 Hi everyone. I want to take this opportunity to thank UNU wider, the chair, my panelists and all of you for being here today to have the opportunity to present this research. I'm looking forward to your reactions and how to hone the message and the questions that I'm asking. Now what I'm here to talk to you today about is part of a larger project that I undertook about three years ago in doing field research in Mozambique and today I'm specifically going to focus on a component of that which was informal service delivery in, excuse me, urban development and service delivery in informal areas and I specifically took a look at trash collection in doing this research. There was a fantastic, I do think that this is a well-placed panel because I feel like the first presenter really laid out the kind of general institutional questions and questions about indigeneity in the creation of the institutions and I thought Abdul did a great job in terms of talking specifics on Ghana. I'm going to sink a little deeper to some of the micro specifics and taking a look at the service delivery questions that I raised in Mozambique. There was a great presentation, series of presentations yesterday on informal urbanization which, if this is an area that interests you, I suggest that you take a look at those papers. My entry point into this question of service delivery in informal areas began with taking a look at local democracy. I think we would all agree that urban areas, subnational government is where government touches us the most. When we talk about street lighting, water and sanitation, trash collection, these are all areas in which we acutely feel the role of subnational government or its absence and so I felt it was incredibly interesting for me in trying to figure out what are the levers that hold government accountable to take a look at that specific level of government, local government in order to understand this question. It's a timely and a timeless question, really. As you'll see from the quotes that I have up here, Alex de Tocqueville wondered this very question and looked at this very issue when he came to America and took a look at individual townships and having that be the center of the crux of local democracy. I found that very compelling, but when I started to take a look at some of this literature, my observation was that local democracies were being, or democracies in general, were being judged by the performance of their elections or the strength of their political parties, which is certainly a very valuable criteria in assessing the strength of a democratic government, but certainly it's an entry point, it's the first step, because I think what we all really care about at the end of the day is are we getting the services that we have elected our officials to provide us? Are elected officials able to exercise the levers of bureaucracy in order to provide those services? And so I found much more compelling when I was examining Putnam's work on Italian democracy and region and subnational government and also De Soto's work in analyzing the steps it took to legalize property and get access to capital related to that property, to be the best sort of starting point to begin this research, because again, my guess was really on the outcome of a government, of an elected government, which in this case is how well do they perform trash collection? So the question that I ask in this paper is what is the extent to which civic participation motivates municipalities to improve service delivery? So the literature tells us just very broadly that there are a few areas that can compel government to act, a few levers or sanctions. One is political pressure and I'll be exploring not so much the votes and sanctions of voting for different parties or different elected officials. I'm exploring more the role of civil society, of lobbies, of civil society organizations and of their ability to generate boycotts, for example, as a sanction against a government that isn't providing the services that they were elected to provide. Now, what I'm sure many of you have observed, especially in the 1990s, is a trend towards decentralization in sub-Saharan Africa. And so moving away from socialist models and moving towards models of not only elected government at the national level, but looking at ways of devolving and decentralizing power to local governments, giving them the authority to collect fees and taxes, giving the authority to elect their own officials. And so I was really compelled by decentralization and its reforms and the argument that decentralization brings power to the people, that if you decentralize and you are putting votes in the hands of the people to elect their mayors, that that's going to improve services. So that is the hypothesis that I went into this project with, which is decentralization provides authorities and incentives for local governments to act and opportunities for residents to pressure them to do so. I expected, in the four cities, which I'll go into in a little bit, where I did this research, that if I saw good, strong trash collection, regular service, clean streets, that it's partly the result of the fact of an active civil society. Residents are holding the city accountable, NGOs are working with the city, donors and NGOs are working together, and really trying to pressure and motivate the municipality to conduct this service. What I found is, of course, a little bit more nuanced and not quite so straightforward. What I found is that strong civil societies