Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Cirolia, L. R. (2020). Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Habitat International, 104, 102233. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2020.102233
Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Journal
Habitat International
ISSN/ISBN
0197-3975
DOI
10.1016/j.habitatint.2020.102233
Author(s)
Liza Rose Cirolia
Published year
Subject
Urban Studies
Abstract
The current global development agendas provide relatively little guidance on how the incredible challenge of sustainable urban development in Africa can and should be financed. This paper makes the case for understanding this development challenge at the nexus of urban governance and city infrastructure. Tracing African urban development trends over the post-colonial period, the paper makes three arguments. First, African cities experience fractured fiscal authority. Decentralization reforms have resulted in contested and complex city governance arrangements. Second, large scale infrastructure investments have been the focus of donors and investors. This has resulted in fragmented networks and systems. Finally, these two processes together have created fertile ground for the emergence of hybrid systems of service delivery in cities. This has implications for both how urban services are governed and their material arrangements. This reality, and the underlying processes which contributed to its production, are under-accounted for within global development discourses. In conclusion, it is crucial that new models of infrastructure finance are developed to respond to the fractured fiscal authority, fragmented infrastructure networks, and hybrid service delivery patterns which characterise African cities.
The study of fiscal geographies foregrounds the spatialities of fiscal instruments, such as taxes or bonds. Of central concern in the fiscal geographies literature are the ways that fiscal spaces are co-constituted with stateform and the built environment. Recent scholarship argues for ‘placing’ fiscal geographies in urban studies, drawing attention to the ways in which fiscal tools shape urban governance and the material development of city spaces. I build on this work, further placing fiscal geographies in the context of an ordinary city in Africa, Kisumu (Kenya). Inspired by conceptual and methodological debates within the ‘African urbanism’ literature, I provide a rich account of two ‘sites’ through which Kisumu’s fiscal geographies are given effect. First, I focus on the newly formed Kisumu County Government. The County represents a reterritorialization of urban authority. This authority is given substance, and contested, through fiscal instruments. Second, I focus on low-level bureaucrats. I foreground the relationship between fiscal policy and everyday practices. These two sites draw our attention to the multiple and relational logics at play in Kisumu’s fiscal geographies.
Cirolia, L. R. (2017). Negotiating Cities: Nairobi and Cape Town. In J. Rokem and C. Boano (Eds.) Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities. Routledge.
Platform: Cape TownType: Book chapterPublished year: