Empowerment through mistrust?

Institutional analysis and informal urban settlements: A proposition for a new institutionalist grounded property rights perspective

BackgroundThe potential of antenatal care for reducing maternal morbidity and improving newborn survival and health is widely acknowledged. Yet there are worrying gaps in knowledge of the quality of antenatal care provided in Tanzania. In particular, determinants of health workers' performance have not yet been fully understood. This paper uses ethnographic methods to document health workers' antenatal care practices with reference to the national Focused Antenatal Care guidelines and identifies factors influencing health workers' performance. Potential implications for improving antenatal care provision in Tanzania are discussed.MethodsCombining different qualitative techniques, we studied health workers' antenatal care practices in four public antenatal care clinics in the Kilombero Valley, south-eastern Tanzania. A total of 36 antenatal care consultations were observed and compared with the Focused Antenatal Care guidelines. Participant observation, informal discussions and in-depth interviews with the staff helped to identify and explain health workers' practices and contextual factors influencing antenatal care provision.ResultsThe delivery of antenatal care services to pregnant women at the selected antenatal care clinics varied widely. Some services that are recommended by the Focused Antenatal Care guidelines were given to all women while other services were not delivered at all. Factors influencing health workers' practices were poor implementation of the Focused Antenatal Care guidelines, lack of trained staff and absenteeism, supply shortages and use of working tools that are not consistent with the Focused Antenatal Care guidelines. Health workers react to difficult working conditions by developing informal practices as coping strategies or "street-level bureaucracy".ConclusionsEfforts to improve antenatal care should address shortages of trained staff through expanding training opportunities, including health worker cadres with little pre-service training. Attention should be paid to the identification of informal practices resulting from individual coping strategies and "street-level bureaucracy" in order to tackle problems before they become part of the organizational culture.

Introduction Service delivery and representation in informal settlements often exhibit a hybrid governance system, encompassing both formal and informal mechanisms. While formal governance structures, such as municipal authorities, are typically emphasized, their absence or inadequacy does not equate to a governance void. Instead, a diverse array of non-state actors, including resident-led initiatives and local service providers, frequently step in to fill the service delivery gaps. These informal actors create a networked governance system through self-organization and collaboration, often responding to the immediate needs of residents. This research aims to uncover and document the nature and dynamics of these informal governance practices within informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. By acknowledging and understanding the contributions of these informal actors, we value them and move beyond viewing them as temporary aberrations or unintended consequences of state failure. Methodology This study employed qualitative research methodology, utilizing in-depth interviews with 36 informal service providers operating in the education, healthcare, water, sanitation, and solid waste management sectors. These service providers were selected based on their history of serving vulnerable populations, including older persons, persons with disabilities, and child-headed households, and had been operational for at least eight years. Additionally, four local leaders from two urban informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, were interviewed. Data from the transcribed interviews were analyzed using thematic framework analysis, informed by Ostrom’s framework of self-governance, which provides a conceptual lens for understanding the management of common pool resources. Results We identified key crosscutting informal governance strategies in service delivery, including clear boundaries, alignment with local needs, effective resource management, collaborative decision-making, monitoring, appropriate sanctions, conflict resolution, and external recognition. However, challenges such as poor accountability, inadequate leadership, lack of political will, and unclear policies hindered the effectiveness of these informal governance structures. To address these challenges, results uncovered the need to focus on enhancing accountability, strengthening leadership, fostering consensus, clarifying policies, and promoting inclusive participation in service delivery. Conclusion The intricate governance of basic services in informal settlements is largely driven by informal practices and structures. Strengthening these structures alongside recognizing and valuing them is key. By documenting, acknowledging and supporting these informal governance structures, we can create a more equitable and sustainable service delivery systems for residents of informal settlements in Nairobi and beyond.

