Despite a centralized formal structure, Chinese politics and policy-making have long been marked by substantial degrees of regional and local variation and experimentation. These trends have, if anything, intensified as China's reform matures. Though often remarked upon, the politicsof policy formation, diffusion, and implementation at the subnational level have not previously been comprehensively described, let alone satisfactorily explained. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores how policies diffuse across China today, the mechanisms through which local governments actually arrive at specific solutions, and the implications for China's political development and stability in the years ahead. The chapters examine how local-level institutions solve governance challenges, such as rural development, enterprise reform, and social service provision. Focusing on diverse policy areas that include land use, state-owned enterprise reform, and house churches, the contributors all address the same overarching question: how do local policymakers innovate in each issue area to address a governance challenges and how, if at all, do these innovations diffuse into national politics. As a study of local governance in China today, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Chinese politics, comparative politics, governance and development studies, and also to policy-makers interested in authoritarianism and governance.

A fundamental question about contemporary Africa is why does Africa remain so poor, long after the departure of the European Colonial domination and in the midst of so many natural resources?

Poverty Reduction Strategies in Africa provides new understandings of the persistent issue of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and makes recommendations for policy frameworks to help African governments alleviate poverty. Each chapters uses case studies to review the old strategies for resolving the problem of poverty in the continent and make the case for new initiatives to address poverty. The contributors focus on practical and day-to-day issues as the best approach to formulate and implement poverty reduction strategies in contemporary Africa.

This book is invaluable reading for students and scholars of African politics and development.

Table of Contents

Part I: Dimensions and Assessments of Poverty Reduction Policies and Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa

1. Poverty in Post-colonial Africa: The Legacy of Contested Perspectives

2. Scaling up Power Infrastructure Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa for Poverty Alleviation

3. The Impact of Anti-Corruption Conventions in Sub-Saharan Africa

4. The Besieged Continent: Interrogating Contemporary Issues of Corruption and Poverty in Africa

5. PEPFAR and Preventing HIV Transmission: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

6. Reflections on the Current Challenges of Poverty Reduction in Africa

7. A Critical Analysis of Poverty Reduction Strategies in Post-Colonial Africa

Part II: Problems of Good Governance and Institutional Failures in West-Africa

8. Weaknesses and Failures of Poverty Reduction Policies and Programs in Nigeria since 1960

9. In the Web of Neo¬-Liberalism and Deepening Contradictions? Assessing Poverty Reform Strategies in West Africa Since the Mid-1980s

10. An Assessment of Abuse of the elderly as an Aspect of Poverty in Akwa-Ibom State, Nigeria

11. Reflections on the Interface between Poverty and Food Insecurity in Nigeria

12. An Appraisal of Poverty Reduction Program in Bayelsa State of Nigeria: “In- Care of the People” (COPE)

13. A Comparative Analysis of Incidence of Poverty in Three Urban Centers in Ghana from 1945-1990

Rights-based Litigation, Urban Governance and Social Justice in South Africa considers the overlap between legal and everyday struggles for social and spatial justice in the particular context of Johannesburg, South Africa. Drawing from literature across disciplines of law, urban geography and urban planning, as well as from reported case-law concerning the invocation of constitutional rights in Johannesburg and other South African cities, the book critically examines whether, and to what extent, the invocation of legal rights before South African courts have contributed to the advancement of social justice in the city. It considers the impact of the legal assertion of different constituent aspects of the so-called "right to the city" on the many people simultaneously performing the right, the governance structures responsible for enabling and facilitating its enjoyment and, thirdly, the physical place in which it is performed.

Drawing broad conclusions on the utility of rights-based litigation for the achievement of social change and spatial justice, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Africa, constitutional law, human rights law, regulatory law, sociology of rights, studies of law and society, urban studies, urban geography, governance studies, and development studies.