and civic participation isn't necessarily a prerequisite to good service. It's a condition that's present, but not a prerequisite. What I found is that civil society organizations and participation tend to be fluid. They tend to be a bit dependent on assistance from donors and the type of assistance that they get, and also the relationship that these organizations have with the municipalities. So the extent to which that there's good, strong leadership in place that knows how to reach out to the community and knows how to mobilize the bureaucracy to make something happen. So let me go into, so I just gave away the endings, so for those of you who want a coffee break, you can go ahead and leave now. But I have some titillating pictures of trash coming up, so you might want to stay for that. So I chose to do this study in Mozambique for lots of reasons, but the primary one was that I thought I would like to do this study in a place that has several constraints that it's dealing with, post-conflict, new democracy, low income, and the interesting dynamic of having Renamo be a part of that conflict as a group that was fighting against the government and then becoming a political party. I thought this is a really good context where, like Frank Sinatra says, if I make it here, I make it anywhere, you know, New York, New York. If the results here show the characteristics associated with providing good quality service, then I thought that those, you know, findings could be extracted and applied elsewhere. So that made Mozambique a natural laboratory for this type of a study. I'm a political scientist, so I chose to do more of a qualitative approach here. I did an embedded single case study. I chose Mozambique and within Mozambique, I chose four of the largest cities in which to do this study. As my many cases, those are the cities right there. And I actually took a look at two services. So the 1998 decentralization reform in Mozambique provided municipalities, authorities to do lots of different things. Two of those are trash collection and managing markets. Those are the two services that municipalities basically generate the bulk of their revenue, their free revenue from providing trash collection and making sure that the markets are clean, well-regulated, sanitary, and that vendors are paying the fees in order to maintain those standards. So in my mind, I thought, of course, the municipality is going to be incentivized to provide good services because they're getting the predominant share of their fees from these two services. So those are the two that I analyzed. And I did a series of, I triangulated a series of my findings by doing two service experiments, which I'll discuss one in a moment. Focus groups for the market management component, which I will be talking about today. I interviewed vendors in 14 markets in these four cities. And I did over 100 interviews and lots of discussions with mayors of these cities and other elites to try to put the puzzle together. So of course, when you start a study, you want to have definitions kind of ironed out as well as seemingly possible. And so taking a look at civic participation in civil society, I took a look and defined civil society as the exercise of participation and voice. And so really, what I was interested in is understanding how citizens could exercise this participation and voice in influencing municipal policy. And in this case, municipal policy and the provision of trash collection. So how did I do that? I measured the strength of this type of participation using two characteristics. The first is the financial self-sustainability of that particular organization. Did that organization have access to its own funds? That would help it be an independent voice in lobbying the municipality to be able to provide services. The second is, what was that organization's ability to influence municipal policy in the area of trash collection? So those were the two criteria that I used. And in short, I only found one of the four cities, Loputa, which is the capital, to have both characteristics present in the civil society organizations that I analyzed. And I'll go into that in a bit. Loputa was also the place that was the home of a very successful 2002 boycott that basically made the city do an about face and change its policies and fee structure related to trash collection because people were extremely dissatisfied. Berra and Dondo, two of the four cities, I classified as active because they had one of these characteristics present, primarily influenced over municipal policy. In general, the organizations in these two cities were fairly weak and expanded and contracted with the presence of donors. But they were still active. They still worked with the city. And in those two cities, there was a high level of trash collection service. So I classified those as being active but not strong civil society organizations. Lastly, the fourth city, Matola, was weak. There were no neighborhood organizations that worked in this area in the neighborhoods that I conducted this study. And trash collection was fairly poor. So that's the general framework. So let's jump into it. Did the job actually get done? How did I figure out or assess if trash collection was actually occurring to be able to say that service is high or low? What I did is an experiment in which in each of the four cities, I selected six to eight sites in an informal community and in a formal community. And what I did at that site is observe the trash collection occurring. So I