Examination of Witnesses (Questions 71
- 79)
TUESDAY 2 JUNE 2009
MS CAREN
LEVY AND
MS RUTH
MCLEOD
Q71 Chairman:
Good morning to you both. Thank you very much for coming to give
evidence. You have obviously been sitting through the first half,
so you will have some idea of the thrust of where we are coming
from. I wonder if you can introduce yourselves for the record.
Ms Levy: My name is Caren Levy.
I am Director of the Development Planning Unit in the Faculty
of the Built Environment at University College London. The DPU
is an international centre with over 50 years' experience of addressing
issues related to urban and regional development and urban development
policy and planning in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle
East. My own expertise is in the area of urban policy and planning
in the context of governance and community-driven development
with a focus on housing, infrastructure and transport in cities
and urban areas of the global south. I think I will leave my colleague,
Ruth McLeod, a Senior Teaching Fellow at the DPU, to introduce
herself.
Ms McLeod: I am Ruth McLeod. I
am a Senior Teaching Fellow, part-time, and a specialist in urban
development, particularly in capital finance systems and community-led
development. I was the founding director of Homeless International
and worked there for 19 years. I co-ordinated the research which
led to CLIFF[5]
and co-ordinated CLIFF at international level until I left Homeless
International a couple of years ago. Since then I have been working
on the Slum Upgrading Facility (SUF) with special responsibility
for establishing local finance facilities in Ghana, Indonesia,
Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Q72 Chairman:
Thank you for that helpful introduction. In your submission you
make a very positive case for both urbanisation and even for slums,
although we have had a debate about the use of the word and what
people living in slums call themselves or what we call them. If
it is a positive development, what should governments be doing
to accommodate that, to recognise this urbanisation is part of
a driver for growth and instead of being treated as a nuisance
and a threat, I think that is the implication of your submission,
it should be accepted as something positive and they should engage
with it.
Ms Levy: That exactly summarises
the thrust of the whole evidence. Slums, with the proviso of recognising
their heterogeneity, of course also recognising that people are
poor in slums and many people are very poor in slums, at the same
time they are places where people have come in order to improve
their lives and in which they are engaging with a range of activities
which link into the positive growth dimensions of the city itself.
Unfortunately many governments have approached slums and the poor
in cities with ideologies which are excluding them from participating
fully in those processes and, to some extent, almost criminalising
them by labelling slums as illegal. In this respect I think many
of the cities in urban areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America
are dealing with quite outdated planning legislation frameworks
in which, for example, the levels of standards are very high,
cost too much and in which the process of dealing and engaging
with these regulations is very slow, open to corruption and, therefore,
in fact, does not help the situation in any positive way. We can
also recognise that many of those governments are overwhelmed
by the situation and do not have the capacity to address the situation.
I think the focus of our evidence would be to look at how those
things can be addressed.
Q73 Chairman:
That would be my follow-up question, the extent to which governments
and donors can work together to be positive and improve lives
without excluding them.
Ms McLeod: If I can add a little
bit to that. Andy Rutherford was emphasising the importance of
decentralisation in recent years, and I think some of the most
encouraging developments I have seen have been where national
government has worked hand in hand with city level government
and mechanisms have been found to plan together and to provide
complementary sorts of resources. For example, if you take a new
initiative which is fairly slow but has great potential in Ghana,
at national level a new local government finance facility is being
established, supported by Cities Alliance, with the aim of helping
local government to organise itself much better around financial
management, eventually being able to borrow from the commercial
sector so you expand the resource base and so on. That is happening
at national level, but at local city level there are initiatives
to also start programmes which are linked to slum upgrading and
city development as a whole, but which bring in increased capacity
from collection of local property taxes so that those local property
taxes not only benefit the local government budget as a whole
and central government, but a proportion of them is set aside
specifically for slum upgrading. There is an integrated approach
to it which brings in new sources of finance, both commercial
and public sector, but also organises that in a way which makes
much more effective use of resources which can be pulled down
from different levels rather than trying to duplicate or compete.
Q74 Chairman:
That is a very interesting point. It slightly adds positively
to the evidence we had before. What you are saying is if you are
imaginative enough there are resources which can be pulled together
and people should not be too intimidated.
Ms McLeod: Yes. I think often
the issue is the lack of linkage. I think all of us know what
happens when you get into a silo situation. Very often people
will say, "Banks do not want to lend for this reason",
but very often nobody has gone and asked them or people will say,
"Local government cannot do this, that and the other",
but the reason why local government is not able to borrow and,
therefore, expand the resource base and take on a major exercise
in terms of a longer-term plan has not been looked at closely.
People learn very rapidly from each other. Where local and/or
national government are able to see examples of what has happened
elsewhere, in my experience it can be absorbed very rapidly. It
does not get absorbed very easily through textbooks, it tends
to be a linkage with practitioners.
Chairman: That is helpful and leads on
to Mr Stunell's point.
Q75 Andrew Stunell:
You made the point in your evidence that DFID's leading role in
urban development has been eroded, I think was the word you used.
What has really led to that, bearing in mind the increasing importance
of urbanisation as an issue?
Ms Levy: I am not sure I understand
it all myself in a sense. In fact, in 2001 DFID produced a really
excellent paper called, Meeting the Challenge of Poverty in
Urban Areas: Strategies for Achieving the International Development
Targets.. This paper laid out much of the very progressive
and positive approaches to urban development which I think we
would like to see taken forward. Subsequent to that, it appears
that much of DFID's expertise has been dismantled and fragmented
within DFID. It does not mean they are not working on urban issues,
I think they are, but those issues are not visible and there is
not necessarily a coherent community of practice within DFID which
recognises urban development as some kind of real context in which
development is taking place, a recognition that this is an emerging
urgent context in which development is taking place and needs
to be recognised for what it is.
Q76 Andrew Stunell:
What impact would you say that has had in real life in terms of
what DFID is doing?
Ms McLeod: It is a tricky question.
It has been the experience of quite a lot of agencies that there
is no-one to talk to. You may have something really important
to bring to the table to discuss, but unless you have got a relationship
which is ongoing that preceded that situation, it is really difficult
because there is not a focus. For instance, the example of CLIFF.
CLIFF was located within the private investment section, not within
the urban section, so when the urban section was dismantled CLIFF
went on. It is salutatory that CLIFF has been very successful
and has had consistent support from DFID, but DFID would not necessarily
put it forward as an "urban" initiative, it would be
put forward far more on the basis of leveraging commercial finance,
innovative approaches to finance, deepening financial markets,
et cetera. Having personally been through that transition from
the other end, I think one of the big difficulties, and Caren
has alluded to it, is in many ways DFID is still doing that work
but it does not have a way of capturing the fact that it does
through a lens which reflects what is happening in the urban context.
Therefore, it loses a very important source of knowledge and input
into potential future strategy.
Q77 Andrew Stunell:
If the DPU was reorganising DFID, what would you change about
what they are doing now?
Ms Levy: We would like to see
the reconstruction of a community of practice. We would not go
so far as to say what kind of entity because obviously it would
be for DFID to decide what that entity would look like. This community
of practice should not be perceived as a sector because urban
is not a sector, it is a context in which development is taking
place and a very important and urgent one to recognise. This community
of practice, however it is constructed, would have to cross sectors,
which I think DFID has been trying to do with urban, but it can
also extend beyond DFID. It can extend to a wider group of people
within the UK and abroad who work with urban issues and could
also feed into that community of practice in different ways.
Q78 Andrew Stunell:
Is one of the underlying difficulties here that it is all too
difficult and there is really a disconnect between what many national
governments are saying in their own countries they want to do
about balancing urban and rural and what you are arguing in terms
of urban development being the focus of growth and the future?
How does DFID get through that knot?
Ms Levy: I think DFID has an advocacy
role to play as well as a role in directly investing in urban
development through its funds. In the same way as DFID has its
priorities around, for example, climate change and has played
an important role in raising climate change issues on to international
agendas, it has the same role to do with urban. It has to make
the arguments and has to engage with partners in the same way
as it does with everything else.
Q79 Andrew Stunell:
It should be arguing for big cities in developing countries?
Ms Levy: No, it should be arguing
for more proactive and positive responses to the phenomenon of
urbanisation and urban growth.
Ms McLeod: PRSPs[6]
were mentioned earlier and there is a very interesting question
about why does urban poverty, urban planning and urban growth
not appear within those PRSPs. In fact it is beginning to in this
latest generation I think because there was quite a noise made
about it. At a certain stage I was involved in looking at a number
of Commonwealth countries' PRSPs and when we looked at the case
of Uganda, for instance, one of the reasons why it was not in
the PRSP was the agency responsible for "urban" in Uganda
was the Ministry of Housing. The Ministry of Housing had a very
tiny budget and no personnel with the expertise to disaggregate
the national statistical data. You would have had to have gone
through that exercise to reveal the growing levels of urban poverty.
There was a missing link in the whole thing. Because the whole
context had not been properly analysed and presented, people were
not getting the full picture of it. Clearly it was difficult for
them to respond to, let alone to put a strategy in place and a
budget against. I think DFID could have a tremendously strong
role in supporting the capacity of agencies responsible for urban
to make that voice louder in policy terms and in analysing what
is actually going on. If that is made clear, because of the consultation
processes which go on with the creation of PRSPs, it would then
get into the PRSPs. The idea that you simply get rid of PRSPs
is unrealistic, you have got to have some kind of national planning
mechanism of that kind, but you need to get urban on the agenda.
5 Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility Back
6
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Back
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