Strengthening urban governance in the South through city-to-city cooperation: Towards an analytical framework

The challenges of urban areas and their authorities that have risen from decentralisation and public sector reform, ongoing urbanisation, and persistent poverty, call for new forms of urban governance. This paper considers the role of North–South city-to-city cooperation (C2C) in strengthening governance in cities in the South. As a decentralised form of development cooperation, city partnerships have the unique feature of involving a range of urban actors – with both an institution and a civic society background – as partners in C2C interventions and as the perceived beneficiaries of these interventions. It is therefore assumed that city partnerships can affect urban governance from different angles. The potential of city-to-city cooperation is explored as an instrument to improve local government performance in terms of administration, service delivery and level of responsiveness to community needs, while at the same time encouraging citizenship and citizen participation in urban decision-making. Both conditions are considered imperative to strengthening urban governance. To address this question, evidence is used from four case studies of North–South partnerships, involving cities in Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa, Germany and the Netherlands. Interventions are discussed and compared. Subsequently, an analytical framework is presented that indicates potential forms of C2C contributions to cities in the South and their governance processes.