Municipal Actors Research Articles

Hybrid infrastructures, hybrid governance: New evidence from Nairobi (Kenya) on green-blue-grey infrastructure in informal settlements

In expanding informal neighborhoods of cities in sub-Saharan Africa, sustainable management of storm and wastewater drainage is fundamental to improving living conditions. Planners debate the optimal combination between "green" or natural infrastructure, traditional "grey" infrastructure, and "blue" infrastructure, which mimics natural solutions using artificial materials. Many advocate for small-scale, niche experiments with these approaches in informal settings, in order to learn how to navigate the intrinsic constraints of space, contested land tenure, participation, and local maintenance. This paper reports the benefits and limitations of implementing and managing local green, blue and grey infrastructure solutions in an urban informal setting. We studied ten completed public space projects that featured urban drainage infrastructure in the informal neighborhood of Kibera, Nairobi. The analysis drew from ten surveys with project designers and seven semi-structured interviews with site managers. The studied spaces featured different combinations of green, grey, and blue drainage infrastructure that have evolved over years of operation, maintenance, and change in the settlement. All projects featured participation in design, mixed design methods, hybrid infrastructure, and community governance models with potential to interact successfully with municipal actors. Results show that involvement in the co-development of small-scale green infrastructure changed people's valuation, perception, and stewardship of nature-based systems and ecosystem services. These results have implications for the larger scale adoption, integration, and management of urban drainage infrastructure. They also suggest that hybrid systems of infrastructure and governance constitute a resilient approach to incremental and inclusive upgrading.

Adaptando los ODS a lo Local mediante la Educación para el Desarrollo. La Experiencia de la Estrategia de la Ciudad de Valencia

This article presents the relationship between the Strategy of Non-Formal Development Education of the city of Valencia and the Sustainable Development Goals (sdg). The content of the Strategy is based on three fundamental axes: 1) a territorial approach in the neighbourhood or district; 2) the importance of coordination between municipal actors and ngdos to develop educational proposals and 3) a series of priority themes and methodologies. The correspondence of the Strategy with the sdgs has been interpreted using an analytical framework designed for transformative innovation. This interpretation distinguishes between sdgs that define socio-technical systems or areas of application; those that define directionality and those that indicate context conditions. This interpretation can contribute to increase the reflection on the transformatory potential of educational actions in a synergic way, avoiding compartmentalized perspectives. On the other hand, it highlights the importance of networks and coordination between actors in the city and its neighbourhoods. These are the spaces that need to be transformed and from which transformations can start.

Human rights encounters in small places: the contestation of human rights responsibilities in three Dutch municipalities

This article investigates engagements of local authorities with human rights in the field of irregular migration in a small town, medium-sized city and a rural municipality in the Netherlands. Although scholarship on human rights cities constitutes an important point of departure for this study, this article challenges the urban bias in this emerging body of research on the role of local authorities in processes of human rights localization. Drawing from theories of legal pluralism, scholarship on human rights practice and encounters and finally geographical insights, the article examines spatial dimensions of human rights practices of municipal actors in these three municipalities. More specifically, it investigates how in these municipalities the presence of and encounters with irregular migrants in local institutional spaces contribute to a local contestation of human rights responsibilities and examines how this process of contesting human rights responsibilities differs between these municipalities. The article draws on and develops scholarship on human rights encounters, by extending the scope beyond encounters at high seas and by explicating how power dynamics, temporalities and the sites of encounters can give rise to perceptions of duties that set these encounters apart from everyday sociabilities or encounters with difference. On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of municipal council documents and proceedings this study moreover found considerable differences with regard to how human rights responsibilities are contested locally by municipal actors. This study observed both differences among municipalities and differences among municipal actors within a single municipality in relation to these local understandings of human rights and perceptions of human rights responsibilities.

Assessment of barriers and drivers for implementation of blue-green solutions in Swedish municipalities

Due to increased urbanisation, and climate change, there have been calls for a more sustainable management of stormwater. Blue-green measures have been recognised as a sustainable solution and a necessary complement to pipe-bound approaches. The aim of this study is to identify barriers and drivers in the implementation of blue-green measures in a Swedish context, to increase the understanding of how they could be implemented in a more successful manner. The study is qualitative and based on semi-structured interviews. Through the lens of transition theory, barriers and drivers for blue-green measures were identified and they give an updated picture of Swedish urban stormwater management. Many factors encourage municipal actors to implement blue-green solutions, such as increased need for recreation, protection of biodiversity and climate change. Identified barriers are found within the municipal stormwater management it-self, but can also be found outside the storm water management structure, such as lack of knowledge among politicians, officials, exploiters and civilians, fragmented roles and responsibilities in general, as well as uncertainty of the effects and cost of new alternatives. The study has three main findings; Several barriers were mentioned by most of the interviewees clearly show that a wide range of changes are needed to alter the current stormwater management regime; Niche innovations are often put forward as a way to enhance socio-technical transition, but this study is that such an approach is over-simplified instead elaborated suggestions for an alteration of urban stormwater management is given, both with top-down and bottom-up perspective. For the success of blue-green solutions, educational efforts are important at different levels in the planning, building and maintenance process of blue-green solutions. Therefore, employees must have a good general knowledge of both blue and green issues as well as having contacts in the different sectors of the municipality. To conclude we argue that a transition can not only be induced by pilot projects but requires change in legal structures as well as altered financing models for blue-green solutions. Moreover, the ongoing, but slow, change should therefor probably be interpreted as a shift to a new regime, but rather an evolutionary transition where new approaches are combined with traditional, pipe-bound solutions.

Evaluation of the Effects of Health Impact Assessment (Hia) Practice in Monteregie

This study explores the effects of the collaborative model of health impact assessment (HIA), as deployed in Monteregie (Quebec), on the development, adoption and implementation of municipal projects that include health considerations. Nine HIA processes were studied in nine territories and 35 individuals were interviewed. Data collection was based on the six steps of contribution analysis, and included document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and on-site observations. The study design is cross-sectional design were every HIA was analysed at least six month after completion. The individuals interviewed where those implicated into the HIA process (no matter at what point of the process). No exclusion criteria were applied considering that all points of view were important for this analysis. The Contribution Analysis (CA) was used to analyze the data. The study results emerged form by the interviews, the field observations and document analysis. They showed that the HIAs had varying results. First, the actors involved acquired new knowledge. However, the HIAs had little impact in terms of increasing the municipal actors’ awareness of health issues. Rather, it helped them acquire arguments for raising awareness among and convincing their municipal council members of the merits of certain actions and their potential positive impacts on citizens’ health. In fact, the HIAs were generally undertaken by municipal actors already aware of the importance of promoting citizen health. Second, as observed in the document, in a few of the HIAs, some recommendations were integrated into planning documents, but usually, as reported by the actor, the HIA report constituted an additional planning document and was not merged with the original planning documents. Lastly, following the HIAs, document analysis and interviews showed that most of the municipal actors continued to include health considerations in their subsequent planning of public policies and projects. Prerequisites for effective HIA include the presence of municipal actors, who are aware of the importance of their role in their local population’s health, municipal policies that include health considerations, and the municipality’s active participation in the HIA process. This study sheds light on the complexity of the factors that ensure HIA impact on municipal decision making and decisions. The particularities of each HIA process play a major role.

EXTREME EVENTS, CLIMATE CHANGE AND ADAPTATION IN THE STATE OF SÃO PAULO

Abstract In this paper, we analyze secondary data from surveys focusing on climate change and adaptation in Sao Paulo municipalities. The survey was completed by municipal actors who work in 332 of the 645 municipalities in the State. In this paper, we use a theoretical framework on urban climate governance, which highlights the role that local governments play in proposing strategies to deal with climate change, to present and discuss data related to: 1) the occurrence of extreme climatic events in these municipalities; 2) the impacts of these events; 3) local government actors’ perception about climate change; and 4) local actions and responses. Our analysis of these data significantly contributes to better understanding how cities in the most populous and economically developed state in Brazil perceive, respond and deal with climate change and what critical challenges hamper climate adaptation in these cities.

Building collaboration from scratch: exploring mandated collaboration between healthcare insurers and municipalities

Introduction: Collaboration between public sectors is often understood as a way to manage the complex care challenges society faces [1–4]. However, it is also widely recognized as problematic due to the complexity involved with collaboration across organizational boundaries [5–7]. Paradoxically, intersectoral collaboration is thus seen as both problem and solution for care challenges. Thus far, research into intersectoral collaboration does not detail the micro-dynamics of organizational actors entering into, establishing, maintaining, altering or abandoning collaborative relations. More research is required to better understand the processes that take place when collaborating across sectoral boundaries [8,9] and the frictions involved with the establishment of new roles for the stakeholders involved. In 2015, the Dutch healthcare system was reformed and care tasks that used to be the responsibility of the central government were localized and transferred to healthcare insurers medical care and decentralized to municipalities social care. The government then required municipal actors and healthcare insurers to negotiate about the funding of integration between the social and medical domains [10]. Theory/methods: This paper draws upon a case in which care responsibilities are distributed between healthcare insurers and municipalities. The study methods comprised of participant observation of meetings and in-depth interviews with key informants. Analysing the collaborating stakeholders’ boundary work [11–13], i.e. the discursive practices people deploy in order to organize interaction across boundaries, can provide insight into micro dynamics involved in establishing cross-sector collaboration. Results: The analysis of the stakeholders’ discourse identified three interaction patterns actors deploy to organize this interaction across boundaries: 1 opposing patterns, 2 negotiating patterns, and 3 aligning patterns. Conclusion/discussion: This research elucidates the process of building collaboration about responsibilities in the health and social care fields that stakeholders did not enter voluntarily. The paper demonstrates how the involved actors shift from opposition towards each other to negotiating boundaries and eventually come to a strategic alignment, which includes new forms of opposition towards other stakeholders. Limitations/future research: This is a study of a single case of intersectoral collaboration. Future research could include more and different stakeholders such as healthcare providers.

Local responses to state-led municipal reform in the Finnish-Swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions

This paper scrutinises the intersections and collisions of different development discourses in the Kemi-Tornio sub-region which lies alongside the Finnish-Swedish border within the political context of municipal reform initiated by the Finnish government in 2011–2015. By drawing on cultural political economy and institutional regional theory, this paper studies how local actors utilize different development discourses produced at (and producing) different scales to justify or contest the municipal amalgamation within the Kemi-Tornio region. In addition, the specific interest is on the how local institutional environment, and border location in particular, are mobilized and strategically used in these processes. The results, based on policy documents and qualitative interviews with key municipal actors, highlight the coexistence of three different, yet overlapping development discourses. While some municipal actors support the state-led development discourse with justification of economic reasoning, there is a strong opposing discourse emphasising the region’s history, identity and municipal self-autonomy. The latter, interestingly, resonates with the EU’s cross-border co-operation discourse; offering an alternative development strategy. Together with the path-dependent regional history, this intersection creates unbalanced power relations between municipalities both with and without a state border. Thus, this paper illustrates how different scalar discourses and institutional structures are actively utilized in municipal reform processes.

User fees and the permeability of public space at municipal pools and bathhouses in New York City, 1870 – present

ABSTRACT This paper examines fees for access to New York City’s public swimming and bathing spaces from 1870 to the present. We argue that, beyond generating revenue and rationing space, charges for admission to public bathing spaces have served to condition how permeable those spaces were to various groups of potential users. Municipal actors involved in administering baths and pools have used fees to maintain and order these spaces; to distinguish between deserving and undeserving users; and to include and exclude participants in an ostensibly universal public. Over time, fees have been naturalized, erasing these motivations and giving cause to their outcomes. We problematize the fee in order to address both theoretical questions about the nature of public space and practical ones about how municipal administrators govern amidst competing pressures to serve, develop and regulate urban residents and their communities.

The challenge of systemic food change: Insights from cities

An emerging literature recognizes cities as the optimal scale for food policy innovation, pointing to their pervasive emphasis on the adoption of a systemic approach to address the complex socio-ecological issues that have disrupted the internal metabolism of the food system. To date, however, no empirical effort has been made to identify the meanings and goals attributed to such an approach by municipal actors who are concretely involved with its implementation. To begin to fill this gap, this paper analyzes data (collected through a semi-structured questionnaire and a focus group) from 33 cities across the globe as part of a project that aimed to understand how a systemic approach to food is interpreted and applied in different urban contexts and, more broadly, whether there is a gap between food systems theory and practice. The analysis highlights a widespread emphasis on food policy integration and on the creation of an inclusive governance context but it also uncovers low levels of engagement by city governments with key food system actors operating at higher governance scales. As the paper concludes, there are substantial knowledge gaps that raise the need for a new research and policy agenda focused on the dialectical relationships between ordinary food practices and infrastructural transformations to enhance understanding of the role of food in place-making processes and to meet the challenge of systemic food change.

Citizen engagement in South Africa: the case Prince Albert

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to gain insight in how South African local governments organize citizen engagement. The new South African constitution provides ways to construct and implement citizen engagement at local level. However, understanding citizen engagement at local level is still a challenge and municipalities search for proper structures and mechanisms to organize citizen engagement efficiently.Design/methodology/approachInterviews with different municipal actors were analyzed using a single case study method. As a primary unit of analysis, a specific project in which citizen engagement is organized was used. In addition, document analysis and a focus group were used to deepen understanding.FindingsThe findings reveal that citizen engagement is a viable strategy to identify the needs of the community if facilitated by a third party and that learning leadership is important when organizing citizen engagement.Originality/valueThe value of this research is the exploration of the citizen engagement process. It sheds light on the conditions that play a role when a local government organizes citizen engagement. As local governments search for ways to effectively organize and structure citizen engagement, insight into these conditions is helpful.

The politics of Estonia’s offshore wind energy programme: Discourse, power and marine spatial planning

There is growing recognition that marine spatial planning is an inherently political process marked by a clash of discourses, power and conflicts of interest. Yet, there are very few attempts to make sense of and explain the political practices of marine spatial planning protests in different contexts, especially the way that planners and developers create the conditions for the articulation of objections, and then develop new strategies to negotiate and mediate community resistance. Using poststructuralist discourse theory, the article analyses the politics of a proposed offshore wind energy project in Estonia within the context of the country’s marine spatial planning processes. First, through the lens of politicization, it explores the strategies of political mobilization and the rival discourses of expertise and sustainability through which residents and municipal actors have contested the offshore wind energy project. Secondly, through the lens of depoliticization, it explains the discursive and legalistic strategies employed by developers, planners and an Administrative Court to displace – spatially and temporally – the core issues of contestation, thus legitimizing the offshore wind energy plan. We argue that the spaces created by the pre-planning conjuncture offered the most conducive conditions for residents to voice concerns about the proposed project in a dialogical fashion, whereas the marine spatial planning and post-planning phases became mired in a therapeutic-style consultation, set alongside rigid and unreflexive interpretations and applications of legality. We conclude by setting out the limits of the Estonian marine spatial planning as a process for resolving conflicts, while offering an alternative model of handling such public controversies, which we call pragmatic adversarialism.

Surveying Municipal Data Systems in Ontario

Recent years have seen an increase in the public availability of various forms of municipal data, both in cities and in higher-level governments, in countries across the globe. Rural areas have been slower to engage with this developing technology. While several reasons have been proposed for this disparity, including a lack of municipal resources, a lack of interest, Internet accessibility issues, and more, the academic literature assessing this phenomenon remains thin. In this poster, we outline the literature that is available on this topic from across several countries. We also discuss a planned research project to survey municipal actors in order to understand how and why Ontario's rural communities are or are not engaging with newer data technologies.

„Nicht für Erich Honecker früher oder heute für Angela Merkel, sondern für sich selber“ – Eine Fallstudie zu ehrenamtlichen Engagementformen im ländlichen Raum zwischen gesellschaftspolitischen Ansprüchen und individuellen Wahrnehmungen

For several years now, volunteer activity has been increasingly placed at the center of a political discourse monopolizing it for politics of dealing with socio- and spatio-political problems. It is particularly in those rural regions affected by out-migration and an ageing population that volunteering is considered an advisable way for securing local public responsibilities. Based on a critical reflection and discussion of these political positions we plead for a subject-oriented research approach in order to understand regionally problematised conditions not primarily as static parameters, but as individually negotiated aspects of everyday life. Accordingly, voluntary activity is investigated in terms of individually perceived challenges and underlying logics of action as a social practice of collaboratively organising everyday life in a shrinking rural region. Hence, using a case study conducted in the Altenburger Land in Thuringia we analyse the socially embedded negotiation of responsibilities between municipal actors and voluntary workers on the one hand and trace the influencing factors on voluntary activities considered relevant by involved actors on the other hand. Those factors include institutional and political support, municipality reforms, regional education and working conditions in the light of a problematic regional labour market, for example. Building on the results of our empirical research we finally discuss the political and analytical-conceptual implications resulting from the notion of a homogeneous community of voluntary workers and their political-strategic invocation and activation.

The Meaning of Social Participation for Daily Mobility in Later Life: an Ethnographic Case Study of a Senior Project in a Swedish Urban Neighbourhood

This paper presents an ethnographic case study that aims to understand the meaning of social participation in a neighbourhood for daily mobility in later life. In the study, the mobility of the participants of a senior-citizen project was monitored over 18 months. The project was founded as a result of a municipal district’s targeting of social sustainability. The results show that social participation had positive effects on the daily mobility of the participants. The implementation of broad-minded thinking from the municipality and the cooperation of various municipal actors were shown to be essential for the positive outcome of this project.

Validation of networks derived from snowball sampling of municipal science education actors

ABSTRACTSocial network analysis (SNA) has been used in many educational studies in the past decade, but what these studies have in common is that the populations in question in most cases are defined and known to the researchers studying the networks. Snowball sampling is an SNA methodology most often used to study hidden populations, for example, groups of homosexual people, drug users or people with sexually transmitted diseases. By use of a snowball sampling approach, this study mapped municipal social networks of educational actors, who were otherwise hidden to the researchers. Subsequently, the resulting networks were validated through interviews with central respondents and by using prior investigations of the municipalities. Our results confirmed that the majority of the designated respondents recognized the resulting sociograms and their own position in these. It was also found that not all predictions based on existing knowledge of the municipalities aligned with SNA data. However, these discrepancies could be explained by development in the municipalities in the time following previous investigations. This study shows that snowball sampling is an applicable method to use for mapping hidden populations in educational settings, but also that qualitative studies are needed in order to interpret the networks in real-life contexts.

Addressing urban crises: Bridging the humanitarian–development divide

AbstractThe world is urbanizing rapidly. Demographic shifts are intersecting with the impacts of climate change, conflict and displacement. In many parts of the world, chronic stresses mean that large proportions of the urban population are already vulnerable. Rapid and poorly planned urbanization is not just an issue for governments and development specialists; humanitarian actors must also increase their understanding of and ability to operate within towns and cities at risk of crises. Their current approaches do not always adequately reflect and work with the reality of urban populations and the systems that support urban life. This means that humanitarian interventions may not contribute to sustainable urban development and the well-being of town and city dwellers in the longer term. This article argues that greater collaboration between humanitarian responders, municipal actors, development specialists and professional associations could lead to better outcomes for crisis-affected populations in both the short and long term.

Micro-Incentives and Municipal Behavior: Political Decentralization and Fiscal Federalism in Argentina and Mexico

Summary This article analyzes the mixed results of political and fiscal decentralization in Latin America by comparing taxing and spending policies in six cities in Argentina and Mexico. Consistent with previous studies, we find that decentralization has been frustrated by overconcentration of power at the provincial level and large vertical fiscal imbalances, though we characterize these as functional elements in a system of redistributive policy-making that benefits a wide array of provincial and municipal actors. We seek to add a new dimension to the literature by arguing that micro-level incentives (conditions and circumstances particular to specific places) are more important determinants of municipal behavior than macro-level structures (those policy and institutional changes intended to make officials more responsive to local conditions – federalism, local elections, intergovernmental transfers, and own-source revenues). We conclude that the theory of decentralization relies on a flawed conception of the causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to create responsiveness in local officials.

A qualitative approach for identifying areas prone to urban floods with the support of LiDAR

AbstarctIn urban areas, the land surface is often covered with impervious layers increasing the potential for storm water flooding. Thus, runoff water management during intensive rain events has become an important issue to be tackled in fast-growing cities with increasingly large populations. This paper presents a LiDAR-aided qualitative methodology for defining areas prone to urban floods on a regional scale at the early phases of land use planning. The developed methodology is based on different datasets describing water infiltration capacity of the ground and tested in the city of Vantaa, Finland. The methodology utilizes datasets that are freely and easily available. The selected factors for analysis are soil permeability, soil sealing and surface topography. The presented approach gives tools for the preliminary identification of areas prone to storm water flooding. The developed analysis is user-friendly and quick to perform. It is a qualitative method that can support land use planners and other municipal and regional actors in the environmental and technical sectors in early-phase storm water flood management. The developed method is applicable for different planning scales.

The development of the International Baccalaureate in Spanish speaking countries: a global comparative approach

ABSTRACTThis paper compares the development of International Baccalaureate (IB) schools in four different settings: Argentine, Chile, Spain and Ecuador. The global comparative approach used in this study, based on actor-network theory (ANT), allows us to analyse the connections and interactions between global actors and the plurality of national, regional, municipal actors in a common conceptual frame – the IB network. The IB network includes mainly global actors, such as the Diploma Programme (DP), IB schools and the IB organisation, IB schools associations but also a myriad of local actors such as political leaders, national education administrations and local authorities. The paper examines two central assemblages: the institutional assemblage and the curricular assemblage. The institutional assemblage relates to who promotes and funds the DP in each country. While in Argentina and Chile an IB-private school assemblage prevails, in Spain it was an IB-public/private schools assemblage and in Ecuador an IB-government one. These assemblages condition the main point of passage of the IB network – the DP as a means to access to university – which further necessitates new assemblages between the DP and the official curriculum – the curricular assemblage.