The growing recognition of the importance of cities for development does not alter the fact that cities and countries are co-dependant, or that cities are better off when supported by their national governments. An appropriate balance of power and responsibilities between tiers of government is at the heart of sustainable cities and in sub-Saharan Africa striking this balance requires policy innovation, if not experimentation.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation is often caricatured as “fast, late and poor”, attributes that create particular challenges when it comes to financing and providing the infrastructure and services that urban citizens require to live long and productive lives. Less widely acknowledged are the urban governance arrangements that compound finance and service delivery challenges.  The limits of generalisations notwithstanding, many cities in the region are governed by an awkward combination of traditional and municipal authority, and this authority is highly prescribed by national governments. Local governments find themselves charged with the administration of petty responsibilities and revenues, while control of the significant urban investment and revenue streams remains with national government and SOEs^[1] (Berrisford and McAuslan 2017). This mode of urban governance foregoes the benefits of proximity in urban development, and increases the chance that the rapid growth of urban populations in Africa will overwhelm the capacity to assimilate this population in ways that avoid social and ecological disaster. Dar es Salaam is one of the few primary cities in the world where infant mortality and maternal mortality at birth is higher than the national average, pointing to harsh realities of rapid and inadequately planned and coordinated urban expansion.^[2]

It was the limitations of the prevailing multi-level governance arrangements in many sub-Saharan African countries that saw National Urban Policies (NUPs) emerge in 2016 as a key policy instrument for the region in the wake of Habitat III. NUP proponents in Africa envisaged these policies fulfilling different needs: caretaking cities while local government capacity was created; simplifying and cohering the many interests, bylaws, tenure regimes and programmes that had accreted over decades of piece-meal urban development; providing a conduit through which African cities could contribute to Agenda 2030. With the benefit of a few years’ hindsight, what many proponents under-estimated was the extent of competition between tiers of government and the danger, innate to NUPs, that they legitimise the desire of national governments to retain control over local authorities.

It is this contested nature of multi-level governance that necessitated caution by the Coalition for Urban Transitions (CUT) when developing a NUP in Tanzania and supporting the process of NUP review in Ghana. The CUT is a donor funded outfit, external to the respective country’s governments, but with a desire to support national governments in overseeing sustainable cities. The need to balance caution, reflexivity an ambition resulted in the Tanzanian Urbanisation Laboratory (TULab) and the Ghana Urbanisation Think Tank (GUTT), two interdisciplinary institutions convened and funded by the CUT but directed by the respective governments.