Table of Contents

1. Johannesburg as a Site for Rights

2. Inhabiting Joburg: Struggles for Housing and Access to the City

3. Struggles over Essential Services

4. Marginal Struggles: Equality, Public Presence and Livelihood

5. Privileged Struggles: Property, Lifestyle, Business and Safety

6. Struggles over Autonomy, Equality and Identity: Sex, Gender and Sexuality

7. The Right to Joburg?

Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced transformations over the last few years. After more than a decade of a hegemonic model based solely on free-market principles, the regional and global transformation that occurred in the first decade of the new millennium modified the way of understanding economic development and the insertion of regional blocs in global affairs. Old initiatives have been reconsidered, new schemes have emerged, and new principles going beyond trade issues have modified the norms and processes of regional economic integration. This book reviews these recent transformations to depict and explain the new trends shaping regional blocs and cooperation in the Americas.

Local Government Reforms in Countries in Transition explores the impacts that the end of the Cold War and increased globalization have had on government around the world. The decentralization of national governments has led to a greater role for local governments; public administration and democrative representation are the new arena of local governments the world over. Focusing not only on countries from the former Soviet Union, but also on Israel, China, South Africa, and Egypt, the contributors to this volume present a truly global investigation of countries experiencing governmental transformation.

This volume - the summary of a five-year research programme - describes and assesses the Scandinavian approach to local public finance. A key role of local finance in Scandinavia is redistribution in the form of a wide array of social services that are largely financed at the central level.

This fully updated second edition of the "Politico's Guide to Local Government" is a comprehensive guide to every aspect of British local government. As well as outlining the role of councillors and local government officers, it contains a full history of local government in Britain. It examines the politicisation of local government and analyses New Labour's policies and attitudes to local government.

This comprehensive edited volume conceptually develops the notion of 'de-Europeanisation' as an important development in the literature on Europeanisation, and applies it specifically to the case of Turkey. 'De-Europeanisation' is defined as the loss or weakening of the EU/Europe as a normative/political context and as a reference point in domestic settings and national public debates of both candidate and member countries. 'De-Europeanisation' manifests itself in two basic ways: as the weakening of the appeal and influential capacity of European institutions, policies, norms and values, leading to a retreat of EU/ Europe as a normative/political context for society and politics in a candidate/member state; and as growing scepticism and indifference in a given society towards the EU/Europe, risking the legitimacy of the EU/Europe as a reference point in cases even where reform is incurred. Using this concept, the authors analyse the diminishing impact of the EU in Turkish governance and politics after the opening of accession negotiations in October 2005. The relevance of 'de-Europeanisation' is investigated through ten chapters focusing on key policy areas including education, migration, democracy, the rule of law and media freedoms, and a number of key actors including civil society organisations, political parties and political leaders. This book was originally published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

In this comprehensive volume, Canadian, Ukrainian, and American scholars examine various aspects of the Ukrainian crisis, and consider its impact on Europe. The chapters include topics such as: Russian narratives about Ukraine; the conflicting assumptions underlying their divergent nation-building agendas; new findings about the far right's involvement in the Maidan protests; the Ukrainian crisis from the perspective of Western grand strategy; the security implications of Russia's geopolitical agenda in Ukraine; the factors that contributed to the rise of separatism in Donbass; and the economic costs for Ukraine of choosing economic integration with Europe rather than Eurasia. This book demonstrates that the current crisis in Ukraine is much more complex than comes across in the media. It also explores the fact that, since Russia and Ukraine will always be neighbours, some sort of modus vivendi between them will have to be found. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Politics and Society.

Despite the large number of regional and global summits there is very little known about the functioning and impact of this particular type of diplomatic practice. While recognizing that the growing importance of summits is a universal phenomenon, this volume takes advantage of the richness of the Americas experiment to offer a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of contemporary summitry. The book addresses questions such as: How effective have summits been ? How have civil society and other non-state actors been involved in summits? How have summits impacted on the management of regional affairs? Filling a significant void in the literature, this volume offers an original contribution helping to understand how summitry has become a central feature of world politics. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of diplomacy, international organizations, and global/regional governance.

