we are principally interested in identifying existing and suggested/desired knowledge generation initiatives at the meso- (city) and micro- (community) levels. This is a difficult task, because of the multitude of aspects of urban poverty and development, the enormous body of research that exists, as well as the differing viewpoints and interests of researchers, research institutions, as well as development cooperation donors. From a limited consultation of documents and experts, the following picture arises. The World Bank, in its recent document on urban issues, sees as

“Priorities for research: • Studying the economic welfare costs of dysfunctional regulation and design of workable regulatory frameworks, for example, for municipal credit and for land use. • Diagnosing sources of urban economic growth and decline, based on city case studies of successes and failures. • Further exploring causes and solutions of urban poverty, including links with income generation, gender equity, crime and violence, urban governance, and synergies between rural and urban activities to reduce overall poverty. • Assessing the impact of privatizing essential services on the urban poor, and policies to address market failures in housing. • Analyzing approaches to metropolitan management. • Developing analytical and management tools, in particular, refining planning methods to integrate land market and transport development. • Assessing the development impact of different types of urban assistance programs, including their impacts on different user groups and on community-government relations. “The proposed national urban strategies and city development strategies, as well as regular urban lending, would promote the collection and use of policy-relevant data. These data would include community feedback from users of municipal services; city statistical reporting, such as statistical yearbooks with data by type of service, by ward, and by municipality; and citywide indicators, such as those being developed through the UNCHS Urban Indicators Program, that are comparable across urban areas. All data collection would be demand-driven, tailored to perceived local issues, and capable of being updated by local agencies in a cost-effective manner. To help improve city-level urban indicators, the Bank approved a grant of $1.125 million from the Development Grant Facility in fiscal 1999 to the UNCHS Urban Indicators Program (Phase II), and a smaller follow-up grant in fiscal 2000. This program aims to build data collection capacity at the local and country levels, promote the sharing of data and analyses, and disseminate data management tools. All these efforts will feed into the strategic work by cities, the Bank’s comprehensive development framework exercises in pilot countries, and work to further improve Bank operations through better-defined performance indicators.”19

In the United Kingdom, in January of 2000 Clare Short, Secretary of State for International 19 World Bank, Urban Development Division, Cities in Transition: A Strategic View of Urban and Local Government Issues, December 1999, pages 54-55 (www.worldbank.org/urban) (italics added)


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Development, announced a new initiative - The C3 Challenge - at a reception organised by Homeless International. Clare Short said:

“The challenge will build practical ways to get local people, local government and local businesses together to improve the lives of the poorest people in cities around the world. (…) More than half the world's population are now urbanised for the first time in recent history. The numbers are set to grow further. The urban poor often live in great squalor reminiscent of conditions in our cities at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The C3 Challenge aims to build links between those who can start to put things right. This collaboration between the community, local and private sector will be matched by DFID giving 50% funding to future projects. Enabling poor communities to tap into local resources (private sector investment, credit, materials and construction expertise) will help lead to improvements to neighbourhoods on a long-term sustainable basis. In order to achieve the International Development Targets by 2015 we must do better at helping the urban poor to improve their lives. Much can be learned from the experience of poor people working together with local government in southern countries.”20

The British Department for International Development (DFID) supports the generation and dissemination of knowledge intended to help provide solutions to a range of developmental problems relevant to the attainment of DFID goals in supporting poverty reduction and elimination. The Infrastructure and Urban Development Department’s Knowledge and Research Programme (KaR) supports activities with a focus on Geoscience, Transport, Energy, Water and Sanitation, Urbanisation and Information, Communications and Technology. A summary of DFID’s priorities in urbanisation research can be found in Annex C. Research commissioned by DFID in the urban sector falls under the following theme objectives: - Increase the access of low-income households and the poor to adequate, safe and secure shelter; - Increase the access of low-income households and the poor to improved urban services; - Enhance the effectiveness of city and municipal planning and management.21 From the list of ongoing research projects on the same website on can conclude that many are relatively small. There is a consistent policy of including Southern experts in such projects, as well as trying to use research for DFID learning processes. The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation recently published a very useful inventory of urban activities financed by the Official Development Assistance of the donor agencies of 17 countries and 14 multilateral organisations22. It contains some interesting conclusions concerning urban policy:

“In fact several international aid agencies have begun to realise that many of their actions, even if they are not specifically earmarked as urban, do have an important impact on city dwellers who often happen to be the main beneficiaries of their projects. Even those actions, which are apparently well distinct from interventions in urban development, such as the sectors of health, small-scale enterprise promotion, micro-credit, food management and the environment, end up by having direct consequences on cities. They should therefore be taken into account not only by theme, but also by the specific location where they take place.”23 “In the future, one central question remains: whether or not aid will target the lower income groups of Third World countries. ‘Empowering the poor’ and ‘poverty reduction/alleviation/eradication’ are a leitmotiv in the official documents of numerous agencies. Yet, the biggest investment projects are still targeted

20 DFID Press Release 26 January 2000. 21 Source: www.dfid.gov.uk and www.dfid.gov.uk/public/working/research_guide.html. 22 What Future for Urban Cooperation? Assessment of post Habitat II strategies, by Isabelle Milbert (IUED Geneva), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Berne 1999. ISBN 3-905398-37-0, free copies available from the Agency. 23 Idem, page 9.


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towards infrastructure or programmes for middle-level income groups. In fact, very few cooperation programmes really address the problems of the two lowest deciles of Third World urban population.”24 “(…) due to the absence of a comprehensive urban approach (…) some essential horizontal linkages have been overlooked. (…) the spatial integration of urban projects remains a challenge that must be overcome, in order to ensure that they do not continue to be isolated and limited activities.”25

Examples of significant urban activities that include a considerable research component are listed in the Swiss study under ‘innovative projects’ with each donor agency and multilateral organisation. A few of them are reproduced in Annex D. One that is very interesting because of its scope, approach and methodology is the Urban Management Programme, the largest urban programme of UNDP (see the summary in Annex D). It is one of the urban programmes with important participation of the Netherlands. The work of UNRISD (U.N. Research Institute for Social Development) on urban governance

“seeks to identify emerging processes for incorporating the voices of the excluded in decision making at the local level. Research on these questions typically includes inputs from and, where possible, collaborations among CBOs, NGOs, formal research entities and local authorities. “UNRISD has collaborated with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) to better understand the roles and impacts of community volunteer organizations in combating social problems in metropolitan areas, as well as the constraints that such efforts face. Collaborations began in mid-1994, when UNRISD and UNV launched the project Social Integration at the Grassroots: The Urban or "Pavement" Dimension, to document and analyse the experiences of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs) and volunteer groups in working with vulnerable or marginalized urban populations in 16 cities on four continents. This theme was taken up in another join project, Volunteer Action and Local Democracy: A Partnership for a Better Urban Future (VALD). “Funding is provided by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and the Government of The Netherlands. Multi-city action-research is carried out by teams in Chicago, East St. Louis (USA), Ho Chi Minh City, Jinja (Uganda), Johannesburg-Soweto, Lima, Mumbai, and São Paulo.”26

Of the many research activities of UNRISD, this is the only one focusing specifically on urban issues. Last but not least among governmental involvement in urban issues and research agendas, we should mention the research propositions made in 1994 by the (now extinct) NAR27, as well as by DGIS28 of the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both are reproduced in Annex E and F, respectively. We have no information, at this stage, to what extent these research proposals are being implemented. A wholly different category of actors to take into consideration are civil society organizations (for short: NGOs, but including also other actors), both in the South and in the North, who engage in support to low-income urban households and communities. They have less financial resources than bi- and multilateral donors, have limited capacities and sphere of action, but in compensation they are in many cases much nearer to the ‘grass roots’ level: the micro-level of figure 5. Although NGOs are very much short-term and action oriented, there are indications that their interest in (supporting) urban

24 Idem, page 17; italics added. 25 Idem, page 19; italics added. 26 UNRISD website www.unrisd.org. 27 National Advisory Council for Development Cooperation of the Netherlands 28 Directorate-General for International Cooperation


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research is increasing. Here, the main research focus is at the urban community level, principally in the form of ‘diagnostics’ that systematize the situation and the relevant societal and political ‘environment’ of urban communities. Another reason to engage in research would be for dissemination and communication purposes (to back-donors, principally) of successful examples of urban projects. This kind of research is often short-term, aimed at quick results. There are countless NGOs in the South working with urban communities, either by providing them with services (partly substituting local government), or trying to empower them to claim and obtain the services they are entitled to from the same local government. In the first case NGOs are acting more in the sphere of poverty alleviation, in the second of poverty reduction. Southern NGOs are generally financially supported by Northern NGOs, who have as back-donors the general public (donations), as well as governments and the European Union. Sometimes multilateral organizations as well as governments engage in direct funding of Southern NGOs, using them as service providers to the poor and thus limiting their autonomy. An interesting example of African involvement with urban issues is the African NGO Habitat II Caucus, bringing together about seventy African NGOs. In one of four workshops held during the Habitat II Conference in June 1996, on the subject of “Forging new links between urban researchers and activists”, the following research topics were identified:

“- How is urban knowledge currently produced in Africa and how can this production be transformed to bring about new forms and methodologies of urban development? “- How can there be a greater convergence between locally and popularly generated ideas and practices concerning life in cities and the knowledge structures used by those institutions responsible for urban management? “- What kinds of futures is it possible to anticipate now, and what kinds of knowledge are necessary in order to assess the capacities, potentials and conceivable trajectories of specific present and future economic and social development interventions within given African cities? “- What kinds of institutions, partnerships and administrative practices will be necessary in order to address both the increasing population of African cities and intensifying urban poverty; what kinds of economic development strategies are most appropriate to both the local capacities of African cities and their positions within a globalised economy?”29

Although all Northern NGOs claim to work on behalf of the poor in the South, not many have a specific policy concerning the urban poor. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Cordaid, a large Dutch NGO engaging in co-financing of structural development, social care, emergency aid as well as medical aid, in many countries of the South. Cordaid’s experience with urban NGOs and grass root communities is already more than twenty years old, but only recently this experience is being transformed into official policy. As can be expected from an NGO donor, the focus is entirely on empowering urban communities and local NGOs in order to provide (if unavoidable), but preferably to facilitate their access to essential public services, like secure housing tenure, personal security, education, health services, transport, small-scale credit, etc. Preferably an urban community is considered in all its aspects and needs, in a non-sectoral way. A recent internal policy document of Cordaid30 does not make explicit reference to research. However, short-term research provided the information for Cordaid’s31 1996 contribution to Habitat II: a bilingual (Spanish/English) systematisation of thirteen grass roots urban development experiences in nine countries of Latin America.32 This book is good evidence of the importance, both for likeminded 29 African NGOs at Istanbul: Report on the activities of the African NGO Habitat II Caucus at the United Nations Global Conference on Human Settlements, Dakar, October 1996, page 19; italics added. 30 Stedelijke Leefbaarheid Cordaid, Concept kaderstuk, Januari 2000. 31 More exactly: Bilance, one of the three organizations that in 1999 merged into CORDAID. 32 Patrimonio Societal e Intervenciones Urbanas / Societal Patrimony & Urban Interventions, Trece experiencias


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NGOs and communities, as well as for donors and their constituencies, of a sound and accessible systematisation of experiences. Cordaid pursued its urban policy further at a very recent (June 2000) Two-day Urban Expert Meeting “Learning from the Ground”. This meeting brought together fifty stakeholders from both South and North, NGOs and government.33 Its conclusions and recommendations are reproduced in Annex G. They are very significant, not only because they were formulated by a variety of stakeholders, but especially because they stress the importance of an integrated, city-specific approach to tackle urban poverty, with the inclusion of several non-governmental, governmental and private sector actors. Although in the recommendations no specific mention of research as such is made, they are very helpful as a background to the idea we put forward in the next section. 5. Knowledge generation, policy research and research capacity building: food for thought for RAWOO involvement and comments on the first draft of this paper At the beginning of this paper, we put ourselves the following questions concerning knowledge generation, policy research and capacity building: - How can research and knowledge generation support problem solving capacities and initiatives in developing countries concerning the urban poor? - What could be the specificity and added value of a RAWOO initiative on urban poverty research? - How could RAWOO proposals to support initiatives in this field become acceptable to donors? Section 4 shows that there is a growing involvement among the main development actors with urban growth, urban sustainability and urban poverty issues. There is a consensus that rapid urban growth and poverty is nowadays a fact of life, which no human intervention can possibly stop. Also, there is a growing realization of two facts: first, that to combat poverty and to create sustainable cities local and national (and, for that be, also international) good governance is essential. Second, that in all these cities the poor themselves are somehow surviving, and that in this struggle for life they are using an incredible amount of creativity and energy. Well-intentioned external interventions should recognise this, and take not only the needs, but especially the ideas of the poor themselves as a starting point. This should be linked to recognition of local specificities and constraints Much research on urban (poverty) issues is already being done and/or proposed, and on a variety of specific subjects. It is therefore hard to identify a specific research theme that has not yet been tackled and on which RAWOO could make innovative proposals. Nevertheless, the experts who reacted to an earlier draft of this paper provided some interesting insights. Each reacted from her/his background: either academic, government (bi- and multilateral) or NGO-grassroots, the three main groups of stakeholders engaged and interested in knowledge generation on urban issues. i) The reactions from academics stressed the importance of further research on the real dimensions of worldwide urban poverty, partly in the light of inadequate statistical parameters. Research partnerships between Southern and Northern research institutions are essential, in order to help translate the knowledge needs put forward by Southern stakeholders into a feasible research agenda. Very important are the aspects of capacity building of all participants in urban poverty reduction programmes, so as to recognise the needs for (new) knowledge, foster research and finally assist and promote knowledge dissemination. Good research and adequate capacity building go hand in hand. ii) People working in (Northern) government and multilateral institutions stressed the importance of research on urban poverty issues being demand-driven. Important themes are urban insecurity and

