Infrastructure in informal settlements: co-production of public services for inclusive governance

ABSTRACT

Recent studies on urban governance have advanced our understanding of how governance could become inclusive through community-based participation in urban development. However, a concrete process by which participatory public service provision in informal settlements consolidates inclusive governance has not been sufficiently evident in the context of the dynamic urban development witnessed in Africa. Drawing on a case study of the informal sanitation infrastructure known as a bio-centre, which has been introduced by a participatory upgrading programme in Nairobi, Kenya, this article proposes to pay attention to ways that informal settlers experience infrastructure, embed it into their everyday context of place-making and use it in unplanned manners. Inclusive governance that is effective in providing public services in informal settlements requires every development actor to be engaged in deliberating how to deal with such unplanned outcomes and eventually to co-produce services. This article argues that, rather than participation, communities’ capacity to enrol the state actors in the space of deliberation is crucial to make governance genuinely inclusive.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive governance
• infrastructure
• public service
• sanitation
• urban development
• Africa

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the workshop held by these programmes in Nairobi in February 2013; I would also like to thank the urban governance panel of the Nordic Africa Days Conference at Uppsala University held in September 2014 for their comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful for very helpful comments by this journal's two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term informal settlement throughout this article to describe a human settlement space with no official legal claim to the properties and public services.

2. http://isp.unu.edu/research/esda/; it is currently managed on a small follow-up scale.

3. I have made a similar argument to this part of the section in a case study of informal settlements in the Brazilian Amazon in Otsuki (2011).

4. Different versions of this case study appear in Otsuki (2013, 2014).

5. Muema, 14 February 2013, Nairobi, personal communication.

6. Interview, Lindi, Kibera, 5 July 2010.

7. The information on the Umande Trust is reconstructed based on conversations on 8 July 2010 and 15 February 2013 in Nairobi.

8. Interview, Soweto West, 9 July 2010. Usually bio-centres are locked at night and during the night, people still resort to the so-called flying toilet (i.e. plastic bags used for defecation and subsequently thrown out of the house).

9. Interview, Gatwekera, 9 July 2010.

10. A statement recorded at the NGO Umande Trust strategic meeting at Olympic Estate, 15 July 2010.

11. Interview, Lindi, 7 July 2010.

Additional information

Funding

The field research and workshop were conducted with two sets of funding from the United Nations University: Education for Sustainable Development in Africa Programme (2010–2011) and International Development and Cooperation Programme (2012–2013).