Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities

Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities analyses the challenges in South African cities, where the brief post-apartheid moment opened a window for progressive city government and made research into state practices both possible and necessary. In a debate with other ‘progressive moments’ in large cities in Brazil, the USA, and India, the book interrogates City officials’ practices. It considers the instruments they invent and negotiate to implement urban policies, the agency they develop, and the constraints they navigate in governing unequal cities. This focus on actual officials’ practices is captured through first-hand experience, state ethnographies, and engaged research. These reveal day-to-day practices that question generalised explanations of state failure in complex urban societies as essential malevolence, contextual weakness, corruption, and inefficiency. It is hoped that opening the black box of the workings of the state opens paths for the construction of progressive policies in contemporary cities.

Abstract based directly on source