Challenges for international development planning: Preliminary lessons from the case of the Cities Alliance

In 1999, the World Bank and the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (UNCHS) helped launch the Cities Alliance. According to its promoters, it is a global association of development partners interested in improving urban living conditions in the developing world. This paper is a preliminary critique and focuses on three significant aspects of the Alliance’s intentions and strategy: collaboration and synergy, decentralization, and implementation. Three key aspects of the strategy present significant challenges and need additional policy attention. First is a possibility of unresolved differences inherent in the Alliance’s approach. Second, the city focus does not address metropolitan and regional coordination. And third is a lack of robust research to support some of the implementation initiatives. The Alliance’s strategies and challenges are similar to the approaches and limitations of international development planning, and this paper is thus also an assessment of conventional practices in development planning.