INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN PURSUIT OF SUSTAINABLE CITIES

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ABSTRACT

1. N-AERUS members and, indeed, most people working in development cooperation - including relevant officials of development agencies - concerned with urban problems and issues are well aware of the problematic way in which development cooperation has proceeded up to now in this domain:

`human settlements' command a small minority of development funding quite disproportionate to the growing importance of towns and cities to the lives of the inhabitants of all developing countries and the deepening problems associated with urban development;
urban programmes and projects have typically proceeded through central government agencies that are not sufficiently close to the problems faced by local authorities and communities and who therefore misconstrue needs and problems associated with the management of project outputs;
there has been a heavy focus on the provision of urban infrastructure often technically quite inappropriate (sometimes at some distance from needs as locally perceived) and with inadequate attention paid to developing management capacities;
there has been (and continues to be) a set of assumptions about what is needed to improve urban conditions with little or no research into how best to understand the processes of urbanisation, what the real needs are, as locally perceived and in accordance with solidly grounded criteria, what the deeper impediments are to satisfying those needs and how best to overcome these impediments.

2 There seems to be some movement towards redressing this situation, responding to several stimuli including the realisation of the fact of rapid urbanisation, the growing seriousness of urban poverty and the links between urban development and the growing problematic of `sustainable development'.

Agencies that hitherto carried out urban projects in a sectoral way without a policy context are producing policies within which to develop their assistance in urban areas in a more coherent way. Eg SIDA and the Swiss Development Corporation have published such policies and the EC commissioned the production of guidelines for development assistance in urban programmes and projects. The World Bank World Development Report 1999/2000 has a heavy focus on urban development.
There is evidence of some (as yet small amounts) of agency funding going into research into relevant aspects of urbanisation and urban development to provide intelligence for the development of their own urban programmes. Cases include DFID research on the peri-urban interface (urban expansion into rural hinterlands), BMZ (German Development Ministry) research into participatory approaches to urban development in Asia and OECD research into urban-rural economic linkages in West Africa.
As an approach to overcoming the inadequacies of top-down urban projects, some agencies are supporting programmes of `decentralised cooperation', assisting municipality-to-municipality cooperation and the activities of NGOs working particularly at the sub-municipal (community) level. Examples include the EC URBS programmes and decentralised cooperation budget line. The Dutch and French governments are also giving assistance to their municipal associations and to individual municipalities to conduct programmes of cooperation with individual southern municipalities. The UN agencies (UNDP, UNCHS, UNICEF, etc.) and the World Bank are moving significantly towards more direct support of activities at municipal and sub-municipal levels.
Particular attention is being paid to the urban environment with an apparent eye on the problematic of sustainable development. Unfortunately, however, this is practically all focused on the `brown agenda' (pollution abatement, solid waste management, etc.) with little understanding of the broader issues of sustainable urban development.

3 There is clearly still a long way to go before the importance of the need for assistance in sustainable urban development and the need for coherent approaches at the level of the community, the city and the urban region are given their full due by the development agencies. Here are some suggestions with regard to matters that need to be addressed:

A major reason for agencies avoiding urban projects is the complexity of working in urban areas and the problems that have arisen in attempting isolated projects. Even integrated urban projects that do not connect with the national system of urban development and related decision-making are inadequate. Agencies should choose individual countries (or regions) to develop coherent urban programmes. Individual cities might then join the programme with projects suited to local priorities within the more general context.
Within this framework research is needed at various levels: to gain a perspective on the general processes of urban development, to understand regional and national urban systems and to gain an understanding of local situations as a basis for determining real needs upon which effective projects can be built.
Decentralised cooperation (involvement of northern municipalities and NGOs) has substantial potential for overcoming the problems of top-down approaches to cooperation at the urban level. However, there is an urgent need to ensure that personnel involved in cooperation have the right attitude and capacities, including a proper understanding of the very different conditions prevailing as between northern and southern cities and appropriate ways of addressing problems arising within these conditions.
Participatory approaches are fashionable, but very difficult to get right. These are not just social interventions but have essential political and cultural dimensions that must be faced up to consciously and consistently. Involvement of women, the poor, excluded ethnic groups, etc. is often difficult and requires skill to deal with adequately.
Urban projects cannot reasonably be expected to succeed unless they are planned as open-ended collaboration exercises. They should be expected to start in a low-key way to develop appropriate working relations and then to develop small-scale initiatives and only where these are demonstrably appropriate to then make large-scale investments such as in major urban infrastructure as a `scaling up' of earlier initiatives. Such projects may not work and should be abandoned if this becomes evident.
There is an urgent need for `sustainable development' to become better defined at the outset of urban interventions. In its elementary form this simply means that all interventions should be aware of the longer-term implications of what they are doing and not just take quick decisions to resolve immediate problems that result in even bigger problems in the future. They must also consciously include the problematic of achieving less socially and economically divided cities.

ESF/N-AERUS: International workshop - Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000

N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net