Whatever happened to the ‘African spring’?

Tom Goodfellow is a PhD candidate in LSE’s Department of International Development. His current research examines state effectiveness and the politics of urban development in East Africa. Here he points out that the way events have unfolded in Uganda over the past few months provides some answers as to why the upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East have not spread southwards

Urban planning through the barrel of a gun

LSE’s Tom Goodfellow says the authorities in the Ugandan capital are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from across the border

Taxing the Urban Boom: Property Taxation and Land Leasing in Kigali and Addis Ababa

property tax; land leasing; land value capture; urban land reform; real estate; urban development; Africa; Rwanda; Ethiopia.Much contemporary economic growth in Africa is driven by urban service sectors including construction and real estate. This manifests in rapidly transforming landscapes and the proliferation of valuable property in the continent’s booming large cities, often accompanied by growing socio-economic inequality. In this context, improving systems for property taxation is an urgent and growing need – something that national and international policymakers increasingly recognise. Despite this, even in states considered particularly ‘developmental’ and committed to increasing tax revenue, property taxation has fallen by the wayside. This paper argues that, in addition to the usual technical and political difficulties associated with property taxation, it is crucial in reform-oriented developing countries to understand the nature of land tenure systems and how they are changing, as well as historical legacies relating to land and housing. Moves to introduce or improve property taxation need also to be considered in relation to how contemporary development strategies constrain or facilitate investment in real estate, and the political economy underpinning this sector. Through an analysis of existing property tax and land leasing systems in Kigali and Addis Ababa, as well as failed, stalled and ongoing reform attempts in each, the paper identifies key themes for the study of property taxation systems and their potential to succeed in rapidly transforming cities in the global South.DfID, NORA

State effectiveness and the politics of urban development in East Africa: a puzzle of two cities, 2000-2010

East African states in the 21st century face the challenge of some of the highest rates of urban growth the world has ever seen. Cities are expanding despite low levels of industrialisation and formal employment, in contexts where states often struggle to fulfil basic functions. This thesis aims to bridge a gap between the literature on cities and urban development and scholarship pertaining to the role of the state in developing countries, to explain why responses to the urban challenge are producing widely diverging outcomes in the region. Through a comparative case study analysis of Kampala, Uganda and Kigali, Rwanda, it analyses why attempts to implement certain urban policies and regulations have been much more effective in the latter than the former. It explores this divergence in relation to four critical aspects of urban transformation: physical development (urban planning and development regulation), livelihoods in the informal economy (with a particular focus on petty trade), urban public transport, and urban local taxation. Most explanations for poor state performance focus on capacity, usually defined as bureaucratic competence. This study argues that this is inadequate, and that state effectiveness is highly dependent on the political context and the incentives for enforcement and compliance affecting state actors and urban social groups respectively. Through a process-tracing analysis drawing on six months of fieldwork, it highlights the importance of the credibility of government commitments, the sources of state legitimacy, the autonomy of different components of the state vis-à-vis social forces, and ingrained social power relations. It argues that these factors affect the degree to which formal state institutions are supported by (rather than conflicting with) informal norms. These state-society dynamics proved far more important than bureaucratic capacity in accounting for divergent state effectiveness with regard to implementing urban policy in the two cities under consideration

Local taxation and institutional accountability in Rwanda’s growing cities: the case of Kigali

A conference paper presented in IPAR's Annual research conference 201

The MPD thruster program at JPL

The topics covered are presented in viewgraph form and include the following: engine lifetime assessment; lithium magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster development; and radiation-cooled, applied-field engine testing

LSE Research: Museveni’s changing strategies for political control mean continued uncertainty for Uganda’s informal workers

Tom Goodfellow is based in LSE’s Department of International Development. In a new paper, research conducted by himself and Kristof Titeca (of the University of Antwerp) reveals how informal workers on Kampala’s streets leverage protection from the Ugandan President, paralysing the city government in the process

The Blog as a High-impact Institutional Communication Tool

Participation in conferences is a key aspect of professional development for library staff. The benefits of attending a conference include networking opportunities, engagement with the latest ideas, and seeing products provided by vendors. However, the considerable cost of sending staff to a conference is often not matched by the benefits that the library gains as a result. The knowledge acquired by the individuals attending is not always effectively shared by conventional tools such as conference reports or post-event presentations. This is particularly true in larger libraries, and in geographically dispersed organisations. We aimed to maximise the institutional impact of our attendance at Click 06 (the biennial ALIA conference) by providing a blog of the event and encouraging interaction with our colleagues during the conference itself. In this article we will describe the process of establishing, promoting and authoring an ‘institution focussed conference blog’. We also evaluate the success of the project and discuss the implications for future development