Articles > Dinesh Mehta

Building Consensus on City Development through City Consultations: A Tool for Stakeholder Participation in Governance
Dinesh Mehta, Regional Advisor, South Asia, Urban Management Programme, UNDP/UNCHS

Governance is a term that has been used in development literature only in recent years. The Oxford English Dictionary defines governance as the 'action or manner of governing'. From this very narrow meaning of the term, it is now used to describe various processes of participatory development in which the governments are just one of the many actors. This broader meaning of the term largely stems from the fact that the governments, by themselves, have not been able to fulfil the goals of human development. In the context of the urban areas of the developing world, the inability of the local government to cope with the provision of basic services and infrastructure is starkly visible. With rapid growth of urban population in these countries, the limitations of the capacity of the urban local governments have become more pronounced.

Some Challenges for Urban Local Governments in Asia

• Decentralisation efforts are at an initial stage. There is a lack of empowerment of urban local governments. Excessive controls are still being exercised by higher levels of government on the functional and financial responsibilities of local governments, appointment of staff, administrative procedures etc.
• Rapid growth of cities and the inability of local government to cope with the increased demand for services have led to decrease of local government functions and creation of parastatal agencies. This has eroded the importance of local governments in Asia.
• There is a mismatch between the functional powers of urban local governments and the financial resources. As a consequence, the high citizen expectations are unable to be met by local governments
• In many countries, there is a conflict of interest between the local bureaucracy and the elected representatives
• At the city level, the organizational structure is highly centralised and the management style is very bureaucratic with a lack of vision and customer orientation.

Local governments have increasingly begun to recognize their limitations and are now inclined to initiate new modes of governance, including partnerships with the other stakeholders in their city. This paper describes the experiences of city consultations under the Urban Management Program of UNDP/UNCHS. Through the Urban Management Programme (UMP), city consultation processes have been initiated world wide in 72 cities in 40 countries in the past two years. This rich and diverse experience provides many important lessons for stakeholder engagement, particularly the civil society engagement, in participatory governance. This paper is, however, limited to the author's experience of conducting UMP city consultations in South Asia. It describes the city consultation process adopted in some South Asian cities, provides some issues related to conducting a multi-stakeholder consultation the brief description of the on-going city consultations in a few South Asian cities, and draws lessons from these experiences.

UMP City Consultations
The Urban Management Program is a global technical cooperation program of the United Nations. The focus of the program is to build and strengthen the capacity of urban local governments in developing countries in participatory governance, poverty reduction, and environmental management. The key implementation strategies of the program are of city consultations and institutional anchoring. City consultations are seen as a means of institutionalising participatory governance. The institutional anchoring is achieved at two levels - by anchoring the regional offices of the programme in premier regional institutions and involving them in the programme management, and by contracting city level NGO/CBO for city consultation activities. These institutions are not seen as consulting agencies but are recognised as important partners of the UMP activities.

The underlying premise of the UMP city consultation process is that the poor city administration is often due to bureaucratic and unresponsive modes of administration and a result of weak rapport with the stakeholders, particularly the urban poor. Through the city consultation process, the local governments are encouraged to engage in constructive dialogue with the stakeholders and involve them in the decision-making concerning city's development. Towards the goal of ensuring institutionalizing the consultative process, the local and regional partner institutions are encouraged to build adequate rapport with the city government and the stakeholder groups. In many UMP cities, a stakeholder forum is now established.

City Consultation Process
The city consultation process adopted under the UMP is outlined in Figure 1. The process of city consultation, as outlined in the figure, is an illustrative guide. The actual process adopted in cities depends on the contextual realities and often is not as linear as it appears in the diagram. In certain situations, activities under some of the stages occur concurrently.

Key features of the UMP city consultation process

• Demand driven
• Flexible-adaptable
• Participatory
• Open (Inclusive)
• Continuous process
• Institutionalization

The UMP consultations are perceived as a demand driven process. The willingness and commitment of city government to the consultative process is therefore crucial. The selection of participating city is carefully made on the basis of prior evidence of the city's efforts to improve governance and people's participation. The UMP consultation process is also not very rigid or detailed. It is essentially a means to bring all the stakeholders together on the same platform for identification of important issues, developing consensus on the action plans, and ensuring resources and commitments of all stakeholders for the implementation of these action plans. For achieving this, a careful analysis of the stakeholder groups in the city is made and the consultations are kept open to all stakeholder groups.

