ABSTRACT
This book has quite a bit in it about garbage. But it is as much about governing and managing three African cities, and the ways ordinary urbanites cope with the plans and policies of neoliberalism, sustainable development, and good governance in a time fractured by a politics of cultural difference. To keep that framework manageable, I focus a great deal of attention on analyzing the specific workings of the United Nations Sustainable Cities Program (SCP) in three case study cities – Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Lusaka – wherein solid waste management has been the SCP’s priority issue. The SCP is one of the major programs tied to the United Nations network
for addressing what is termed Agenda 21 for human settlements. Agenda 21 was created at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, then refined at the so-called ‘‘City Summit’’ (Habitat II) in Istanbul in 1996 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002 (National Research Council 2002). The SCP has led the way in what gets called localizing Agenda 21 in Africa, meaning adapting the global document’s blueprint principles to the specific circumstances of different countries. The UN Environment Program and UN-Habitat (formerly the UN Center for Human Settlements, UNCHS) – both of which have their headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya – are jointly responsible for creating the SCP, but it has become essentially a Habitat office. In this chapter’s next section, I detail this UN map of engagement with African cities and introduce the Sustainable Cities Program in Africa, with a specific eye on my reasons for choosing Tanzanian and Zambian cases to study. My other intention in this chapter is to put the broader canvas of
development assistance and development rhetoric under a microscope. What
are the UN offices and the donors that support them doing, and why? Critiques of neoliberalism generally zero in on International Financial Institutions (IFIs), as is the case, for instance, with Abrahamsen’s analysis of the World Bank discussed in chapter one. The aid processes for most bilateral donor countries, when they do come under scholarly scrutiny, are portrayed as speaking a common language with the IFIs during the last decade. The UN is often cast aside as a fairly toothless tiger in all of this, full of airy documents and, when push comes to shove, merely doing the work of the IFIs and major donor nations. The United States, in particular, is often said to really be ‘‘calling the shots’’ at the UN, to borrow the title of a recent book that makes just that claim (Bennis 2000). The UN program for localizing Agenda 21 appears to its critics to have a ‘‘credibility gap’’ – behind its pretty words, we find ‘‘an overarching allegiance to unsustainable international development priorities premised on the imperatives of economic growth, market liberalization, and the propagation of the pseudo-political consumerist culture’’ (Lubelski and Carmen 1999, p. 110). But is there more to the UN’s programs like the SCP? Critical analysis
suggests that the SCP, like other Habitat programs, ‘‘gradually changed towards’’ an outlook not too dissimilar from the World Bank’s highly neoliberal ‘‘enabling approach,’’ but a rhetorical nod toward themes of inclusion, justice, or participation is still there (Jenkins and Smith 2002, pp. 133-35). After all, although there is some Japanese, US, French, and German money in the mix, most of the funding base for the operation of the SCP in eastern and southern African cities has come from the aid agencies of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Ireland. None of these countries have anything of a colonial legacy in the region, nor can we really speak of an extensive Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, or Irish role in the capitalist exploitation of the region’s resources. Indeed, a very thorough book series recently explored the roles of Nordic countries in the liberation of southern Africa over the past forty years, not in their oppression (Eriksen 2000; Sellstrom 1999a and 1999b; Soiri and Peltola 1999). Are the UN SCP offices and these specific countries’ aid agencies mere tools of the neoliberal world order, carrying out its agenda of sustainable development and good governance, or do they have a broader vitality and engagement with progressive social change? How do the UN’s Africa-based offices and their programs, as well as the aid agencies of countries that have generally leaned toward third-way democratic socialism at home, intersect and engage with the IFI development agenda (neoliberalism, sustainable development, and good governance) and the politics of cultural difference all around them? In this chapter’s third and fourth sections, I seek to interrogate these questions. The second section, below, outlines the SCP’s work in Africa and my choice of case studies.