en América Latina / Thirteen experiences in Latin America, Santiago de Chile 1996. 33 Cordaid Report Learning from the Ground, Urban Expert Meeting, The Hague 5-6 June 2000. Copies available through [email protected].


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violence, especially against the poor and as a consequence of hopeless poverty. The extremely rapid urbanisation in Africa is still little researched. Also, much more research is needed on the ways local government and poor communities interact, in the sense of enhancing the effective agenda setting by the poor concerning their own rights and needs as urban citizens. iii) People working with and for NGOs and grass root groups stress two things. The first is the need to know more about the ever weaker capacities of (local) governments to deal with the problems of the urban poor, in part as a consequence of globalisation and overall diminishing power of the state. And vice-versa: it is important to know more about how the poor organize themselves, often informally and even without external appearance, in order to survive individually and collectively in urban settings with little or no presence of formal government. The second, and this is very remarkable, is the importance of taking into consideration not only the present problems of urban poverty, but to try to ‘look into the future’ too. This means that (academic) research should try to foresee future urban trends and (scale and magnitude) of problems, before they actually occur. In a way, this entails the ‘agenda setting’ of future urban generations. An additional observation is, that when dealing with research at the level of (that means: with) poor urban communities, one should not limit oneself to research alone. In stead, research should wherever possible be combined with or integrated into concrete projects, even if small and with a limited range, so as to avoid local communities to be ‘used’ as research subjects and objects only. Concerning the methodology of organizing and executing urban research aimed at poverty reduction, not that of the future but of today, many relevant actors nowadays stress the importance of poverty reduction interventions and research, including distinct themes: functioning of local government, access to education, housing conditions, etc.. But at the same time they should take a whole urban community or neighbourhood as its focus, and considering all ‘sectoral’ aspects of poverty, in their locally specific combination and including all the relevant links of the community with its surroundings (the interface of the micro- and the meso-levels, see figure 5). It is here, we feel, that the principal agenda setting process of urban poverty research could best take place, involving all relevant actors, from the poor community as well as from local government and others. In our opinion, such a city-specific approach should be more promoted, as it is a contribution to highly relevant research. Such research should definitely include in its methodology ways and means to guarantee the access to and the adequate use of the outcomes and results by the principal stakeholders: the organisations of the urban poor themselves and their supporters. How could the Dutch ‘development community’ contribute to the further development of urban poverty reduction research, taking into account the principle of ‘demand driven’ and agenda setting in consultation with stakeholders in the South? One of the major assets of Dutch development cooperation, which has grown out of forty years’ experience, is the enormous and very varied network of personal and institutional contacts with people and organizations of the South working with and on behalf of the poor in their own country. Although much of Dutch development cooperation has always been directed to rural poverty, a growing portion of Southern experts works with and on behalf of the urban poor. The most significant groups would be: a) Those originating from the activities of the Netherlands International Education Institutes. Of these, the most concerned with urban issues are the Institute of Housing Studies (IHS) in Rotterdam, the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC) in Enschede (with its Urban Information Systems, Urban Planning and Management and the Urban Land Administration training courses), and the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering (IHE) in Delft (concerned with water and sanitation). There are many thousands of alumni (ex-trainees) of these institutes all over the world, a considerable portion of them working in urban policy areas. In several countries, they have joined into Alumni Associations. The IHS alumni for instance, have associations in 31 countries in South and East, with whom IHS maintains regular contacts.


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b) The project and programme partners in many countries in the South of the Dutch co-financing organizations Cordaid, ICCO, Novib, Hivos, as well as of smaller donors like Solidaridad, Kerken in Aktie, Dorkas. Also, the 30 Dutch organizations participating in PSO (Personele Samenwerking met Ontwikkelingslanden34), as well as SNV, who send Dutch volunteers to several countries all over the world, part of whom work in urban settings. Together, these organizations have many hundreds of contacts with urban NGOs and grass root groups, all operating in specific settings and with a very good knowledge of local issues that would need further research into. c) The twinning initiatives between Dutch cities and cities in the South and East, coordinated by the Habitat Platform, hosted by the Vereniging van Nederlandse Gemeenten35 (VNG). Here direct contacts are made with city officials in Southern countries. Also, the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA), with its Secretariat in the Netherlands is a significant potential partner. d) The Dutch embassies in the development cooperation priority countries should also act as sources of information about potential demand for urban poverty reduction research. e) Finally, one should not forget that the Dutch Directorate-General for International Cooperation (DGIS) has already experience with so-called multi-year, broad-based, location-specific and multidisciplinary research programmes in eight countries in the South, where the research agenda (albeit not specifically on urban issues) is being determined principally by local senior researchers. From here also valuable contacts concerning urban issues could arise. From all these ‘overseas’ contacts of the Netherlands a sufficiently strong and varied caucus of Southern urban experts could arise. This could assist RAWOO and Dutch development cooperation to determine and formulate with greater exactness the relevance, feasibility, conditions and aims of the idea of pursuing an urban research agenda setting process as suggested above, including the possibility of creating city-specific urban poverty reduction knowledge and capacity building facilities. Discussion paper prepared for RAWOO by Dr Fabio Poelhekke, consultant (www.antenna.nl/dialogos) ([email protected]) October 2000 ANNEX In order to produce some more food for thought for the RAWOO, principally, the author of this paper has tried to elaborate a little more on the issue of organizing the agenda setting process, and its subsequent implementation, at the individual city level. The idea consists of organizing research agenda setting consultations with stakeholders in selected Southern cities, with the concrete perspective of promoting the creation of poverty reduction knowledge generation facilities in these cities. Such facilities would focus on the interaction between the micro-level of low-income households and organised communities and the meso-level of the city they live in and its immediate surroundings. The research agenda of this city-knowledge facility would be defined considering the knowledge and information needs of all stakeholders engaged in urban

34 ‘Staff cooperation with developing countries’ 35 ‘Association of Dutch Local Governments’


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poverty reduction and alleviation: communities, NGOs, governmental services, also the private sector and the middle-class, if possible even the elite. While the interests of the poor should always be the driving factor, the research activities (knowledge and information gathering) would involve all relevant stakeholders, including existing local research capacity (universities, schools, etc.). As much as possible, the facility should depend on local researchers, assisted (on a preferably temporary basis) by researchers from other cities in the South or from the North. On a permanent basis there should be networking with relevant research centres in the North, as well as with similar knowledge facilities in other cities in the South. The research approach should focus on spatial integration, considering the ‘sectoral’ needs of poor communities (like income, shelter, health, etc.) in their combination, as they work out differently for distinct neighbourhoods and districts. The facility would become the city focal point for information on urban poverty reduction to be obtained from other cities, countries, institutions, etc., in other words, from what in figure 5 has been defined as the macro-level. This includes examples of good practices in other places, to be ‘translated’ for local use. A specific feature would be training of researchers, coordinators and local government officials in poverty reduction issues in close collaboration with relevant training centres in both the South and the North. Undoubtedly such a facility would function best in situations where local and national government have a honest and real commitment to urban poverty reduction, even if their actual capacities to address the problems are still low. Nevertheless, such a city-based knowledge facility should remain institutionally independent from political interference by powerful groups. Institutional independence can be found through the composition of the Board (including representatives of the poor, of NGOs, local government, local universities, national and foreign knowledge centres, as well as financial donors), as well as through the statutes, which put poverty reduction as the main priority for research. The facility of each city will be institutionally linked with the national research coordinating bodies, like the country’s Academy of Science, in order to guarantee its independence and its long-term embedding in national policies and in funding arrangements. What would be the advantages of having a poverty-focused research and training facility in one’s own city? We propose that this question be answered primarily by Southern stakeholders, whom the RAWOO would like to consult. Nevertheless, some advantages are obvious: - The facility could become the reference point for all actors engaged in poverty reduction and alleviation in their own city, where information and exchange of views go hand in hand with research; - There could be exchange of information between otherwise isolated initiatives of communities, NGOs, government services within one city; - When using information from the ‘macro-level’, this can be selected and adapted to local use and needs; - Research can be demand-driven and tailor-made: directly related to local needs and opportunities, and thus probably cost-effective; - Research can easily be organized inter-sectorally and multidisciplinary, because of its direct relationship to local issues; - Through personal contacts and (electronic) networking with likeminded institutions in both South and North the facility can be a permanent learning centre for everybody that is concerned with the situation of the poor in the city.

Documents

URBAN DEVELOPMENT POVERTY REDUCTION