Urban governance institutions: policy options for fast growing cities: version 1

Developing countries today are home to all of the world’s thirty fastest-growing major cities — with sub-Saharan Africa home to twenty-one of these thirty. This rapid growth has made these cities the epicentre for the battle for national prosperity, a struggle whose outcome depends on the policy choices made by city leaders. Policy options which target the institutional arrangements of the city, by incentivising better governance outcomes, are a particularly powerful tool. Focusing on these institutional arrangements, this policy framing paper analyses policy options based on the synthesis of city-experiences and academic literature.