would meet with the Department of Sanitation, figure out what the trash schedule was, and go take pictures and see how long it would take for the trash to accumulate and how long it would take for it to be removed. And so those are the various periods of service in each of the four cities. Here is an example of the actual pictures that I took of one site in Maputo in the main business district. And what you'll notice, this is a period of four days. And this is basically day one where I was observing the trash collection, I would try to go up the same time every day. And what you'll notice is a pattern from little trash to more accumulation until it was picked up four days later. So this was a typical pattern in the sense that all it might not have been in the case of Maputo, the service was daily. You can see that there was trash accumulation. So clearly the service wasn't daily in this particular area, but the service was regular, and it occurred and it occurred in a timely fashion. So that's how I asked her whether or not the service was actually happening and being able to say that this was a high or low area of performance for that particular municipality. The second way that I determined whether the service was being performed is through focus groups. And in each of the focus groups I sat down and I asked them to take a look at these four pictures and tell me what does the street outside your house look like? And put an X next to it. So here in Iñama-Dima, which is an informal neighborhood in Beira, you can clearly see that it's pretty littered. So folks generally live in pretty poor conditions in this particular community. However, in another informal community in Beira, Muñeva Central, you'll see first two pictures on the top are relatively clean. So people felt that their neighborhood was relatively clean and well attended. So even within a city and informal communities that are within walking distance in that city, you'll see that there is variation in the way that the service is performed. Okay, so just to go into my results in a bit more detail, I had previously indicated that Maputo was the only city in which I saw strong civil society participation and there are a few reasons why. Like I had referenced earlier, there was a protest in 2002. So there was a flood in that greatly affected the city of Maputo and caused there to be an even greater amount of trash available on the streets. And it was an issue that Mayor Inayas Komish, who ran in 2003, campaigned on. And what had occurred essentially was the city had to come up with a plan for collecting the trash. And what they did as a first move, which is probably not the best move is decide to charge a flat tax to all residents to pick up trash. Now, trash was still accumulating outside the door. And now we all know flat taxes are regressives. Some of the poorest people are now being asked to pay in this case 20 Mets, which is 90 cents, but still for a service that they do not see working. So if you were in that situation, I would protest too. I'm not paying, you know, any part for trash collection that I don't see working in my city. And so what what citizens did ordinary citizens from all over the city, both formal and informal communities is they protested in one. In one instance, they actually barricaded this the main road to the airport so that people couldn't actually get to the airport from the city. So this really got the city's attention. And they decided within three or four days to essentially stop trying to impose this flat fee, which they weren't able to collect anyway, and reassess the situation. This is where the GTC, a guy who comes in GTZ supported a nonprofit to work with the city of Maputo's Department of Sanitation to institute a series of technical changes. So they assessed the stock of garbage containers, garbage trucks, tractors, uniforms, personnel. They also did a feasibility study to understand what the price points were for charging people fees. And what they came up with is a sliding fee scale that is based on your consumption, your electricity consumption under the premise that the more electricity you consume, the more garbage you produce, which my observation in taking a look at trash in formal communities and informal communities, but it comes to bear, you're going to see a lot more purchased plastic refuse in a formal community than in an informal community. And so they instituted this change along with a campaign of cartoons of what each of the taxes and fees were going to be associated with trash collection so that people would become familiar with this way of being charged and what they were being charged for. More importantly, as they instituted this fee, they started collecting trash, so it was very visibly noticeable that the trash was being removed. This was adopted widely by the residents of Maputo and is a system that continues today. Very quickly, in terms of informal neighborhoods and NGO participation, there are two examples of two NGOs that worked in informal neighborhoods in Maputo that started off as just community volunteers. And basically what they wound up doing with the help of Doctors Without Borders in the case of Adasbu and just on their own in the case of Asocia Sacatunga, they worked as a group of volunteers with handcarts picking up trash in their informal neighborhood and eventually was able to get the attention of the municipality and get contracts. In the case of Adasbu, they started off charging two meds a day to pick up the trash at the door and