Social Policy in Hong Kong provides for the first time a comprehensive and critical analysis of social policy in Hong Kong. It shows that Hong Kong is far from being a simple free market economy. In many areas, Hong Kong has highly developed social policies which make a major contribution to the quality of life of its citizens.An introductory chapter provides background information on the economic, social and political structure of the region. Subsequent chapters cover issues such as health, housing, education, poverty and social security, social care, transport and labour protection. A concluding chapter draws out the essential nature of the Hong Kong approach and constructs a balance sheet of success and failure. With Hong Kong becoming a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997, this timely book describes social policy in the territory at the end of an era.

No book has addressed the simultaneous phenomena of Korea's rapid economic development and its vibrant democratization in a single coherent paradigm. The late developmentalist approach emphasizes the strong role of Korea's state and bureaucratic efficiency but does not explain how political development was concurrent with the economic miracles in the Han River; modernization and dependence theories also fail to explain the aspect of simultaneity in this phenomenon. What these three theories commonly miss is the unique relationship between state and society in Korea's long history of political culture. In this book, Jongwoo Han takes a holistic approach to understanding these phenomena by examining the state's role in the unprecedented economic development and society's capabilities to resist the state's centralized power. Han re-articulates state-society relations through Onuf's social constructivist approach based on three rules of a political community: hegemony, hierarchy, and heteronomy. This book expands upon this effort to re-construct the state and society relations in two ways. First, it produces case studies of the capital city of Hanyang (Joseon Dynasty from 1392 to 1910), Kyeongseong (Japanese colonial control from 1910 to 1945), and Seoul (1945-current). The capital city is analyzed as a container for the major ideologies and ways of thinking that have shaped three important political eras. Second, i adopts two indigenous thoughts, Neo-Confucianism and geomancy, as sources of the main political and cultural ideologies that shape Korea's state and society relations. These sources have never been treated as units of political analysis. This book finds that both Neo-Confucianism and geomancy, over two periods of Hanyang and Kyeongseong, are two main contributing factors of the emergence of the developmental state and vibrant democracy in Korea in the Seoul era.

The bantustans – or ‘homelands’ – were created by South Africa’s apartheid regime as ethnically-defined territories for Africans. Granted self-governing and ‘independent’ status by Pretoria, they aimed to deflect the demands for full political representation by black South Africans and were shunned by the anti-apartheid movement. In 1972, Steve Biko wrote that ‘politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’. With the end of apartheid and the first democratic elections of 1994, the bantustans formally ceased to exist, but their legacies remain inscribed in South Africa’s contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. While the older literature on the bantustans has tended to focus on their repressive role and political illegitimacy, this edited volume offers new approaches to the histories and afterlives of the former bantustans in South Africa by a new generation of scholars. This book was originally published as various special issues of the South African Historical Journal.

Table of Contents

Preface: ‘Let’s Talk About Bantustans’ Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni

Introduction – Beyond ‘Homelands’: Some Ideas about the History of African Rural Areas in South Africa William Beinart

1. ‘The Bandwagon of Golden Opportunities’? Healthcare in South Africa’s Bantustan Periphery Anne Digby

2. The Renewal of Community Health under the KwaZulu ‘Homeland’ Government Elizabeth Hull

3. Bantustan Education History: The ‘Progressivism’ of Bophutatswana’s Primary Education Upgrade Programme (PEUP), 1979-1988 Linda Chisholm

4. Witchcraft and the South African Bantustans: Evidence from Bushbuckridge Isak Niehaus

5. Ethnic Separatism or Cultural Preservation? Ndebele Radio under Apartheid, 1983-1994 Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi

6. Rural Reggae: The Politics of Performance in the Former ‘Homeland’ of Venda Fraser G. McNeill

7. Bophuthatswana and the North-West Province: From Pan-Tswanaism to Mineral-Based Ethnic Assertiveness Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga

8. ‘If you are hungry, and a man promises you mealies, will you not follow him?’ South African Swazi Ethnic Nationalism, 1931-1986 Shireen Ally

