Nairobi is urbanizing rapidly and is facing enormous urban challenges, such as the growth of slums and increasing inequality. With such growing urban challenges however, responsibility for key urban governance issues is often fragmented amongst large numbers of government stakeholders with limited capacities and conflicting interests. Key urban governance stakeholders therefore need to be brought together in collaborative processes to jointly develop and implement new strategies that are based on a broader range of interests and meet a broader range of needs.
Nairobi is urbanizing rapidly and is facing enormous urban challenges, such as the growth of slums and increasing inequality.
In order to be able to do this, understanding actual urban governance processes, which are essentially about how different actors interact to make and operationalize decisions, is vitally important.
The basic objects of urban governance can include a wide range of issues, such as land use management, the provision of basic services, ensuring access/mobility and ensuring public health and safety. The diversity of governance actors and of agendas complicates addressing urban issues, but can also be seen as an opportunity for leveraging additional skills and resources through collaborative urban governance processes that bring different stakeholders together to develop and implement more holistic and inclusive strategies.
Governance does not occur for its own sake; there are particular objects, tangible or intangible, that are governed. Governance can be considered as collective practices addressing societal problems.
In an urban context these ‘problems’ are the collective issues that have always impacted on the lives of residents whenever large groups of people live in close proximity to each other, and include how to govern who can do what where, how to ensure access to water and sanitation and solid waste disposal, and how to ensure there is a well-functioning transport system.
The most basic object of urban governance is land allocation and land use management, which essentially is about who can do what where.
The second most basic object of urban governance is the provision and management of basic infrastructure/services, such as water, sanitation, and waste management.
A third key object of governance can be considered as the movement or accessibility system, which is essentially about how people and goods can get around from one part of the settlement to another—at its most basic, this will consist of footpaths and roads, while at a higher level there would be buses, trains, and so on.
Beyond these basic and widespread objects of urban governance, found in most contexts, there are also many other possible objects of urban governance, such as ensuring good health and well-being, ensuring safety from crime and violence, disaster risk management, education, social/cultural development, economic development, environmental management, and so on.
The most basic object of urban governance is land allocation and land use management, which essentially is about who can do what where.
Urban governance policy discourses are now connecting urban investments and regulation with macroeconomic imperatives, which could lead to a greater awareness of urban governance within centres of state power. There is a growing need to track, analyze and engage various processes on the urban scale in order to arrive at a propositional sensibility with regard to governing diverse spaces.
New policy concepts and frameworks can advance a more focused politics based on an analysis of the nature and terms of infrastructure investments and consider whether such investments are advancing a more inclusive, labour intensive and sustainable pattern of development in the city.