Venice - March 11-12 1999
Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management
in the Context of Developing Countries
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International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries |
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Peter Schubeler (WAP, Werkstat fur Architectur und Planung Ag., Zurich)
"Concepts and Strategies of Urban Development: the Issue of Hegemony"
Professional and academic thinking about urban management in developing countries is re-plete with key words and concepts which first achieved currency in World Bank and UNDP publications. Assistance programmes of development agencies around the world are similarly permeated. Is this leadership, or hegemony? Do concepts propagated by the main develop-ment agencies liberate potentials and enhance development cooperation? Or do they actually stifle initiatives, limit options and reduce development potentials?
To facilitate the discussion of this issue in Workshop 2, it would be useful to consider:
This paper gives some rapid responses to these questions based on personal impressions and a quick look at the policy documents and thus derives a tentative response to the "hegem-ony" issue. The paper's argument is roughly hewn and is intended only to stimulate discus-sion.
Concepts and strategies
The World Bank
Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank viewed "urban" as a field of development activity with its own particular problems (e.g. rapidly expanding under-served squatter settlements) and risks (e.g. dangerous levels of urban poverty). As distinct from mainline economic development, the urban programme was primarily concerned with satis-fying "basic needs" and projects focused mainly on access to services (water and sanitation), housing (site and service schemes) and improvement of living conditions (slum clearance). Efforts were made to institutionalise urban programmes at the national level but, with few ex-ceptions such as the KIP, they remained fairly peripheral activities which served to mitigate negative impacts of structural adjustment and liberal economic policies-safety valves in po-litically explosive settings.
In 1991 the World Bank devised a new rationale for its urban development programme based on a fresh appreciation of the role which cities play in the national economy. As a spa-tially defined economic system, cities interact with the national economy through financial, fiscal and real sector linkages. From this perspective, the significance of urban projects lay not only in their immediate effects on the population but, more importantly, in their macro-economic impact. The central aim of the urban programme was to improve the productivity of the urban economy and, in consequence, the national economy. Related aims were to improve the productivity of the urban poor, reverse the deterioration of the urban environment and im-prove the analytical basis of urban development thorough research.
With the shift of focus from neighbourhood investments to productivity enhancement, urban management acquired new significance. Earlier, output-oriented programmes often cre-ated special agencies (such as development authorities) which, while increasing implementa-tion efficiency, weakened municipal institutions by sapping their staff, resources and power. By contrast, productivity enhancement required the strengthening of municipal institutions in the areas of city-wide infrastructure management, regulatory frameworks, resource mobilisa-tion and financial services for urban development.
This more systemic approach to urban development greatly increased the policy implica-tions of urban projects. Urban loans could be tied to "agreed" policy changes (conditionalities)-aimed, for the most part, at freeing the markets for land, credit and other factors. Furthermore, the impact of Bank loans could be multiplied (leveraged) by channelling them through larger domestic flows of public spending.
In practice, these strategic instruments proved somewhat problematic. Although the ap-proach was justified by a comprehensive systemic view, leverage required a precisely located "fulcrum". The need to influence complex development processes through a few policy meas-ures produced a tendency to perceive problems in function of the anticipated solutions. For example, policy measures proposed to free market constraints were not always relevant to in-formal markets segmented by various non-economic factors. Furthermore, the need to channel loans through sizeable and predictable flows of domestic funds predisposed an orientation to-wards national-level, public-sector, supply-oriented approaches as opposed to local-level, pri-vate-sector, informal, demand-oriented approaches which would, in many cases, be more relevant. Finally, where other incentives were lacking, it was questionable that "leveraged" improvements could actually build management capacity; the opposite impact was equally likely.
The World Bank is presently engaged in another important revision of its urban develop-ment programme, the point of departure being a further expansion of the concept of the city. More than an economic entity, the city is now seen-much like a country-as an integral unit with its own spatial, social, political, environmental, financial and economic context. The in-creased importance of cities is justified by global trends such as political and fiscal decentrali-sation and a refocusing of government's role towards facilitating markets and promoting sta-bility. The rationale for this approach is that overall developmental objectives will only have the desired impact on the national economy when they are adapted and implemented at the municipal level-"where policy meets the people". Cities are thus advanced from constituents of macro-economic development, to agents of development in their own right.
An important consequence of this upgrading is that it is no longer adequate to project na-tional development goals onto cities. Goals and, indeed, development vision needs to be elaborated at the level of cities (or urban regions) in order to guide development assistance.
