State effectiveness and the politics of urban development in East Africa
East Africa is one of the least urbanised but fastest urbanising regions in the world. Even among countries experiencing this fundamental shift under similar economic conditions, governments in are responding to the strain on their cities in very different ways, with profound implications for development both within and beyond the city. Moreover, the strategies and tactics political actors adopt to deal with the new challenges and demands created by urbanisation impact not only on urban development but on the nature of the state itself. Little comparative research has been done to explore why and how governments reshape both cities and states differently in response to similar urban challenges.
The rapidly growing cities of Kampala (Uganda) and Kigali (Rwanda) face comparable urban environmental and development challenges with highly constrained resources, as well as sharing similar policies on how do deal with them. Despite this, the outcomes of recent efforts to control and shape the cities’ development differs markedly between the two, with the state in Rwanda displaying a remarkably high level of effective implementation relative to that in Uganda. This PhD argues that the reasons for this sit squarely in the realm of politics rather than bureaucratic capacity. While much of the discourse around ‘state effectiveness’ is concerned with questions of policy and capacity, this project takes a different approach by exploring stark differences in policy implementation even between countries that are both relatively weak bureaucratically. Through an examination of efforts to implement urban planning, regulate the informal economy and generate local state revenues, it analyses the patterns of political bargaining and intervention that underpin the relative effectiveness of the state in each case. In so doing it aims to contribute to academic and policy discourses on both urban governance and state-building.
This PhD is funded by a collaborative scholarship from the ESRC and Oxfam GB under the ESRC CASE scheme.
Supervisors
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Professor James Putzel and Professor Jo Beall
Research interests
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Urbanisation and urban development;
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Urban politics and conflict
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Decentralisation and governance in fragile situations
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State-building at local and national levels
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East Africa.
Publications
Beall, J., T. Goodfellow and J. Putzel. 2006. ‘Introductory Article: On the Discourse of Terrorism, Security and Development’, Journal of International Development, 18(1), pp. 51-67.
Goodfellow, Tom and Wendy Taylor. 2009. ‘Urban poverty and vulnerability in Kenya’, Oxfam GB Briefing Note, September.
Goodfellow, Tom. 2010. ‘’The Bastard Child of Nobody’? Anti-planning and the institutional crisis in contemporary Kampala’, Crisis States Research Centre Working Paper 67.2
Goodfellow, Tom, Jo Beall and Dennis Rodgers. 2010 (forthcoming). ‘Cities, conflict and state fragility’, Crisis States Research Centre Working Paper.
Languages
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English (Native Speaker),
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French (2S, 2W)
1 = basic; 2 = intermediate; 3 = fluent
Contact information
Tom Goodfellow
Research Associate, Crisis States Research Centre
Department of International Development
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC 2A 2AE
United Kingdom
Email: t.a.goodfellow@lse.ac.uk