Local government as a political battleground for power: Interview with Sylvia Croese

As part of our interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Dr. Greg Stride interviews Sylvia Croese, Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Sylvia shares her journey into studying urban power and politics, local government’s role in addressing inequalities, and her vision for the future and why collaboration will be so critical.

Sylvia Croese is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government. Make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

01:22 – Sylvia’s research background
05:53 – Local government as a battleground for power
07:17 – Collaboration across disciplines for effective local governance
10:20 – Lessons from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
12:24 – Local government’s role in addressing inequalities
14:40 – Community cohesion and local government’s role in listening
17:05 – Emerging future trends and the impact on urban development
20:03 – Advice for those in local government navigating future challenges
21:19 – Current inspiring innovations from the local government sector
21:51 – Best practice to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange

Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? How did you become interested in urban power and politics?

I’m currently based in the US, in California at the university here. Most of my work is around teaching, but also research. But before this, I was based in South Africa for about 10 years where I was doing a lot of research across a number of different African cities and a lot of that built on my PhD work, which I conducted in Luanda, Angola.

Most of my family is from Angola, and I was based there in a period that was marked by a large-scale urban transformation. Angola was in a long period of war, which ended in 2002. Particularly in the capital city of Luanda, it was a city that had grown rapidly during the war, and that growth had taken place in largely unplanned ways. So, a lot of informal settlements, a lot of unplanned growth.

The government kind of rolled out this mass-scale program of urban renewal and housing development. That kind of state led housing development became the topic of my PhD research. What really stood out for me in doing that work were the ways in which that kind of deviated or challenged from the ways in which a lot of the people in African studies or urban studies were writing about urban transformation and urban renewal.

In African studies, scholars wouldn’t usually write about the role of the national government because there’s this assumption, especially after the period of the 1980s, that there was this failed state and African states are not really interested in pursuing development. In urban literature, a lot of the focus was on the role of local authorities and how local governments are involved in driving local development and urban renewal.

Two things came together in the case of Angola that didn’t really fit with what the general assumptions were, in either the African or the urban studies literature. And actually, since then, a lot of my work has been about unpacking these disjunctures. So the disjuncture between the ways in which local government and the workings of local government in the city context tend to be theorised, generally based on assumptions that have been developed in the global north context, and how local government actually operates within the context of African cities and the constraints that are faced in those contexts.

In order to do that, you really need to understand the workings of urban power and politics. So, that’s been my lens through which I’ve looked at these issues of local government in the African city context.

That’s really interesting because we are particularly interested in the lessons that you can learn from one place and apply somewhere else. Whereas it sounds like what you’re saying there is that there’s quite a big distinction between these things in the global north and in the African context. Is that something you could speak to a bit more?

You would think so. For a long time, a lot of my work has been around showing exactly what is different and how the African city context is different, how it challenges these assumptions. But now being based in the US, it’s actually really interesting to see how we see these growing cases of central or, in this case, federal government interference at the local level.

We’ve seen this kind of growing drive for the federal government to come in and interfere or intervene in areas such as local policing, immigration enforcement – obviously, recently we’ve been seeing this. But there have been earlier attempts and tensions when we look at topics such as climate change policies or investments in public transit. These are often functions or mandates that are held or shared across different levels of government. These are exactly the kind of challenges that I have been looking at for such a long time in the African cities context. Now I’m seeing them come up here, in the US, so it’s really interesting.

I feel that having that kind of experience and that lens from the African city context allows me to see and pick up on some of these things in a different way. I think it really shows that local government is actually really contested everywhere, even in contexts where we think they are, quote unquote, more developed or where power has historically been more devolved or decentralised. Local government tends to be the battleground where political tensions play out in actually quite similar ways, even if you might not expect that.

What is it about local government that makes it the place where there are these political battles?

I think, obviously, local authorities are those authorities that are closest to the people. So, they are best placed to actually deliver to local communities in terms of the delivery of certain services. But that also has certain political implications, and it can give local authorities a certain level of power that other levels of government might not feel very comfortable with, because there’s this understanding that power that might be gained at the local level can take away power at higher levels of government.

So, there’s this very distinctly political element to those tensions that play out at the local government level. We see that often translating into attempts by higher levels of government to take away powers at the local government level in order to prevent the balance of power from tipping towards a particular side.

I think it’s something that all our listeners who work in local government will be aware of, that sort of tension, because you do feel it on the local level. Just to move on slightly to some other work that we’ve been reading of yours. Your work often involves collaborations with people from various fields and disciplines, like city officials or practitioners and academics. How have these partnerships influenced your perspective on what makes for effective local government?

Being based in academia, we often talk about academic silos, where the sociologists might not speak to the political scientists and the geographers are over by themselves. We’re all having these conversations within our own little fields. But these silos obviously exist everywhere. In local government, there are departments that may not be collaborating or sharing information, but even across a wider set of stakeholders that operate in the urban context.

A few years ago, when I was still based in Cape Town, over the course of a year, I was involved in curating a series of seminars that would bring together urban experts, not just from the government and city-level sides. We brought together people from the city, the provincial government, and the national government levels. Plus academics, representatives from civil society and the private sector.

This seminar series talked about how to localise the SDGs. How to take up or bring down these global, sometimes abstract, goals to the local level; how to engage with them; how to develop policies for their implementation.

Actually bringing people together in the room really showed the power and the importance of collaboration and just creating these spaces for knowledge sharing. It was really, really interesting to be part of that and to see the kind of conversations those seminars actually enabled and the kind of communities of practice that evolved out of that. I would say that’s really influenced my perspective in the sense of bringing home what that could look like in practice and the power of that.

Was it ever challenging to get people to sit down together? And if it was, how did you get over those challenges?

I think I had the fortune that the kind of people I was working with were already kind of champions in their own fields or departments. So they already had a kind of predisposition, perhaps to be more open. I think the challenge is not always in kind of bringing people into the room, but how to translate what is talked about in the room to the spaces outside the room. To make sure that people actually take an interest and really take ownership of that. That is not something that, as an academic, you come in and say. It’s so important for us to collaborate and to share knowledge. We also have to be conscious of the fact that there are a lot of constraints in the everyday workings of government that make it very hard to do that in practice. If you don’t take an initiative in bringing certain people together, that’s not something that is always supported or even enabled in the workings of everyday government. I would say that that’s where the real challenge is.

I’m intrigued as well because you mentioned that you were doing these seminars on what, you know, the sustainable development goals at a local level. What kind of things were you talking about in those seminars? I mean, what are the lessons from the SDGs for the local government?

Each seminar had a different topic and we had different people coming in to present on a particular topic. But what really comes to mind when thinking about this, and it’s also something that became important at the city level in Cape Town, was the question of data. The SDGs have this kind of monitoring and evaluation framework with a set of targets that could be used to measure the progress towards meeting the goals. But when you start looking at those targets and you start looking at the kind of information that you need to measure them, either that information just does not even exist at all or it’s not disaggregated to the right level, or the information is collected by the national government agency of statistics and not at the city level.

At the same time, there’s also data that is collected at the city level that is not actually available or used by other levels of government. So for me, the question of data was really a great example that showed the challenges and these challenges around the silos. But also the power of when you bring people together in the room, you start realising, wait a minute, you are collecting this data, how can we share this? Or how can we use the methodology that you have developed in a particular city, in another city?

That’s also something that we started looking at; bringing together people outside of the City of Cape Town, meeting with city officials from other cities across South Africa and having them share experiences and knowledge on the kind of data that they were collecting, the methods that they were using and how they could share that with other levels of government.

That’s really useful to know. And I think here, because we’re the Local Government Information Unit, I think we share the same thing. We’re trying to share information between local governments all the time. Something that made me think about was your other work. So we’ve spoken a bit there about the Sustainable Development Goals. Can we focus a bit on inequality as one of these sort of areas where local government can have an impact and what you found in your research about inequality?

What comes to mind is that inequality looks different and can manifest itself in very different ways, even within one city. I’m thinking about the work that I was doing in Luanda, in Angola. This was a comparative study with Mozambique in the capital city of Maputo. We were doing work across different neighbourhoods in both cities, and we also brought together city officials/representatives from a local government association in Mozambique. The officials went over to Angola and then people from Angola went over to Mozambique, which in and of itself was a really great experience.

We collected data here, so we worked together with community actors at the neighbourhood level in three neighbourhoods in both cities. We saw that inequality manifested itself, even within one city, so differently in these three different neighbourhoods. I think the power of local government, again, because it’s closer to the community level, has a much better sense of these nuances. Even the indicators when we look at the SDGs, they try to make an effort to be more conscious of the different dimensions of inequality. So, even if you look at access to public services, it’s not just about knowing whether there’s access to water in a particular neighbourhood, but is that water affordable? Is that water potable? Can people drink it without any threat to their health?

All of these different elements can play out differently within one single city. I think that’s something local government are very well positioned to address; these different dimensions of inequality. We’re building sufficiently on the knowledge that exists at that local level and how that can be translated into approaches that are more context-dependent, adapted and differentiated to particular needs at the local level.

Does that apply to community cohesion as well? Is the same thing, the same lesson relevant?

I haven’t done specific research on community cohesion per se, I think this will probably look very differently depending on the context. This is a reality in many African cities because of the fact that local governments are often faced with a lot of constraints in terms of fiscal resources, technical resources and even the mandates they legally have to deliver certain services.

You’ll often see communities step in. In South Africa, we’ve seen a lot of communities go on and start fixing their own potholes. People going for different sources of energy provision, people coming together really at the level of community. Mutual self-help and these groups of mutual aid and solidarity.