9. South Africa’s Bantustans and the Dynamics of ‘Decolonisation’: Reflections on Writing Histories of the Homelands Laura Evans

Memoirs

10. Autobiography of an Underground Political Activist Vha-Musanda Vho-Shandukani Mudzunga (Manapule)

11. KaNgwane: A Life in and Beyond Mabhuza Simeon Ginindza

12. Bophuthatswana and the North-West Province: The Role of the Joint Administrators Tebogo Job Mokgoro

The demand on local government to do more with less by improving operations, increasing productivity, and making better and more informed decisions increases constantly. On a departmental level Geographic Information Systems are helping meet this demand but the majority of local government organizations do not take the time to understand the GIS needs and opportunities of each and every department. This book: Discusses how towns, cities and counties and their specific departments should actually use GIS Explains the best ways to use GIS tools through many specific case studies and step by step instructions Emphasises local government needs first before offering solutions Gives readers a practical and understandable way of thinking about managing and making GIS successful This book is the guide that details best GIS applications and practices for the 34 departments in local government that can, and should, use GIS technology. It explains in details how, why, and what each department should implement, a clear and understandable explanation of departmental GIS.

Across Africa, new collectivities are shifting the terms within which access to economic opportunity, social belonging, and political agency have historically been understood. Recent years have seen powerful waves of civic mobilization sweep across the continent. Less prominent articulations of contemporary political desire have also been percolating through the diffuse experiences of the African everyday. As differential access to global capitalism and its promises folds into modes of subjection—and escape—that are hard to predict, those who exercise power find ever more ways of guarding the borders and memberships of privileged groups. This book turns to the critically entangled terms of affect and access as a basis for exploring emergent orientations in the field of African cultural theorizing. It pays especial attention to scholarship engaging with the multifaceted coordinates of political and social participation, where complex assemblages of affective attachment, exchange, and realignment work in concert with demands for socio-political and economic forms of access. This book was originally published as a special issue of Safundi.

Table of Contents

Contemporary African mediations of affect and access

Jessie Forsyth, Sarah Olutola & Helene Strauss

A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African woman, True Lovemagazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile

Pumla Dineo Gqola

The girls who don’t die: subversions of gender and genre in recent fiction by Lauren Beukes

Jennifer M. Schmidt

Sticky e/motional connections: young people, social media, and the re-orientation of affect

Allison Mackey

Mediating women’s globalized existence through social media in the work of Adichie and Bulawayo

Camille Isaacs

A threatening personification of freedom or: Sobukwe and repression

Derek Hook

"Only words can bury us, not silence": reading Yvonne Vera’s difficult silences

Sarah Kastner

Fostering receptivity: cultural translation, ethical solicitation, and the navigation of distance in J.T. Rogers’ The Overwhelming

Susan Spearey

Empathy’s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling

Ross Truscott

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Bringing together the thoughts of outstanding contributors, Regional Politics presents a comparative study on the emerging regional nature of local and urban politics. Recent studies tend to focus on the politics and power of internal cities or on suburban areas that have gained incredible strength in the past decade. However, this important volume explores how politics work in the extended metropolis or "functional city"--which includes and surrounds the urban core and whose economy, society, and politics are integrally joined. Contributors center on detailed case studies of 10 cities with a look at the development of regional patterns, an analysis of the impact regionalism has on urban politics, and an outline for an overall approach. The comprehensive and state-of-the-art expertise presented in this volume makes Regional Politics ideal for planners, policymakers, academics, researchers, and students in the areas of urban politics, state and local government, and public policy.

Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, 'the local' is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence 'everyday peace' is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, 'the local', and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the 'local turn' of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The history of the ANC, which is the oldest liberation movement on the African continent, is one that has generated a great deal of interest amongst historians in recent years. Gone are the days when the history of African nationalism could be relegated to the margins of the study of the South African past. Instead, with the ANC having ascended to the helm of political power, a position it has maintained for over twenty years, there can be no question that its history occupies an important and permanent place in the history of the nation.

