Making urban sector lending work; lessons from a capacity building programme in Karnataka, India

This article presents experiences with human resource development and ‘capacity building programmes’ in urban sector lending by multilateral agencies. The article first reviews the history of ‘capacity building’ and provides a view on its meaning. The experiences with a capacity building programme, part of an infrastructure loan to the state of Karnataka in India, are subsequently elaborated as an illustration. The article seeks to identify the factors determining the success of capacity building programmes which are part of urban lending. It concludes first that Terms of Reference, drafted in a bottom–up and demand-driven fashion are a better guarantee for ownership, commitment and positive results. Secondly, capacity building activities need to be tailored to the ability of the towns to make changes in their operation. Finally, capacity building at local government level can only be effective if reciprocated by supportive measures of state governments. The paper also argues that Technical Assistance (TA) as a component of capacity building should be more strongly integrated in the loan component activities and continue throughout the project period.     

The Peru Urban Management Education Programme (PEGUP) — linking capacity building with local realities

The development of initiatives for Local Agenda 21 for the cities of Peru, their documentation for the “best practices” programme of HABITAT II, and the demand for a formalized programme of support, capacity building and technical assistance has stimulated the establishment of the Peru Urban Management Education Programme (PEGUP). The PEGUP represents an innovative approach to capacity building, working through different mechanisms of education and training, technical assistance to municipal development of Local Agenda 21 and the promotion of networking and experience exchange. The experiences to date indicate that the set of support mechanisms is in line with the requirements of local governments which need a variety of support on the long road to develop urban management capacities that allow the solution of their urban and environmental problems. PEGUP offers a variety of services which are part of the development strategy of “Forum of Cities for Life” network.     

A senior manager with a knowledge management portfolio: the Santa Clara County experience

The agency director sought to create a systematically coordinated department that utilizes knowledge management strategies to promote evidence-informed practice. In his view, the organization was not providing needed information or organizational supports for practitioners to use knowledge effectively. To address this issue, he created a Director of Development and Operational Planning (DDOP) position with the responsibility to build structures and facilitate processes that support knowledge management. The DDOP oversees research and planning, government relations, legislative development and support, Board of Supervisors communications, staff development and training, community contracts, public information and in-house communication. The DDOP is reorganizing units under her supervision to create a knowledge management matrix that will implement new knowledge sharing strategies related to evaluation, contracts, legislation, organizational development, policy and planning, and staff development. The case study describes challenges and strategies related to: government regulations, size and complexity of the agency, staff resistance, and the developmental nature of the process.     

Willing but unable? Extending theory to investigate community capacity to participate in Ghana’s community-based health planning and service implementation

While primary health care programmes based on community participation are widely implemented in low- and middle- income settings, empirical evidence on whether and to what extent local people have the capacity to participate, support and drive such programmes scale up is scant in these countries. This paper assessed the level of community capacity to participate in one such programme – the Community-Based Health Planning and Service (CHPS) in Ghana. The capacity assessments were drawn from Chaskin’s (2001) theorised indicators of community capacity with modifications to include: sense of community; community members commitment; community leadership commitment; problem solving mechanisms; and access to resources. These capacity measures guided the design of an interview guide used to collect data from community informants, frontline health providers (FLP) and district health managers. Key qualitative themes were built into a questionnaire administered to households selected through systematic sampling approach. Findings showed that growing individualism, low trust in neighbours and apathetic behaviours undermined the capacity of mutual support for CHPS. The capacity to support CHPS was high for local leadership and community social mobilisation groups who often dedicated time to working with FLP to promote maternal and reproductive health service use, and in advocating broader support for CHPS. Within the wider community, commitment to voluntarism was low as members perceived CHPS to be owned by, and run on government funds and resources. Poor voluntarism was compounded by poverty that crippled the capacity to provide needed resource support for CHPS. Findings have great implications for building strong capable communities for participation in community oriented health programmes.     

地方政府发展竞争下的城市化进程

文章分析了以要素、环境和政策竞争为主的地方政府发展竞争对我国城市化的影响，并就如何积极稳妥推进城市化提出几点构想。研究发现：积极作用方面。要素竞争夯实了城市化基础；环境竞争改善了城市风貌；政策竞争加快了城市化步伐。消极作用方面，政府竞争导致城市用地扩张过快，户籍改革相对滞后和城市特色逐渐消逝等问题。为实现城市化进程的健康有序，需要增强城市“两规”的协调性、坚持产业发展与城市发展良性互动和加快土地与户籍制度改革。     

New roles for families in child welfare: Strategies for expanding family involvement beyond the case level

