In our piece, Governance as a concept, we mentioned four principles of governance. In this piece, we try to understand urban governance in the context of a city. Urban governance, quite simply, is the system that administers our cities. It is how our infrastructure is kept in running condition, basic daily services like garbage collection and water supply are delivered, and how our grievances are heard.

Governance is a process because it is changing given the needs of the time. When India was going through rapid urbanisation, and with economic liberalisation recently enacted, the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 gave constitutional recognition to municipal governments in cities. While the mandates of the Act have not been fully realised yet, it still gave a boost of new life to urban governance.

23 years later in 2015, with the launch of the Smart Cities Mission came another actor in the landscape of urban governance, the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs). SPVs were set up to streamline the planning and execution of projects under the Mission. They have been a competing presence to city governments, doing a lot of the functions that city governments should ideally be doing. But they still show how urban governance incorporates changes and is a process that is fluid and not a structure that is rigid.

City governments and SPVs are only two of the many actors in play in urban governance. They primarily belong to two broad categories:

Public Sector: This includes city governments, SPVs, state and central government departments, regulatory boards etc. They are part of the larger system which we call the ‘Government’. They have varying and often hierarchical degrees of power, and have separate but frequently overlapping spheres of responsibilities. We look into this sector, especially the city government, in a later article.

Private Sector: Within this category of actors are two more categories: formal and informal players. The former includes registered civil society bodies like NGOs and RWAs, service providers such as private electricity providers, Project Management Units, training centres, construction companies etc. The formalness of the bodies in this sector is symptomatic of the relationship with the public sector bodies. This means that they are recognised by the government through their registration.

Private sector actors frequently help the government in urban governance by performing some of its functions in service and infrastructure provision, grievance redressal, and policy making, amongst other things. This may be done in association with the government in the form of contracts and tenders, or on their own, as in the case of non-profits.

Informal private sector includes service providers like unregistered water tank providers and cesspool cleaners, waste pickers, unregistered recycling centres etc. The basic difference between this set of actors and those belonging to the formal category is that there is no official recognition of their services by the government. This also means that this set of actors are fluid and can shift between formal and informal when its official relationship with the government changes.
All these different actors come together to perform different aspects of governance. The actors have different natures and responsibilities which make their presence complementary to each other. This represents the coordinated interaction between them and adds to the horizontalisation of governance functions over multiple actors. This coming together is not always official and represents both de jure and de facto modes of interaction.

Nagrikal: Citizens writing for small cities

What is Urban Governance?

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