Jeffrey W. Paller

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott writes, “We have repeatedly observed the natural and social failures of thin, formulaic simplifications imposed through the agency of state power” (1998, 309). State and top-down planning lacks mētis, or the common sense and practical experience that people on the ground possess of their everyday environments. Instead, Scott proposes a focus on practical knowledge, which “depends on an exceptionally close and astute observation of the environment” (1998, 324).

Urbanization is transforming the human and political geography of Africa. While a growing body of research explores the urban dimensions of clientelism, contentious action, and social mobilization, there has been less attention given to the ways in which this demographic megatrend is influencing political change more broadly. We argue that the political implications of African urbanization are contingent on local conditions and experiences; there are no deterministic associations between urbanization and political change. To better understand the mechanisms linking urbanization to politics, we argue that a place-based approach is needed. We illustrate this by reviewing and highlighting how urbanization may affect (i) the nature and balance of citizen preferences; (ii) the composition, interests, and influence of elite actors; (iii) forms of political mobilization; (iv) shifting gender roles; (v) the role of civil society in political processes; and (vi) the likelihood and manifestations of contentious collective action. We conclude with a discussion of directions for further research.

Rapid population growth in the Global South places extreme pressure on cities, making it very difficult for governments to provide the necessary housing to city dwellers. The short-term needs and demands of residents often contradict or challenge long-term central urban plans and sustainable solutions. Important but overlooked actors in the politics of sustainable urban development are community organisations that demand housing and rights to the city. Yet these organisations do not adopt the same strategies everywhere. This article examines the pathways of engagement adopted by organisations across different urban contexts and how they affect governance. These organisations contribute to sustainability politics by engaging local and national governments, allying with political parties and politicians, and informing and mobilising local populations. Drawing from a most different case design that compares São Paulo, Brazil with Accra, Ghana, we find that the ideology of the organisation, its relationship to the state and to society, and the credibility of multi-level institutions shape the success or failure of sustainable urban governance and development. We conclude that urban residents often seek change through pathways of engagement that can be generalised across diverse social contexts, but the underlying politics within civil society can undermine a sustainable urban future.

Despite increasingly programmatic politics and competitive elections, political clientelism remains an enduring feature of African politics. More so, while politicians rarely deliver on political promises, citizens continue to demand and participate in patron–client relations. While moral economy and instrumentalist accounts offer insight into the puzzling persistence of political clientelism, we offer an additional framework based on demands for social recognition. Beyond expectations of materialist exchange or the performance of cultural norms, citizens expect their political leaders to recognize them as dignified human beings and members of an identity group. Drawing on evidence from three diverse African contexts—urban Ghana, rural Senegal, and coastal Kenya—we argue that citizens engage in political clientelism as a vehicle for demanding three dimensions of social recognition: (i) To be seen and heard by leaders, (ii) to be respected as agents in the political process, and (iii) to be politically included and protected from harm. By providing new insights into the enduring logics of clientelism, citizen strategies amidst unequal power relationships, and the role of emotions in democratic politics, we aim to reconcile existing approaches and bring them into a more unified framework.

This paper introduces a framework of sustainable urban development that considers the everyday politics of cities and their neighbourhoods. First, it considers the challenges facing cities in the Global South, and calls for renewed attention to the daily political struggles of urban residents. Second, it reviews the scholarship on the politics of urban governance and incorporates the politics of belonging and how citizens make claims to urban space into logics of sustainable governance. Third, it presents a framework of sustainable urban development based on thinking about cities and their neighbourhoods as urban commons. Fourth, it illustrates the theory with examples from the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Ashaiman. Fifth, it concludes by discussing how the framework generalizes to cities in Asia and Latin America, and offers possible policy interventions that incorporate the underlying political conditions that contribute to sustainability.

The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts of emergence and emergency (2004), as well as prior research in Africa on informal economic practices (the exchange of goods and services unregulated by states) (Hart 1973; Piot 2010; Roitman 2004; Weiss 2009), we consider emergence to be the process by which new social formations become thinkable, repeatable, and even – at times – habitual. Although conditions of crisis or precarity or even revolutionary upheaval might be fertile ground for emergence, insofar as these social conditions represent ‘rupture[s] in the organization of the present’ (Simone 2004: 4), the articles here also show that new social practices do not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, these articles demonstrate that attention to quotidian encounters can illuminate how citizens mobilize previously existing norms and patterns of behaviour in response to social change or economic crisis.