The consultations in a city are not visualized as a 'one-off' event, but as a continuous process of dialogue among the stakeholders and the city governments. A typical city consultation process begins with a set of parallel activities related to the preparation of a city profile on identified sectors and the preparation of position papers on various issues. These position papers are derived from various focus group meetings and consultations with each stakeholder group. These outputs are discussed in a large stakeholder consultation to arrive at a consensus on the key issues, its prioritization, and potential action areas. One of the important outcomes of this event is the establishment of a stakeholder forum at the city level and the establishment of an institution for participatory governance in the city. Various stakeholder task groups then work on further development of these action plans and their adoption by city government, stakeholder groups, and donor agencies.
UMP city consultations in south Asia

Within the general framework of city consultation, described in the previous paragraphs, city consultations in South Asia have been initiated in nine cities of five South Asian countries. (See Table 1). Our experiences in these cities suggest that building consensus through multi-stakeholder consultation process is not easy in South Asia. But given the fact that the UMP was involved with cities that had demonstrated some interest in such an approach, it was relatively easy to get the city government, particularly its leaders, to support and participate actively in the process.

Theme, Cities, Countries	Partner Institutions
Environmental Management
1. DHAKA, Bangladesh	Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, Dhaka
2. MUMBAI, India	AIILSG, Mumbai
3. SURAT, India	CEPT, Ahmedabad
4. COLOMBO, Sri Lanka	Sevanatha, Colombo
Poverty Alleviation
5. LALITPUR, Nepal	LUMANTI, Lalitpur
6. HYDERABAD, India	Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad
Participatory Urban Governance
7. BANGALORE, India	CIVIC, Bangalore
8. NAGPUR, India	AIILSG, Mumbai
9. LAHORE, Pakistan	Lahore Sanitation Programme, Lahore

Outcomes of city consultations in South Asia

• Establishment of a stakeholders forum ( Bangalore, Colombo, Lalitpur, Bombay)
• Creation of city development fund by private sector (Surat)
• Budget allocations by city government for consultation follow-up (Hyderabad, Bombay, Lalitpur)
• Strong interest and support by other multilateral and bilateral agencies (Colombo)
• Initiation of pilot activities in cities as a follow-up to the consultation by CBO-NGO-Local government partnership (Colombo, Lalitpur)
• Establishing links with other on-going donor supported activities (Lahore, Bangalore, Colombo, Hyderabad, Lalitpur)

The outcomes of these city consultations have varied across the cities where UMP has been active. There are, however, certain common characteristics of the consultation process across the sub-continent. In most South Asian cities, it was the first ever attempt to get all the stakeholders together on a common platform to collectively identify city's priorities. The city governments were the principal supporters of the consultation process, while the stakeholder groups contributed their staff resources. The local media was particularly active in the consultation process and provided an excellent coverage to its outcomes. While care was taken to involve all the stakeholder groups and seek their active participation, some groups took a keen interest in the process, while others remained passive. In some cities, the private sector provided excellent support by hosting the consultation meetings and providing financial support. In other cities, the NGOs and CBOs were more active in putting forth the concerns of the poor.
Resolution of the conflicting interests at these consultations was the major challenge. However, we realized that if the consultations were presented as establishment of mutually agreed shared responsibilities among various institutions, the city government and the civil society, there were greater chances of managing the discussion among 'unequal' stakeholders. The consultations provided a platform and a framework for sharing responsibilities and improved accountability. More importantly, each stakeholder group perceived some 'value addition' in the consultation process and in working together for the better future of the city.

Through the consultation process, one also witnessed a distinct paradigm shift among the stakeholders. The local governments saw a shift in their role from provider or doer to enabler/ facilitator and initiators of partnerships. The NGOs and CBOs in the city have begun to move away from confrontation (activism) to collaboration with the city government. The private sector has also begun to consider partnerships in city development, not purely from profit driven motives, but from a sense of corporate citizenship. These paradigmatic shifts are quite important in ensuring partnership of stakeholders in city development.
Lessons from stakeholder consultations

Despite the difficult circumstances under which the local governments in South Asia operate, many cities have been able to achieve a remarkable success. The city consultations in South Asia were largely undertaken in those cities that had demonstrated some capacity to improve their internal organisation, service delivery, and credibility with the stakeholders. These characteristics seem to be a pre-requisite for a successful city consultation process.

