Designing and institutionalizing city-labs for climate resilient urban infrastructures

Summary

Many climate change impacts are playing out in cities. A myriad of climate-informed interventions have been developed in and for African cities. But they are often informed by assumptions, ideas, and structures that originate in the global North, without a clear understanding of Africa’s material and institutional dynamics. The status quo of infrastructure investment and local government capacity do not adequately address the climate risks facing African cities. Challenging this inertia requires contending with troubled and political realities. Africa’s infrastructure deficits and delivery models are embedded in entrenched systems. The continent has endured prolonged exploitation. Over the past 20 years, incredible efforts have been made to redress problematic legacies. However, structural challenges circumscribe transformation. Thinking holistically about infrastructure pathways in the context of various climate scenarios demands new sense-making and planning ideas and practices. We propose city-labs as an inclusive approach that seeks to foster necessary capacities and capabilities and identify resources, addressing critical and vexing challenges in African cities. We provide a framework to support the development of ‘city-labs’ in African cities, focusing specifically on labs that tackle the challenging intersections between urban infrastructure development, climate resilience, and local governance. For full details download the accompanying resource.

Introduction

African countries have not created the climate crisis – however, they must respond to it. There is an urgent need to improve the relationship between existing and desired infrastructure systems, planning processes, and climate change in Africa. This imperative is underpinned by dynamics that play out in particular ways in the continent’s urban centres and urbanising areas. Cities are critical to national development ambitions, and to international plans such as the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the AU’s Agenda 2036. There is an urgent need to improve the capacity of cities, and local
governments in particular, to respond to the imperatives created and risks posed by climate change. While African city authorities often have limited powers and fiscal resources, they experience the implications of the global climate crisis. Meaningful intervention must be attentive to the scale and urgency of the challenge, the particular confluences of risks and uncertainties in African cities, and the reality of urban governance constraints impacting on local authorities.

Methodology

‘City-labs’ are structured processes for bringing together different stakeholders, such as government, civil society, and academia, to co-produce and utilise knowledge aimed at addressing complex urban problems. One of the core ideas underpinning the lab method is that new and innovative ideas for how to solve urban issues can come from co-producing knowledge with diverse stakeholders. Tackling complex problems requires bringing together different rationalities, types of knowledge (practical, theoretical, academic, local, etc.), mandates, and resources to co-produce knowledge and co-construct action plans. City-labs have taken different forms in different places, depending on the local context. The basis of the city-lab is a set of core partnerships: The Strategic Partner is an external organisation that provides funding and technical support and enables sharing among city-lab platforms in different cities. The Convening Partner is a local partner that acts as an intermediary organisation to ground and facilitate the lab process. The Decision-Making Partner is an actor – usually a government actor – nested within the decision-making space that is willing to support the lab. City-labs should be supported by formal agreements between the Core Partners. A well-crafted agreement protects the process from political shifts, staffing changes, and financial risk any partners might face. The lab is nested within a larger network of stakeholders (sometimes called the ‘platform’ or the ‘ecosystem’). This includes a wide range of actors from the academy, civil society, state, and private sectors. City-labs can be used to address all sorts of complex issues facing cities. A key part of developing innovative ways of working is to develop richer and more complex understandings of the problems at hand. Once the general lab topic and approach are identified, the activities and tactics for co-production can be designed. While the lab process provides an indication of the outcomes required, it does not provide a rigid framework for producing them. Examples of activities that can be used include: Workshops; Seminars; Field trips; Collaborative research; and Embedding/dis-embedding researchers, officials, or activists in new contexts. In addition to these activities within city-labs, it is also useful to share experiences, practices, and knowledge with other city-labs, to be able to learn from other sectors or other cities. There is no blueprint for city-labs. However, based on experience and a review of literature, city-labs have three broad phases: 1) formulation, including identification of the key issue, the Convening Partner, and the decision-making
space; 2) generation, through the joint production of knowledge and implementation of solutions ; 3) institutionalisation and reflection, involving the closure of the lab and ensuring that the ideas and practices developed get taken forward.

Adaptation strategies

Labs can (only) address the complexity and inherent uncertainties African cities face if they are grounded in a solid understanding of African city contexts. Despite incredible diversity, there are some common dynamics and trends which shape African cities in particular and similar ways: Africa is rapidly urbanising, with a compounding effect on demographics (e.g. concentration of young people); informality is increasing across African cities; and the nature of urban governance is determinative. Owing to complex colonial histories, key urban infrastructures in many African cities often serve only small areas, and are not sufficient to meet demand. Supplemental providers fill the gaps, raising questions around safety and other concerns, and resulting in a lack of uniformity in city infrastructure – with users generally paying higher costs for the more distributed infrastructure technologies. Hybrid services also create problems for city governments trying to mitigate climate change. Physical changes leading to heatwaves and other intense weather events create extra hazards and risks in African cities, which also face risks and potential opportunities associated with global low-carbon or net-zero carbon transitions, including the potential for lowering costs. In developing the infrastructures needed to meet urban and demographic pressures, cities can continue along the status quo, or they can consider the need for adaptive capacity, responsiveness, ecological resilience, and carbon-neutrality. Efforts are needed to ensure that infrastructure choices do not lock African cities, countries, and regions into unsustainable development pathways. The city-labs approach is designed to support and foster the engagements and thinking needed to underpin climate-compatible infrastructure planning and investment. It is important that cities develop adaptive and sustainable responses to the risks and impacts which climate change create on urban infrastructure and service-delivery systems. These approaches must involve developing capacity to think and act differently, breaking silos between sectors, spheres of government, the state, and urban citizens.

Barriers

In complex systems, such as those that exist in cities, there are many interesting and dynamic reasons why it is difficult to shift toward desired futures. Even if visions are widely agreed to be better than the status quo, there are many barriers, constraints and path dependencies. It is important to get a clear sense of what is blocking progress toward this future, what is perpetuating the status quo, etc.
The sorts of barriers that might be identified could include things like:
• Policy or institutional issues (such as conflicting regulations or tensions between departmental mandates);
• Social or political constraints (such as the acceptability of particular infrastructural technologies);
• Fiscal or financial issues (such as weak revenue-generation, sub-national borrowing limits, etc.).

Understanding the problem, the desired future, and the challenges and blockages the system faces in reaching this future, provides a sound foundation for identifying viable entry points to address or change the system.

Enablers

It is important that the lab create a space not only for understanding problems, but also for creating solutions. As such, it is important to create a shared understanding of what it would look like for this problem to be adequately addressed. This requires undertaking some form of visioning exercise, whereby the Core Partners and network can contribute to developing a clear idea of what they are working toward. This vision, as best as possible, should be mapped onto different timescales, short-, medium-, and long-term. It should hold space for conflicting ideas about ideal city futures. Like the problem formation, building this future-facing picture requires inputs from many stakeholders. For each entry point, programmes of action need to be developed. For these programmes to be meaningful, they need to be developed with the idea that such programmes will be taken forward by strong coalitions of actors within the lab network and decision-making space.

Outcomes

Programmes of action should include the following:
• Developing of a clear problem statement for the sub-issue;
• Development of a work plan for filling gaps in knowledge necessary for effecting change;
• Development and strengthening of a coalition of actors to take this work forward. This could include actors outside of the original city-lab grouping;
• Development of an action plan (the group may decide to apply for other funding to support particular action plans or particular actions).
As these plans are being developed, the Convening Partner needs to hold the lab space. This includes keeping up the network, ensuring that those leading the development of plans are supported, and ensuring that the development of plans for intervention speak to one another and reflect a systems understanding of the issues at hand. Where necessary, the Strategic Partner can support the Convening Partner in maintaining the framing, conceptualising, and feeding-in of learnings from other lab processes. Implementing action plans will each take on their own timelines.

Impacts

Labs, as structured processes, require closure and evaluation. They are meant to initiate different activities, ways of thinking, and ways of working. However, the lab itself is an incubator and must eventually allow for such work to be institutionalised. At the close of the lab, it is important to reflect on what worked and did not work, as well as how best insights and relationships can be taken forward into the future.

Lessons Learned

Depending on what the lab set out to do, institutionalisation of the lab processes will differ. However, the goal is that the new knowledge, plans, and practices generated through the lab process become embedded in the decision-making space. In other words, they become streamlined into existing institutional processes and no longer exist in the ‘grey space’ created by the lab for experimentation. One of the ways to do this is to ensure that the action plans have been taken forward by a coalition of actors within the decision-making space. These actors have taken ownership of addressing the issue and are either institutionalising the lessons learned or operationalising the plan that has been developed. Labs generally run for several years (often between two and four). After this period, the intensive work of the lab comes to an end and the process must be integrated into the operations of the decision-making space. At the close of the lab, it is important to ensure that everything is documented and shared. Sharing the learnings from the lab both locally and internationally is important to ensuring that the ideas and lessons can be integrated and extended. The design of this process should be specific to the needs of the lab partners. The activities of the city-lab will need to be monitored and evaluated to reflect on learnings and impact. Evaluation processes will vary, depending on the lab’s design. Planning up front for evaluation of the lab’s process and impacts is important, and one of the most important things to track is the lab’s long-term impacts. See the full Strategic Paper, available for download, for examples of city-labs that have been run in various African cities and how they worked, as well as a structured set of resources for designing your city-lab initiative addressing the nexus of urban infrastructure and climate resilient development. We look forward to hearing how it goes and learning with you and your network of partners.