I think what can make these initiatives make or break is either where there’s just no support at all from the government, because at some point you do start reaching certain limits on what a community can do or the extent to which those initiatives can be upscaled. Or the other kind of extreme of that would be the government coming in and just trying to take over and insisting they’re going to do it better or know how to do it. I think it’s very important for local government in terms of looking at ways in which cohesion can be strengthened. It’s really listening. What do these communities actually need? Do they want you to come in? Do they maybe just want you to be given a space to come together? Or particular sources of funding?

You’ll often see that at the community level, there will be key figures who champion or are central to the daily workings of certain initiatives. So, we’re trying to identify who those champions are and really listening in a way that allows these structures to function according to their needs, rather than what a local government might think they need.

As we look to the future of local government, what emerging trends or innovations do you foresee transforming the landscape of urban policy and development? What’s coming up?

That’s a difficult one because these trends play out so differently across each context. Here in the US, and I think globally, there’s a lot of talk about the role of AI and the role of digital technologies. These just really play out in very different ways in the African context. The role that digital technologies play in a country such as Kenya or other parts of East Africa or Southern Africa is really very different from other parts of the continent. I think we’ve come a long way in embracing that diversity, and even the fact that when we talk about local government, we can be talking about these mega sprawling urban metropolitan areas and corridors, but local government is also in a small town or secondary city. We’ve come a long way in terms of embracing that diversity and understanding that, whether we’re talking about the role of digital technologies or the effects of climate change, which I think is really important and will continue to shape and challenge the workings of local government, that will really play out in different ways depending on the local context. But I think for me, just for my own research, what I’m really passionate about communicating to people is that we need to have an understanding of city power. What power do cities actually have? What constrains this power? Particularly in a global context where we see a resurgence of more non-democratic forms of political rule. And we see that playing out.

Even the kind of so-called global north or south distinction here is not really of help because we see this playing out across the globe. I think we need a much better understanding of what power cities have and what constrains the power of cities. Understanding that there’s a lot that cities actually do not control, whether it’s large global challenges of climate change, migration and macroeconomics, and understanding that we cannot just have the conversation about local government. This needs to include all levels of government. So, really, the importance of multi-level governance systems and who is doing what. How can we collaborate together? How can we share and distribute resources?

I think that is what will ultimately shape the future of local government and urban policy. It’s exactly that conversation of the distribution of power, how that plays out and how we can practice that power in ways that actually respond to people’s needs.

Is there any advice that you’d give any city officers who are listening to this for navigating that challenge?

I really do not want to advise city officials because I do not envy them. I think it’s very easy as academics to critique urban policy. I spent time as an embedded researcher also with the City of Cape Town, and it made me very, very aware and appreciative of the challenges that local government officials face. I don’t think I would want to be in their position and I don’t know if I want to advise them. But I do think that we see examples of very exciting things happening at the local government level, where, even within the constraints, we do see experimentation, innovation and the emergence of political alternatives and leadership that show we actually can do this. Ways in which city governments are experimenting with bringing local communities in, with collaboration and coming up with solutions that take that into account. So, for those city officials who are doing that, I would like to say keep on doing that because it’s very important and it’s very difficult, and keep up the good work. That’s what I would say.

That’s a great message. Are there any of these innovations that sort of spring to mind from your research? Are there any that really stick with you over the time that you’ve been doing this?

I think most of the things that really stick with me are the really small-scale initiatives that are really powerful in terms of bringing people together, for instance, in the public space. Some examples that come to mind from the different cities that I’ve worked in are really kind of community spaces, for a local library or a local playground, for example. It’s often not the big flashy investment, but it’s really those neighbourhood-level interventions that can be so powerful. I think that’s what comes to mind.

How can local government, going into the future, best foster collaboration and knowledge exchange between researchers, policymakers and communities?

I mentioned I worked as an embedded researcher with the City of Cape Town, and that was really important in terms of shaping me as a researcher to understand what it is actually like to work within a local government, what the daily realities are. So this was part of a wider knowledge exchange program and collaboration between the City of Cape Town and the University of Cape Town.

We’ve seen different versions of that collaboration happening in other parts of the world, and I think it’s just such a powerful tool of having academia and government come together. It’s important to note that just as academics would spend time with the city government, some academics were doing their PhD research while being based within a city level department, we also had city officials coming to spend time at the university.

I think having both sides is really powerful because it allows local government officials, who often have a wealth of knowledge and experience but don’t really have the time, to really reflect on their own learnings and put this into a comparative perspective with another city.

Having these knowledge exchanges, where it’s not just about academics spending time within the city, but also the other way around, is really powerful. I think being able to establish these kinds of collaborations over a longer period, where it’s not just a one-off of someone coming in for a short period of time, allows for the learnings to translate into policy making and implementation, particularly in the case of Cape Town. We’ve had a few people who spend time within the city as PhD researchers and now actually work within the city as officials. They take that experience and that allows them to have these learnings become more ingrained into long-term government workings and policy making. I think that’s just a great example of fostering this kind of knowledge exchange in a way that can have very real, tangible and long-term impacts.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.