While public administration scholars argue that core values of social equity are exceedingly important in service provision, less is known of how these values are practised on the frontline in the contemporary public administration. Research points to a dual trend: together with practices aimed at increasing clients’ wellbeing, public service workers’ decisions about allocating public resources are guided by moral perceptions of worthiness, leaving behind the most weakened populations. The current study aims to decipher this duality, analyzing street-level bureaucrats’ decisionmaking about providing personal resources to low-income clients, in order to examine whether the pursuit of social equity is manifested in informal practices. Drawing on indepth qualitative interviews of social service providers in Israel, we found that decisionmaking about personal resource provision is grounded in two distinct sets of values. Alongside a pattern of providing resources to deserving clients, street-level bureaucrats also provide them to clients typically considered undeserving. These latter practices are aimed at decreasing social inequality, demonstrating that social service providers often walk the talk of social equity.

This article examines the practice of assigning children places in public preschools when the number of places is limited. Enrolment procedures in four Polish municipalities are analysed to uncover processes involved in the construction of local social citizenship. The conceptualisation of local social citizenship is based on linking a local welfare regime perspective and street-level bureaucracy. I explore how local enrolment regulations, street-level bureaucracy and discourses in municipalities contribute to universalist Marshallian or a duty-based model of active social citizenship. I argue that when there is a severe shortage of preschool places, the combination of traditional discourse of the preschool as ‘help for working mothers’ together with neoliberal activation discourse affects both formal regulations and informal practices, resulting in the exclusion of children of unemployed and precariously employed parents. In municipalities where there is not a lack of preschool places, however, these discourses affect the ideal of the local parent-citizen.

Global South scholars emphasize the importance of informal settlements in the urban lives of disadvantaged residents. In a similar vein, scholars in the Global North highlight the significance and potential of manufactured homes and manufactured housing communities to provide affordable housing. Although manufactured housing communities and informal housing settlements differ in many ways, they share a history of being ignored as crucial avenues for addressing housing affordability and social mobility challenges. Residents of manufactured housing communities and informal settlements also face the challenge of precarious security of tenure. This Global South-influenced review aims to unsettle narrow assumptions about policy needs in manufactured housing communities and to offer alternative ways to support residents with precarious tenure through heterodox policy approaches. In addition to examining the key similarities, the review discusses the attempts to address the insecure housing tenure of residents of informal settlements in the Global South and their potential lessons for new urban possibilities in the Global North. The Global South experience shows how a narrow debate over tenure in informal settlements, particularly through the legalization of individual land titles, has been successfully broadened into a richer, complementary set of policy alternatives that includes de jure property rights, de facto property rights, perceptions of tenure security, and building legitimacy. The experience is particularly relevant for improving living conditions and strengthening tenure in the Global North’s informal manufactured housing communities. It also offers lessons for formal manufactured housing communities, including land-lease parks.

In this study of households living in informal settlements in three principal Chinese cities, we analyze the associations between informality, property rights, and poverty. We propose that informality can be understood in terms of property rights (presence/absence, strength, completeness, and ambiguity). Drawing on the property rights (entitlements) theories of Sen, de Soto, Ostrom, Alchian, and Coase, we refine a list of property rights effects that can be tested empirically. Using a household questionnaire survey of 1,208 respondents from a representative sample of 60 urban villages in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, we use robust regression models to detect statistical relationships between household performance on six poverty domains as a function of four property rights domains, controlling for income, human capital, and other influences. We find evidence for what we call Sen effects and de Soto effects. Our models show that some property rights are associated with lower poverty indicators. But we also find evidence to show that the absence, weakness, or ambiguity of property rights also reduce poverty indicators on particular domains, through what we assume to be a substitution effect. Informal settlements permit poorer household to live at lower costs than is usually, or officially, acceptable, and thus spend more on other welfare-enhancing expenditures. The distribution of property rights determines the size, distribution, and impacts of these trade-offs and shapes the economic and social performance of informal settlements.

Informal settlements, where groups of asylum-seekers, refugees, or internally displaced people settle in self-identified, spontaneous locations, often lack basic services and are highly vulnerable to climate-driven risks. Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, driving significant research attention to issues such as property rights and governance strategies. However, the lack of large-scale location and boundary data for informal settlements poses a major obstacle to conducting in-depth quantitative analyses. Existing approaches to identifying informal settlements have been constrained to individual cities or districts due to their reliance on costly imagery, field survey, and localized expertise. To address this gap, we develop a novel, global framework to identify permanent informal settlements using satellite imagery and publicly available datasets. First, building footprint and nighttime light datasets were combined to isolate human settlements with low energy availability, effectively narrowing the focus to potential settlement areas and significantly reducing computational costs. Next, leveraging high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery, we estimated the similarity of each pixel's spectral principal components to those of high-confidence samples, allowing us to distinguish informal settlements from broader human settlement areas. Finally, nearly 10,000 informal settlement points provided by the United Nations were used to refine our results, ensuring that only officially recognized informal settlements were retained. This fast and scalable framework overcomes the data scarcity challenges typically faced in resource-poor regions, where informal settlements are most prevalent. The results of this study provide an unprecedented foundation for deeper quantitative analyses of informal settlement areas, supporting global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and address urban vulnerabilities.

Participation in property formation: Insights from land-use planning in an informal urban settlement in Tanzania

ABSTRACTThe paper analyses the origins of Russia's statist-patrimonial political economy, marked by insecure property rights and particularistic state-business relations. Based on in-depth interviews, the paper argues that statist-patrimonial capitalism is not only a result of top-down activity of the state sovereign and its corrupt agents but is also a system that rests on the bottom-up contribution of the bulk of economic actors - small and medium-sized firms. This contribution happened - often inadvertently - through informal practices that locked small firms in the ‘informality trap' and undermined the security of property. Back in the 1990s some of those informal practices were taken up by companies out of expediency. In the 2000s informality backfired as the state exploited it to violate property rights of virtually any business actor. Thus the advent of statist-patrimonial capitalism was facilitated, among other factors, by the informal choices and practices of business actors in the previous decade.

This article employs Taiwan's institutions for intellectual property rights (IPR) to explain two aspects of Taiwan's foreign direct investment behavior: the location of offshore sites for Taiwanese research and development, and investment by Taiwanese venture capitalists. The article first describes the evolution of Taiwan's informal IPR practices that differ from the ideal typical IPR regime supposedly required for economies as technologically sophisticated as Taiwan's. Essentially, Taiwan has developed informal practices to protect corporate IPR that are centered on internal corporate mechanisms rather than external formal legal mechanisms. Relying on these informal practices, the article discusses how Taiwan has invested in technology-intensive activities in locations where IPR protection is weak. This behavior stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of multinationals from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

Legal Aspects of Tenure and Housing Finance in Informal Settlements: Law and Practice from Indian States

The Kenyan legal framework accords robust safeguards to private property rights. It is only in few cases that these rights may be limited. In Kenya, many informal settlements are on private land, which can limit the ability of residents to access life-saving basic services. Here, we explore how a public health emergency in Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, gave rise to a redefinition of private property, security of tenure and delivery of water and sanitation. We suggest that “everyday emergency” of public health threats in informal settlements offers an opportunity to ensure that property and planning norms deliver rights to both secure tenure and human health. Ultimately, we explore the place of public health in (re)negotiating for land rights in Nairobi, particularly to ensure that the urban poor can express their rights to health and well-being and assess what this portends for planners in their quest to upgrade informal settlements.

Property rights in informal settlements

Public housing estate renewal programmes increasingly require that tenants move from their homes to enable redevelopment; a process we refer to as renewal-initiated tenant relocation. While there is an extant body of research that reveals how forced relocation can have negative health and well-being impacts for tenants, limited attention has been given to the policies and practices that shape the relocation process, specifically the role of frontline staff. In this paper, we examine the role of relocation officers—staff responsible for managing renewal-initiated tenant relocation—in New South Wales and Victoria, Australia. We argue that relocation officers operate as specialised street-level bureaucrats responsible for enacting policy on-the-ground. Relocation officers navigate formal policy frameworks, organisational structures, and individual tenant needs through relationship-building, and the exercise of discretion, flexibility, and informal practices. Renewal-initiated tenant relocation is shaped by local autonomy and team culture, the skills and experiences of relocation officers, and their capacity to engage in intra- and inter-departmental negotiations.