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Locally Led Planning: A Guide for Building Climate Resilience in Urban Informal Settlements

7 December 2022 Tools to Mainstream Effective LLA into Development

Introduction

This Guide provides resources for locally-led, inclusive, multisectoral upgrading for climate resilience in urban informal settlements. It pays particular attention to context and its variation across cities and countries — the principles, guides and methods in this document must be translated to each unique context. It can help replicate the approaches and roles taken by institutions and people for comprehensive, transformative upgrading — based largely on the experience from the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi, Kenya — but not the specific plans themselves. While the focus is on Africa, the lessons can be applied elsewhere as well.

The Mukuru Approach at a Glance

The videos for this Guide were produced in collaboration with Know Your City TV, a creative collective of young men and women from informal settlements across the world: "So many images of development, poverty and informality are taken through the lens of the “other.” We say: nothing for us without us."

About this Guide

Download the full version, and read the what, why and how of this Guide.
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The Mukuru Approach

A high-level overview of Mukuru Special Planning Area

The Mukuru approach has taught us that improving climate resilience in informal settlements requires the urgent coordination of several key strategies. National and city leaders should take up this approach to building climate resilience and upgrading informal settlements.

Urbanization in the margins: Upgrading informal settlements for climate resilience

Like informal settlements in cities across Africa, Mukuru is vulnerable to climate hazards like extreme rainfall, floods, water- and vector-borne diseases, extreme heat, fires, and water scarcity. Locally-led planning efforts serve as an important model for upgrading at scale to build climate resilience in informal settlements.

Across Africa, climate resilience in informal settlements requires urgent attention. Residents are highly vulnerable to multiple climate hazards like extreme rainfall, floods, water- and vector-borne diseases and extreme heat, fires and water scarcity. While upgrading is yet to be mainstreamed as climate change adaptation, it is a widely accepted practice in urban governance that can greatly increase the resilience of residents and infrastructure in informal settlements to climate change impacts.
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This Guide draws primarily on the experience of residents and their government, civil society and university partners in the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi, Kenya. The SPA is an important case study in locally led, inclusive and multisectoral upgrading of urban informal settlements for climate resilience. This section summarizes the Mukuru SPA and its key strategies.
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The Mukuru Story

The story of Mukuru, as told by Jane Weru, Executive Director of the Akiba Mashinani Trust and one of its central champions and stewards, and Dorise Moseti, a community mobilization champion from Mukuru.

Guides and Methods

The following Guides and Methods provide in-depth discussions of key practices and methodologies as well as practical considerations for translating concepts to your context.

Guides discuss key practices that are highly sensitive to local context. Each guide, therefore, includes practical considerations for translating concepts to your context as well as relevant case studies. 

Methods are detailed methodologies that can be more directly replicated across cities and countries and aid the undertaking of concepts discussed in Guides. They include examples of relevant materials like data collection tools.

Videos highlight key lessons from the Mukuru approach and strategies for undertaking locally-led upgrading for climate resilience.

Guides and Methods are organized by theme (e.g. Roles; Community Co-planning; etc) and modularized by topic so that you can more easily pick and choose what is most relevant for your work.
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Roles

Determining Roles

Locally-led, participatory and multisectoral upgrading at scale requires a broad array of roles, drawing leadership, sector knowledge and technical expertise from communities, local government and civil society as well as academia and the private sector. Building partnerships between historically adversarial parties and convening a broad array of organizations is needed to navigate local politics, overcome resource constraints and achieve genuine co-planning between communities and local government.
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Negotiation and advocacy

Measuring the Poverty Penalty

Contrary to popular belief, the urban poor are often willing and able to pay for basic services. In fact, informal settlement residents often encounter a poverty penalty, paying more for lower quality water, sanitation, electricity, housing and other goods and services than residents in nearby formal neighborhoods. Measuring the poverty penalty, and associated service provision and revenue opportunity for local utilities, can provide compelling evidence to persuade local decision-makers to upgrade basic infrastructure and services in informal settlements.
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Community training