• Leadership quality - in each successful city consultation exercise, the leadership of the Mayor or the CEO was the key. This leader had initiated many changes in the organizational culture and there was a ready acceptance of the notion of participatory urban management and development. The 'ownership' of the city government of the consultation process and its outcome was also largely due to the commitment of the leader. It is, therefore, important to convince the leaders in the city government about the consultation process prior to its launch.
• Credibility of local government - the local government was the key stakeholder and the 'driver' of the consultation process. Credibility of the local government with the civil society was found to be extremely crucial in generating stakeholders' interest in city development. In some cases, the local government had established its credibility with the people through strict enforcement of rules and regulations, and improved services. These efforts had resulted in a shift of attitude of people toward the local government from being seen as a corrupt, apathetic, and inefficient one to a dynamic, caring and efficient local government. It also created appropriate conditions for initiating civil society engagement by local government.
• Pilot projects for 'testing' stakeholder partnerships - Initial efforts of engaging the civil society in a few critical yet 'visible' activities were seen as important strategies to build a long -term partnership and continuous stakeholder involvement.
• Responsive local government - developing mechanisms within the municipal government to respond to the civil society was also seen as a necessary condition for sustaining stakeholder interactions. This was achieved in a few cities through building trust within organizations by delegation of responsibilities to the lower levels of bureaucracy and sharing of decision-making powers among the elected officials. Citizen interactions with local government was also promoted by bringing the municipal office closer to the people through decentralization of municipal offices to the ward level, creating stakeholder fora at both ward level and at the city level.
Lessons learnt for enhancing partnership
• Increase transparency in dealing with private sector, use public consultations to identify areas of partnership, open and transparent bidding process.
• Increased resource base of the local government is an essential pre-requisite to ensure a level playing field for the local government because a successful Partnership is the one among equals and thus the local government must be in a strong bargaining/negotiation position.
• Good corporate citizenship is necessary to involve the private business sector in local development. The initial partnerships may not be mooted with 'profit' motive but with the motive of corporate citizenship with local business as an important stakeholder in the process.
Lessons for increasing Peoples' participation
• On-going process of local government contacts with the people is essential.
• Active civil society organizations in the city are necessary and there has to be a willingness on the part of the local government to consult citizens.
• A responsive local government is seen by the people as the one that has various channels for citizen participation- stakeholders' forum, complaints system, citizen friendly attitude, citizen charters, report cards etc.
• A long-term vision for the city that is evolved collectively can enable mobilization of the community and its participation in action Programmes.
Problems encountered in city consultations
The process of bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders in a city does not always succeed. Despite the close monitoring and supervision, the consultation process may not lead to the expected results. The problems encountered in the UMP city consultations are narrated below. It is expected that the future city consultations will take adequate care to mitigate these problems.
• Frequent change in leaderships - One often encountered frequent changes in the city government's leadership, either at the political level or at the administrative level. This resulted in repeated efforts for the local partner institutions to convince the leadership about the advantages of the consultative process. The municipal officials, who are largely 'driven' by the leaders, tend to wait and watch the new leaders. This often led to stoppage of both the consultative process and the formulation of the action plans.
• Dominant stakeholder groups - In a multi-stakeholder setting, certain groups tend to dominate the consultations. Of particular concern are the groups representing the poor, who were often under-represented at the consultations. Adequate care, therefore, was needed to ensure that the 'voice' of this group is heard at the consultations.
• Change of Focus - In a few instances, it became clear that the priorities of the city government were quite different from that of the stakeholder groups. During the consultations, it was useful to arrive at a common focus. Appropriate methodologies, such as ZOPP, were found to be extremely useful at the consultations to derive a common agenda of action that was 'owned' by all stakeholders.

Conclusions
The UMP city consultations in South Asia and other parts of the world have demonstrated a process for participatory governance that can be implemented with very little resource commitments from the international agencies. The key criteria of success of these consultations so far have been the continued commitment of the city government and the stakeholders to the participatory process, deployment of local resources for implementation of pilot partnership projects and institutionalization of the consultation process. It is expected that the relative success of these processes will lead to an emergence of a new mode of urban governance in the developing world.