Stakeholders’ partnership approach to infrastructure provision and management in developing world cities: lessons from the Sustainable Ibadan project

Abstract

In recent decades unprecedented urbanization has constituted a huge challenge to urban infrastructure development and management in most developing countries. Meanwhile, the appropriateness of conventional urban planning approaches to the improvement of urban environmental conditions in the face of deteriorating urban environment have often been questioned. It became inevitable to search for new approaches particularly in the context of low-income urban communities. International organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) have subsequently initiated strategies to evolve a participatory approach to the development and management of the urban environment. One of such strategies is the Sustainable City Programme (SCP) which aims to provide municipal authorities and city stakeholders in the public, private and community sectors with an enhanced capacity for environmental planning and management. The programme is being implemented in several cities in parts of the developing world, including Ibadan – the Sustainable Ibadan Project (SIP) – in Nigeria. This paper examines the partnership approach to urban environmental infrastructure improvement, development and management as represented by the SIP. The relevance of the participatory partnership approach of the SIP for cities in parts of developing regions is examined. The paper implicitly stresses that bottom-up participatory stakeholder partnership is a strategy capable of enlisting the financial, material resources and expertise of various sectors of the urban community towards the improvement of urban environmental infrastructure. The paper presents preliminary findings of a study. Although traditional appraisal techniques were not employed, nonetheless, the paper presents a discussion of the processes and dynamics of the SIP on the basis of which some useful lessons may be drawn.