This volume gathers together some of the most important contributions to the literature on the ANC’s role in South Africa’s struggle for liberation. Besides important themes such as gender, ethnicity, and healthcare, contributions from leading historians also address why the ANC decided to engage in armed struggle; what role the South African Communist Party played in making this decision; how the ANC External Mission contributed to the upsurge of mass protest in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s; and the ANC’s contribution, relative to the other components of the liberation struggle, in ensuring the eventual demise of the old racial order. The chapters in this book were originally published in the South African Historical Journal, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and African Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface Thula Simpson

1. Dialectical Dances: Exploring John Dube’s Public Life Heather A. Hughes

2. ‘A Member of the Race’: Dr Modiri Molema’s Intellectual Engagement with the Popular History of South Africa, 1912-1921 Jane Starfield

3. Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography Meghan Healy-Clancy

4. The African National Congress in the Western Transvaal/Northern Cape Platteland, c.1910-1964: Patterns of Diffusion and Support for Congress in a Rural Setting Andrew Hayden Manson and Bernard Mbenga

5. The Lasting Legacy: The Soviet Theory of the National-Democratic Revolution and South Africa Irina Filatova

6. The Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle in South Africa 1948-1961 Stephen Ellis

7. The African National Congress (ANC) Underground: From the M-Plan to Rivonia Raymond Suttner

8. ‘The Road to Freedom is via the Cross’: ‘Just Means’ in Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life Raymond Suttner

9. Emasculating Agency: An Unambiguous Assessment of Albert Luthuli’s Stance on Violence Scott Everett Couper

10. Secret Party: South African Communists between 1950 and 1960 Tom Lodge

11. The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960-1962) Paul S. Landau

12. Armed and Trained: Nelson Mandela’s 1962 Military Mission as Commander in Chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe and Provenance for his Buried Makatov Pistol Garth Benneyworth

13. Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c. 1960-1969 Arianna Lissoni

14. Healthcare in Exile: ANC Health Policy and Health Care Provision in MK Camps, 1964 to 1989 Melissa Armstrong

15. Main Machinery: The ANC’s Armed Underground in Johannesburg During the 1976 Soweto Uprising Thula Simpson

16. ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe, We are Waiting for You’: The ANC and the Township Uprising, September 1984 – September 1985 Thula Simpson

17. Sex in a Time of Exile: An Examination of Sexual Health, AIDS, Gender, and the ANC, 1980-1990 Carla Tsampiras

In Japan, the main local administrative affairs are traditionally allotted to prefectures and municipalities, while communal disposal systems, fire-fighting and regional development takes secondary importance. However, two new changes to the frame of local governments have altered the main frameworks of national and provincial governance. With decentralization reforms taking effect, more local bodies are gaining autonomy and departing from uniformity. This has allowed methods of cooperation between governing bodies to diversify- trends which augur a dissolution of uniformity in Japanese local administration. If left alone, it may eventually lead to disparities between principal and peripheral bodies, and thus complicate the administrative systems further. How will these changes affect future community development? This book aims to address the dynamism of concepts of wide area public service in Japan. It advocates the use of flexible strategies to ensure service standards are best suited to each regional demand. This concept can be called "departure from uniformity". This book also examines the advantages and disadvantages of these shifts for the future of Japanese public policy, and suggests various strategies to prevent further complications; e.g. autonomous settlement zone. Regional Administration in Japan: Departure from uniformity will interest researchers of Japanese public policy and public administration. This book will also engage researchers of Japanese politics and Japanese studies in general.