This paper examines the strategies and approaches child welfare agencies used to integrate meaningful family involvement into their service delivery systems, under the Children's Bureau Improving Child Welfare Outcomes Through Systems of Care demonstration initiative. Through a series of retrospective interviews with child welfare agency staff, systems of care project staff, family members actively involved in implementing the systems of care initiative, and local program evaluators, researchers investigated the family involvement planning and capacity building activities of child welfare agencies during the initiative's implementation. Findings indicate that child welfare agencies' capacity building efforts primarily centered on human resource development, focusing on three areas: program staffing, family engagement, and agency buy-in. These findings illustrate the importance of developing the capacity of child welfare agency staff and family members before fully implementing family involvement programs and activities. Although more research is needed to document the impact of family involvement, the lessons learned from these grant communities' experiences provide critical information and can inform development of policies and practices to help child welfare and other child- and family-serving systems promote and implement meaningful and sustainable family involvement.     

Local government training capacity in Romania: an institutional perspective

The article deals with the problems and prospects of local government training in Romania. Training for local government is seen as a rather new service that has to be developed, produced and delivered, like all public services. In the Romanian case, this service is delivered in a semi-public manner. Firstly, the paper will take an institutional view of the capacity of local government training and highlight that conditions in the general environment produce almost insurmountable problems for the small local government training sector to strengthen its capacity. Secondly, the capacity of the local government training will be considered from a market perspective. It will be highlighted that the market for local government training is still very imperfect.     

Social-ecological innovation: adaptive responses to urban environmental conditions

Novel approaches to natural resource management, particularly those which promote stakeholder participation, have been put forward as fundamental ingredients for establishing resilient, polycentric forms of environmental governance. This is nowhere more pertinent than in the case of the complex adaptive systems associated with urban areas. Decentralisation of urban green space management has been posited as an element thereof which, according to resilience thinking, should contribute to the adaptive capacity of cities and the ecosystem services upon which they rely. Implicit in this move towards increased adaptive capacity is the ability to manage through innovation. Although the importance of innovation towards system adaptability has been acknowledged, little work has thus far been carried out which demonstrates that innovative use of urban green space represents a form of adaptive response to environmental conditions. The current paper reports on research which maps examples of organised social-ecological innovation (OSEI) in an urban study area and evaluates them as adaptive responses to local environmental conditions which may contribute to system resilience. The results present OSEI as a coherent body of responses to local social and environmental deprivation, exhibiting diversity and adaptability according to individual contexts. The study therefore provides evidence for the importance of local stakeholder-led innovation as in the building of adaptive capacity in urban social-ecological systems.     

公民参与视野下的地方政府治理能力建设——基于中国语境的分析

作为国家治理的重要组成部分,地方治理能力高低直接影响国家治理能力的提升。参与时代,地方政府与公众互动的能力是地方治理能力的重要表现。我国地方政府面对公民参与时能力不足的表现有:左躲右闪、打退堂鼓、束手无策。公民参与中地方政府能力建设应以最大化公民参与积极功能和最小化消极功能、保障政府的帮助者和伙伴者及服务者角色、维护和增进公民与政府的关系为依据。公民参与中地方政府能力建设围绕制度能力、参与网络管理能力、政府人员胜任力三个层面,包括信息公开制度、参与制度、政府回应制度、识别和整合利益能力、协调合作能力、维护参与网络能力、尊重公民权利能力、选择参与策略能力等八项建设内容。     

Reconstruction in Aceh: Building whose capacity?

One of the dominant themes in development programmes over thelast fifteen years has been a commitment to capacity building.This paper investigates the forms of capacity building in Aceh,Indonesia, since the devastating earthquake and tsunami thathit the province on 26 December 2004. Despite the preferenceof the Acehnese people for reconstruction processes based onthe principles of community development, local people have beenlargely marginalized by both the Indonesian government and theinternational aid and development agencies. The paper suggestssome of the reasons for this marginalization.     

Institutional constraints on housing development: The urban areas of Nigeria: The land-use decree and the building plan approval process

This paper argues that the land-use decree and the building approval process have become additional institutional bottlenecks which prospective urban housing developers must contend with. Contrary to these experiences, these two para-legal institutions were made to ease in part, the difficulties associated with housing development in the urban areas in Nigeria. The paper then briefly analyses how these institutions operate that made them cogs in the wheels of housing development. Some remedial measures suggested to obliterate the difficulties associated with these institutional constraints include: the possession, acquisition and servicing of urban land for sale to the general public; the need for a complete land information system through the use of cadastral survey; public enlightenment with regard to the requirements of the planning authorities on local building plans; and the provision of official vehicles or car loans to site inspectors.     

Constructing collaborative processes through experiential learning: Participatory planning in Kaymaklı, Turkey

Prevalent discussions in urban planning focus on collaboration. However, they do not explain the underlying processes that allow collaborative work. This paper argues that experiential learning processes can help construct and maintain collaborative platforms in urban planning. To show this, the paper uses the participatory planning of Kaymaklı, a small agricultural and touristic town in the internationally well-known cultural landscape, the Cappadoccia region. This entails the second stage of a two-year long Participatory Action Research project initiated by a local civil association in collaboration with the Municipality of Kaymaklı. The paper presents how the local capacity for collaboration is built through the development of local knowledge in a practice-based training programme. The attention is particularly directed to the pedagogic design of the training programme, the shared knowledge that came out of it, the affects of the programme on the collaborative capacity of participants, and their future collaborative action.     

Urban transport and manpower development and training needs of four Asian cities: A case study of Bandung,Medan, Semarang and Surabaya,Indonesia

Mounting international evidence suggests that an important determinant of the success of large scale urban development projects is the effectiveness of the institutional framework and capacity of government (and its agencies at all levels) to implement project proposals. In this regard, the limited professional and management expertise in transport identified by the Manpower Development and Training Study of the First Regional Cities Urban Transport Project in Indonesia proved critical. The identified staff shortages (particularly among the city authorities) were so acute, as to be in the author's view almost as important as the Project's engineering and financial findings.     

Managing urban growth and development in the Riyadh metropolitan area, Saudi Arabia

The paper examines public sector management of urban growth and development in the Riyadh Metropolitan Area, Saudi Arabia. The focus of the paper is on institutional capacity building and development intervention. The paper traces changes in public sector management structures and development activities over the history of the city with the aim of assessing development impact and identifying forces that have shaped the evolving state of urban management. The paper notes that urban management has significantly improved with time but the persistence of urban problems coupled with projections of future growth point to the need for further improvements. The paper, in conclusion, while acknowledging the utility of the metropolitan development strategy (MEDSTAR) being formulated for the city, points to the need for broader administrative reform to improve the ability to cope with long-term challenges of growth in the city. Some issues that reform could address are suggested.     

Sustainability and Disaster Planning: What Are the Connections?

In this article, we examine the connections between resiliency and sustainability by asking: Can disaster planning lead to more sustainability actions? In a survey we conducted of 1,899 cities, towns, and counties across the United States in 2015, we found that disaster plans are three times more common than sustainability plans. Our regression models find both types of plans lead to sustainability action as does regional collaboration across the rural‐urban interface. However, we find that hazard mitigation planning may be done without including sustainability staff, citizens, and other officials. After controlling for motivations, capacity, and cooperation, we find that rural communities are more likely to have sustainability plans than suburbs, though their level of sustainability action is lower due to capacity constraints. Our models of multilevel governance find local motivations balance sustainability’s concept of environmental protection, economic development, and social equity—and are more important drivers of action than grassroots or higher‐level government funding and policy. This bodes well in a context where federal government leadership on sustainability is absent.     

Resisting motorization in Guangzhou

Private motorization has accompanied unprecedented urbanization in China, as a matter of public policy. Planning at the provincial and city levels has supported the rapid build-up of the private car fleet in major cities through the development of regional and urban highway networks, higher capacity local streets and much higher standards for car parking in new developments. By contrast, urban planning until 1994 concentrated on the building of community and the support for a non-motorized lifestyle. Guangzhou experienced particularly rapid city-building during this period because it was at the centre of the market reforms launched in 1978. The communities that were built form a broad ring around the historic core of the city, constituting one of the most significant obstacles to government ambitions to maintain the recent growth rates in car ownership. Guangyuan and Jiangnanxi are examples of such middle-class, home-owning communities where daily life remains almost exclusively non-motorized. Self-organized groups in the community are increasingly vocal and active in their demands to enhance local environmental quality and restrict local motorization. Local municipal authorities, although increasingly active and autonomous, try to strike a balance between government objectives and local demands. The application of motorization illustrates the growing gap between high-level policy and grassroots urban planning in Guangzhou.     

Bridging the gap between ecological research and land use policy: The North Sonoran Collaboration

A key factor in bridging the gap between ecological research and public land use policy is translating information from the language of research into the language of public policy making. Creating effective translations of research is often beyond the skills of urban planners and environmental researchers individually, and thus collaboration between the two is needed. Examples of such translation and partnerships can be found in the projects of an interdisciplinary group coined the North Sonoran Collaborative. This group consists of Phoenix, AZ, USA city staff, Arizona State University faculty, graduate students, and staff, and people from other local private companies and government agencies. The group, through its collaboration, has sponsored a series of environmental research efforts and translated those into successful land use planning activities and policies. The focus of the collaboration is the northern, largely undeveloped portion of the city of Phoenix, Arizona. This group has pursued three principles: desert ecosystems should be protected, a diversity of development should be pursued, and a sense of community should be created in new developments. This paper discusses this unique approach to planning and how it has proven effective in responding to the local communities needs quickly.     

Bending the urban flow: a construction-migration strategy

The excess rate of migration to urban centers is a problem affecting over 50 developing countries and 18 developed ones (68% of the world's population). Policies that rely on compulsion or disincentives have mostly failed because they do not deal with the cause of the problem. This paper proposes a strategy of increasing or decreasing the rate of housing construction in different urban areas as a means of stimulating or reducing migration to those areas; in most developing areas priority is given to residential construction in already congested metropolitan areas. 5 assumptions are the basis for this approach: 1) migrants tend to gravitate to the most powerful growth poles; 2) residential construction is a leading sector of regional and urban economies; 3) the encouragement of construction activity will make itself felt indirectly via its effect on construction-related employment; 4) rates of residential construction may be manipulated through government policy affecting the cost of materials, availability of loans, level of unionization, and price of housing; and 5) residential construction is amenable to quick policy action. The central idea of the strategy is that an increase in residential construction will exercise a pull on migrants, increasing job opportunities, raising incomes, lowering housing costs, and improving the chances of home ownership. This idea has been verified by various projects in Hong Kong, Ghana, Venezuela, Brazil, Bahrain, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, USSR, and the UK. In Bahrain low-income housing programs have been used to relocate Bahraini nationals in new outlying suburbs and to promote population growth in rural villages. In Mexico self-help and low-income housing programs have helped to redirect migrants headed for small towns toward smaller communities. There is also evidence to show that building construction has the potential to expand and contribute to economic growth. Some problems of implementation might be finding an adequate economic base, the need to place new communities close to primate cities, the use of large portions of the national budget, and profit-maximizing plans have been detrimental to the speed and development of construction migration. Some benefits for smaller urban areas of construction migrants in developing countries are: 1) emphasis on the development of a labor-intensive industry, 2) little training of workers as needed, 3) it can provide the housing required by industries planning to move to smaller areas, 4) this housing will be cheaper, and 5) incentives will exist to save and invest in the smaller areas.     

A Critical View on the Role of NGOs in Systemic Capacity Building: Insights from Projects for Promoting Access to Water and Self-sufficiency in Food Production in Northern Ghana

The paper takes the example of Northern Ghana with its inadequate provision of basic social infrastructure for exploring the ability of NGOs to provide effective capacity building. It examines if NGOs have sufficient understanding and knowledge for operations and if their philosophy and objectives are enough to enable judgment and lasting successes. Weaknesses and strengths of NGOs are investigated as they still are indispensable organizations for developing backward areas, especially for fostering sustainable rural community development. It is shown that the theoretical framework of ‘landscape development' applies best to analyse how the many simultaneous transformations occur in this context and how they connect. A succinct impact study is exhibited in the paper to demonstrate how some of these effects come about. The survey regards World Vision, an international NGO that has been active in Ghana for a long time.     

Community involvement in land regularization for informal settlements in Tanzania: A strategy for enhancing security of tenure in residential neighborhoods

This paper documents and analyzes how landholders managed to uplift status of their neighborhood from hazard land as designated by the 1978 master plan to a regularized residential settlement through land regularization in Dar es Salaam city. Specifically, explores policy framework governing land regularization and how the local community explored the opportunities it offers. Documents the local community planning and land regularization processes undertaken focusing on land use planning, drainage construction, and cadastral survey and discuses how financial resources were raised, trust was built as well as factors which sustained community involvement towards meeting their interests of securing tenure. The paper also, draws challenges facing land regularization policy and recommends areas for further interventions commensurate with the human dimension challenges in securing tenure.Underlying community involvement, those aspects of community, which have been connected to the idea of social capital namely existence of committed leadership in land development matters, embracing mechanism for participatory decision making process and educational background to local leaders were particularly important in determining success for the case. Others include economic ability to contribute, high proportion of landholder settlers, land conflict task force formulation, local consensus to solve commonly felt problems, existence of strong community organization, and unwritten norms put in place to regulate individual behavior in building construction. Weak legal recognition of informal settlement, lengthy and bureaucratic procedures in planning and approval of regularization plans, weak knowledge on land management matters, short-term title deeds with low financial betterments, political popularity are identified critical challenges.Some of recommendations put forward include formalization of the grass-roots role in decision-making, decentralizing some of land development control functions to sub-ward leaders and training the same in basic land management matters. Others include definition of norms; by-laws and government facilitation of informal land parceling. Besides community support should be sought so as to create partnership in the promotion of security of tenure in informal areas. The study concludes that, unless land development activities ongoing in informal settlements are closely monitored and regulated as the settlement grow, it will be too costly socially and economically to retrofit once the settlement have identified.