wound up getting a thousand dollar a month contract from the city of Maputo. So here are two examples in which you've got organizations that began as volunteer organizations that eventually became contractors with the municipality and was able to collect trash in a way that was very scalable and worked in their communities. In the two cases where I found civil society to be active, Beira and Dondo, what I saw more there was there was great leadership on the part of the Maputo mayor in moving forward the trash collection agenda. There was also leadership of the mayor in Beira and Dondo in instituting trash collection and greater participation of citizens within the municipality. In the case of Maputo, the mayor Davis Mango ran on trash collection as one of his major points of the campaign. He won and within just a few months of being in office, he was able to clean up the city. In Mugnava, one of the largest informal communities in Beira, the Italian cooperation worked with Africa Sattenta to institute a water sewer project. And while they were active in this particular community, again the individual NGOs or community organizations that were working on trash collection were fairly weak. They were around but were not able to work when they weren't being funded by a donor. So the relationship between the city and those community organizations in the form of a contract didn't exist. So these organizations weren't able to be self-sustaining. In the case of Dondo, the Austrian Development Corporation came in and instituted a participatory budgeting process which not only affected an improved trash collection by getting feedback from residents, but improved city services for a variety of items because the mayor and his kind of executives were beholden to these neighborhoods and these neighborhood councils to report back and get feedback on what the city should be doing. And in those focus groups, I was really surprised to see that people were extremely aware of what the city was doing and extremely aware of what they couldn't do. So it wasn't just a matter of having expectations that were unreasonable. It was about having reasonable expectations. In the last case, Metola, again, no associations, very selective service provision. In one instance, one of the focus group members indicated that they would regularly see the trash tractor just bypass their house and go straight to the head of the neighborhood to collect his trash and then be gone. So that's not, you know, a sustainable way of providing a public service, but that's how it was provided in this instance. So in conclusion, just to reiterate, if you remember anything from this presentation, the three things I'd like for you to remember first are a path to financial self-sufficiency. In Maputo, the neighborhood organizations that were able to get city contracts were the organizations that were able to consistently pick up trash in informal neighborhoods. We all know that this is a problem. We also know that modern garbage trucks that are huge and wide are not necessarily going to fit through very narrow pathways in these communities. So the thought that these organizations existed and that the city connected with them and helped them grow and help them become self-sustaining I think is a really good way forward in figuring out how to conduct the service in an informal community. Second, donor assistance. Particularly in Maputo and Dondo, you had the presence of donors that provided very targeted technical assistance and helped put into place processes that allowed the city to work with the community in a different way. So I thought that that was an important take away point. The last, which I didn't expect, which gets to the point of leadership and I'm almost done, is the presence in four cities, three of the mayors were technocrats. So we all know that becoming an elected politician has a different set of skills than being an effective manager. Hopefully you have both. Sometimes you don't. In this case, three of the mayors had technical backgrounds. The Mongo in Barra was a civil engineer by training. He understood what it meant when the city flooded. In the case of Maputo, Kamish was a PhD economist who was head of the Bank of Mozambique. He knew how to put a management team together. He knew how to select people that he selected the head of the Department of Sanitation was a medical doctor. He understood the health ramifications of not picking up trash. So he knew how to put a team together and manage that team. Third in Dondo, Cambezo had been a staple in municipal government in Sofala province for years. He was actually the administrator of Barra before decentralization. Was the first elected mayor of Dondo, second elected mayor of Dondo and I think if he's running again in November, he'll probably be re-elected. So these are guys who know their jobs, they know what to do. In the case of Metola, unfortunately that mayor passed midway through his administration, so that caused some fluctuation in the leadership there. So I think that was part of what happened there. So in conclusion, these are some quotes that came up during the research that I really liked that I thought explained people sentiments and feelings about the leadership and I don't speak Shona and I will probably butcher that but I thought that the leader only because of his people was a really good way of thinking about how leaders can really affect and provide leadership in service provision. So thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions.