The State, Trust and Cooperation: Local Government-Residents’ Joint Neighbourhood Upgrading Initiatives in Addis Ababa

Abstract

Collaborative planning is acknowledged to enable several positive outcomes including the building of local knowledge and capacities. It is deemed to facilitate mobilisation of resources, support, acceptance, coordination of action and ownership. However, the collaborative planning literature’s focus on techniques to perfect the process design (i.e., regarding modalities for structuring participation, communication and deliberations) to transform social and political institutions pays little attention to the penetration of planning practices by the overall institutional environment that impede or enable operationalising these techniques. And based on Western liberal realities, it presumes that a minimum level of trust and at least democratic culture and cooperative norms needed for collaborative planning exist everywhere. As de Satgé and Watson (Urban planning in the global south: conflicting rationalities in contested urban space, Springer, 2018) argue, the “thin and instrumental assumptions” that planning theories make regarding the applicability of public participation or collaborative planning do not fit in with what is on the ground in other contexts, such as what is found in many parts of Africa. The chapter aims to bring the state back into the collaborative planning discourse by analysing how government systems affect the conceptions and actions of the different urban actors in collective action. Through local government-residents’ joint urban upgrading projects in two localities of Addis Ababa, it provides insight into the link between government systems, trust, planning practices and cooperation.