This work is the product of comparative research on governance and urban waste in Africa carried out by four teams of researchers in four major cities in Africa: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in francophone West Africa; Ibadan, Nigeria, in anglophone West Africa; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in East Africa; and Johannesburg, South Africa, in southern Africa. The study was funded with a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), of Canada. The coordinators of the research are members of the African Research Network for Urban Management, which has for more than 10 years embraced most of the leading urban researchers and urban-research institutions on the African continent. This book attempts to characterize waste-management systems in Africa within the framework of governance. It pursues the governance debate and how it helps us to deepen our understanding of urban problems in Africa. It has six chapters. Chapter 1 is an overview of the governance debate in Africa, focusing on the various ways governance is conceptualized. It concludes that to move the debate forward, we need to operationalize the concepts by applying them to a specific aspect of urban management in Africa — in this case, urban waste. This chapter also discusses the scope and the objectives of the studies carried out in the selected African cities and the methodology adopted by the research teams. Chapters 2–5 contain analyses of the waste-management systems and approaches in the four key African cities.