Recruiting and Training Community Mobilizers and Co-Researchers

Recruiting and training residents to undertake data collection and mobilize other residents is central to a community’s capacity to co-plan with local governments. Enduring investments in informal settlements require building more than just infrastructure. Resilience demands investment in local leadership and community capacities and livelihoods. The concepts in this Guide are foundational for the Guides and Methods in Community-led Data Collection and Community Co-planning.
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Community-led data collection

Settlement Mapping

Typically conducted at the same time as Settlement Profiling and before Household Numbering and Enumeration, settlement mapping is a community-led data collection method. Also known as community mapping, the method is used to map structure footprints and facilities and service location points. Maps provide foundational data for profiling, numbering and enumerations.
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Settlement Profiling

Typically conducted at the same time as Settlement Mapping and before Household Numbering and Enumeration, settlement profiling is a community-led data collection method. It is a survey with a sample of households to collect data on the history and growth of the settlement and the challenges residents face across sectors. Data is used for both advocacy and subsequent planning efforts.
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Household Numbering and Enumeration

Typically conducted after Settlement Mapping and Settlement Profiling, enumeration is a community-led data collection method. It is a household-level census to collect demographic and socioeconomic data as well as any other key data important to the focus of a given advocacy effort or upgrading project (or as a response to imminent displacement to document structures and households for advocacy and compensation efforts after demolitions occur).
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Risk Profiling: Identifying Risks, Assessing Solutions and Determining Community Priorities

Climate risk profiling captures residents’ perception of everyday risks in their community and ranking of those risks; diagnoses the impacts of identified risks; evaluates their current strategies and ideas for potential solutions to address those impacts; and assesses barriers to taking action to implement their proposed solutions. This process helps determine community priorities for addressing local risks. Profiles support Co-planning between communities and local governments as well as local, community-led initiatives to provide immediate and short-term benefits during upgrading processes.
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Community co-planning

Let’s know each other, so we build each other: Lessons for community co-planning from the Mukuru approach

Mukuru residents worked with the local government to plan crucial infrastructure investments to improve their health, safety and dignity through a “co-planning” process. This empowered residents to make planning decisions that have improved their resilience to climate change.

Community Mobilization, Organization, Representation and Coordination Strategy

An indispensable practice at the center of participatory, inclusive and locally led upgrading for climate resilience, the community organizational model defines how residents mobilize, coordinate and communicate among themselves and how they interact with their government, civil society and other partners.
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Integrated planning

Forming interdisciplinary consortia

Consortia create a platform for collaboration and coordination, convening resources and a broad array of expertise to address the interdependent, multisectoral challenges in informal settlements. They also provide an effective model for co-planning with communities and building a coalition among historically adversarial parties like local government and civil society.
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Forming consortia: Multisectoral planning in informal settlements

The interdependent, multisectoral challenges in informal settlements like Mukuru require integrated planning. Improvements in no one sector alone can solve them. It is crucial to develop sectoral plans in tandem, working together across disciplines.

Assessing Planning Standards and Negotiating Alternatives

Formal, conventional infrastructure standards are unrealistic and impractical in informal settlements where space and resources are often scarce. To address residents’ vulnerabilities, assess the implications of applying conventional, formal planning standards and negotiate with both government and communities to formulate alternatives that minimize the displacement of residents and the fracture of community bonds. At the same time, ensure standards prioritize collective needs for health, safety, dignity and accessibility over individual interests or ownership.
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Throw out your rule book: Alternative planning approaches for climate resilience in informal settlements

Acknowledging Mukuru’s unique developmental and political challenges, planning partners adopted an unconventional planning framework. Enabled by the SPA declaration, it adopted alternatives to conventional planning standards to minimize the displacement of Mukuru residents without sacrificing security, health or resilience considerations.

From plan to implementation: Opportunities and challenges

The Nairobi city government began implementing the community-led, multisectoral upgrading plan in 2020. While the Covid-19 pandemic has delayed official ratification of the upgrading plan, the Nairobi city government and Nairobi Metropolitan Services have already built roads, storm drains, several hospitals, a school, and a pilot water and sanitation project. Ongoing implementation efforts provide opportunities and pose several challenges.

7 December 2022

Tools to Mainstream Effective LLA into Development

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