As the economy and society of China has become more diversified, so have its urban neighborhoods. The last decade has witnessed a surge in collective action by homeowners in China against the infringement of their rights. Research on neighborhood governance is sparse and limited, so this book fills a vital gap in the literature and understanding.The authors reveal how the Chinese authorities have themselves become increasingly sensitive to the potential risk of collective actions becoming destabilizing forces in urban arenas. This thought-provoking book looks at both the theoretical and empirical underpinning of the self-governance of homeowners and their collective action, as well as control mechanisms in neighborhood governance. The book offers a window through which contending issues, such as changing state-society relations, rights-based social movements and the emergence of civil society, can be further explored. Neighborhood governance is a multifaceted concept that cuts across academic disciplines and intersects an array of policy areas. Therefore this book will find a wide audience amongst public and social policy academics, particularly those with an interest in urban studies, governance and Asian cities, as well as politics. Contributors: W. Breitung, H. Chai, J. Chen, L. Chen, Y. Chen, Y. Gui, S. Guo, R. Huang, Y. Jiang, W. Ma, B.L. Read, X. Sun, J. Tang, J. Wang, Y.Wu, N.-M. Yip

This book explores experiences, issues and challenges which have emerged since Constitutional status was granted to the local bodies at grassroots level in India in the early 1990s. Among other issues, it focuses on: the contrasting political ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar on Panchayati Raj Institutions the legal and constitutional provisions which were introduced through the 73rd and 74th Amendment Acts the devolution process, status and challenges of democracy for local governmental bodies empowerment of the women and lower castes through reservations in the local bodies governance in Schedule V and VI tribal areas Based on extensive fieldwork across India, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of political science, sociology, public administration as well as policymakers and civil society activists.

The mesmerizing story of two countries caught in history whose rivalry can destroy the world or restore its peace, this is the first book to untangle the complex relationship of Saudi Arabia and Iran by rejecting heated rhetoric and looking at the real roots of the issue to promise pathways to peace.

Local communities in all countries are increasingly aware of resource scarcity and are pressing for more say in how funds are used. Developments in Local Government Finance examines key issues for economists interested in local government and, in particular, the functioning of institutions at regional and local levels.Local government organization and finance are addressed from a variety of approaches by the authors who critically examine the current intergovernmental distribution of responsibility for service provision and revenue raising. Adopting a multilateral approach to theory and policy, this major book stresses the need for real, and not just formal, devolution and greater local accountability. The contributors highlight how instruments for financing local government and for pursuing interpersonal and geographical equity can vary considerably between countries with broadly similar systems, yet be surprisingly similar for countries with quite different institutional arrangements. Particular reference is made to emerging problems in the European Union and the experience of Switzerland, a country where fiscal federalism and tax harmonization are living together in a unique equilibrium of forces. Developments in Local Government Finance presents a major contribution to the understanding of local government and finance for both students and practitioners.

Multinational federations rest on the coexistence of two or more nations within a single polity. Within these federations, minority nations play a significant role as their character differs from the other building blocks of the federation. This edited volume offers a comprehensive comparison of two such minority nations - Quebec in Canada and Wallonia in Belgium - which exemplifies many dimensions, themes and issues highly resonant to the study of federalism and regionalism across the globe. Quebec and Wallonia have experienced several decades of federal dynamics where both regions have had to find their way as a minority nation in a multinational federation. For those studying federalism and regionalism their importance lies in a number of characteristics, but principally in the fact of these minority nations have transformed into mini-states with fully fledged legislative powers within their federation. This book seeks to study the specific dynamics within these small worlds and between them and the rest of the federation. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of federalism, nationalism and regionalism, comparative politics and policies, political ideas and social movements.

This volume describes African cities in transition, and the economic, socio-political, and environmental challenges resulting from rapid post-colonial urbanization. As the African continent continues to transition from urban configurations inherited from colonial influences and history, it faces issues such as urban slum expansion, increased demands for energy and clean water, lack of adequate public transportation, high levels of inequality among different socio-economic population strata, and inadequate urban governance, planning, and policies. African cities in transition need to reconsider current policies and developmental trajectories to facilitate and sustain economic growth and Africa's strategic repositioning in the world. Written by an international team of scholars and practitioners, this volume uses case studies to focus on key issues and developmental challenges in selected African cities. Topics include but are not limited to, smart cities, changing notions of democracy, the city's role in attaining the SDGs, local governance, alternative models for governance and management, corruption, urbanisation and future cities.