The Bank's proposed vision of sustainable urban development comprises four objectives or criteria:
Within this holistic approach urban management becomes an integral development objec-tive, not merely a means or condition for achieving broader macro-economic aims. The ap-proach is to be applied though four components or "building blocks" of strategy:
It is not yet clear how the new strategy will affect the Bank's understanding of its own role in the development process. On the one hand, the vision is an expression of the Bank's core objectives, and strategy is defined in terms of its analytical, technical and financial in-puts. The Bank still sees itself as "the only international agency with a global and an opera-tional perspective on urban issues." On the other hand, the new strategy is presented as a re-sponse to client demands. Criticism is noted regarding the Bank's "excessive conditionalities" and "insensitivity to local conditions". Urban strategy formulation would involve all major stakeholders and the resulting strategy is expected to be "wholly owned" by local counter-parts. The emphasis on long-term commitments, flexible "learning and innovation loans" and "wholesaling" arrangements for capacity building imply a new model of change.
UNDP
Since 1971, UNDP has distinguished two categories of urban projects: 1) directly targeted projects to improve urban planning, service provision, housing and infrastructure and income generation, and 2) other activities such as regional infrastructure and facilities which benefit urban residents indirectly by promoting urban development. As in the case of the World Bank, "urban" designated a particular field of development activity.
Projects were normally accompanied by technical assistance aimed at improving the ca-pacity of governments and other stakeholders (including NGO) to undertake urban develop-ment activities. However, these inputs were generally short-term. The main focus remained on outputs and, as the UNDP has concluded, their impact on institutional capacity was slight.
Like the World Bank, UNDP revised its urban development strategy in 1991. The point of departure was a clarification of the concept of city as a "complex dynamic system of interac-tions among people, built environment and natural environment" in which cultural, social, psychological and ecological aspects are as important as the economic. The new approach re-defines economic growth as a means for enhancing lives of all humans; "human development" is defined as an enlargement of the range of choices available to people in all spheres of their lives. The resulting "people-centred" framework for urban policy focused on five objectives:
Urban management is thus seen as an objective in its own right, not merely a means to other objectives. Efforts to implement this strategy involved a shift from project activities to-wards support to multi-year programmes, and a reorientation of support from national to local governments. To implement this new strategy, UNDP has established several regional and global programmes, including:
The model of change underlying these programmes can be described as "learning ap-proach". For example, UMP originally concentrated on disseminating knowledge of manage-ment methods and techniques to municipal managers. The Programme has subsequently been decentralised and the approach, based mainly on city consultations, has become more partici-patory. LIFE incorporates the concept of learning as a two-way process. Change is promoted through a flow of communication between central government and local actors: 1) central government facilitates local development activities ("upstream"); local actors initiate devel-opment activities (down-stream), the lessons of local activities are fed into municipal and na-tional policy making (up-stream).
The UNDP approach has evolved progressively, but it still has weaknesses. Firstly, al-though institutional development is a central aim, it is not clear that the programme activities employ a solid understanding of the conditions and processes of institutional development. Secondly, the flexible and open-ended "learning" approach results in unclear project objec-tives. Finally, the projects tend to be overly ambitious, with relationship between objectives, resources and the available time.
Conclusions
In the past decades, key concepts advanced by the World Bank and UNDP in their urban programmes appear to have been converging. However, the significance of these concepts has actually differed due to their application in very different development approaches. Crudely put, the Bank's "leveraged" approach relates concepts to an analytical framework and em-ploys them as instruments to define the conditions of cooperation. By contrast, the UNDP's "learning" approach relates concepts to development ideals and employs them as heuristic de-vises to identify specific objectives.
Nonetheless, the World Bank's recent interest in a "holistic" approach to cities and more participatory models of change reflect strategies which UNDP introduced in 1991. A new phase of convergence may lie ahead.
Both agencies have certainly played "driving roles" in the field of urban management through their conceptual, analytical and developmental contributions. Need we speak of "he-gemony"? In the case of UNDP, certainly not. However, the World Bank's understanding of its own role in national development processes and the strategies it employs to implement this role do reveal a hegemonic calling. At the national level, this approach implies risks. In fact, professionals in more than one developing country consider the net effect of the Bank's as-sistance to be negative.
Globally, the fact that similar concepts have been applied in quite different strategies seems to imply that there is no real risk of hegemony. And, considering the announced changes in the Bank's urban policy, one may even ask "who is influencing whom?" But again, its not the words, or even the concepts, but the strategic actions which count.