Metropolitan Governance: Understanding the Management Challenges

1. Metropolitan Governance:Understanding the Management Challenges Jefferey M. Sellers University of Southern California (USA) Presented at USC/World Bank Megacity Workshop, February 4, 2009, Washington, D.C.

2. The emerging metropolitan dimension of governance • Urbanization => horizontal spread • Of cities • Of exurban regions linked to cities • Of urban-rural linkages • Horizontal dimension added to governance • Metropolitan challenges extend beyond megacities, but most pronounced there • North-South differences • Shape of urban regions • Relations to global economy • Governance institutions and capacities

3. Investigating metropolitan governance • INSTITUTIONS: World Report on Decentralization and Local Democracy, database of local government infrastructures (national institutional and fiscal data (Sellers and Lidström 2007)) • DISTRIBUTION OF SERVICES: International Metropolitan Observatory, Phase III: Governance and Metropolitan Inequality (demographic, budget and output data on samples from ten countries including Brazil, China, India, S. Africa, Poland) • SPATIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES: China-India Urban Environmental Governance Study (remote sensing, GIS data on 20 cities over 30 years)

4. Amalgamation of Greater Bangalore, 2007

5. Urban growth in greater Bangalore, 1973-2006 (A) 1973 to 1992, (B) 1992 to 1999, (C) 1999 to 2000, (D) 2000 to 2006

6. Greater Bangalore 11/1/2008

7. Services in peripheries of large urban areas in developing regions • Growing disparities in living conditions within metro regions • Even outside informal settlements, services (education, health, also infrastructure) in peripheral poor localities usually inferior • Rural and smaller urban local government forms provide fewer administrative and political capacities • Low self-generated revenues outside of urban centers or affluent communities • Underutilization of existing fiscal resources in poor communities • Expenditures in poor metro towns go predominantly to redistributive services (less to administration, infrastructure) • Environmental degradation undermines agriculture, health, compounds service challenges • National and intermediate level policies toward place equity address regional and rural-urban disparities rather than emerging disparities within metropolitan regions

8. Dimensions of metropolitan governance institutions • Spatial coverage • Institutional thickness • Democratic depth • Sector-specificity • Centrality to higher-level policy-making

9. Effective institutions for metro governance: observations • Beyond a single megapolitan jurisdiction to pragmatic “new regionalist” approaches • Multilevel governance (with intermediate and/or national government involvement) crucial to effective initiatives and distributive equity • Comparative success of sector-specific metro governance (airports, roads, waste collection) • Need for national and intermediate policies (grants, programs) similar to those in developed countries to address intra-metropolitan disparities in services • Strengthening of administration and political process in peripheral local governments crucial to better, more equitable service provision • Cost-effectiveness of institutional, infrastructure and planning initiatives in emerging megacities