Co-productive Urban Planning: Protecting and Expanding Food Security in Uganda’s Secondary Cities

Abstract

AbstractCo-production, a strategy increasingly being adopted by urban planners, has potential for protecting and expanding urban food security. Its goals go beyond those of participation to include substantive sharing in policy design, implementation and monitoring: shifting some power associated with these decisions and actions to primary stakeholders. Co-production is desirable for empowerment outcomes, and also on grounds of greater efficiency, cost savings and more locally informed planning. Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) is a lead actor in co-production and has partnered with the Government of Uganda, working on pro-poor urban development projects underway in several secondary cities, including Jinja and Mbale. SDI frames slum dweller advocacy in a rights-based discourse with provisions that informal settlement residents articulate their own priorities. Given food access is a central priority of the urban poor, co-production creates opportunities to address urban food insecurity. However, governments, including municipal and national governments in Uganda, resist genuine power sharing with urban slum dwellers. This research explores how co-production engages slum dwellers and governance actors in the secondary cities of Jinja and Mbale, Uganda. It seeks to understand the possibilities and limitations of the current SDI co-productive programing in the context of urban food security. Empirical evidence to support this research is drawn from interviews with urban planning stakeholders in Kampala, Jinja and Mbale in 2015 and 2018.