NEGOTIATING URBAN GOVERNANCE: GOVERNMENT-GRASSROOTS INTERFACES AND THE POLITICS OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN NAIROBI
NEGOTIATING URBAN GOVERNANCE: GOVERNMENT-GRASSROOTS INTERFACES AND THE POLITICS OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN NAIROBI
Blawo Likenankaa Yata - PhD Candidate, Institute for Social Transformation, Tangaza University, Nairobi, Kenya
Steve Ouma Akoth - Tangaza University, Nairobi, Kenya
Gladys Nyachieo - Multimedia University, Nairobi, Kenya
ABSTRACT
Urban transformation in African cities unfolds within dynamic negotiations between state-led interventions and grassroots modes of urban production. This article examines these negotiations in Nairobi’s Kibra Soweto-East settlement, where technocratic state agendas epitomized by the Affordable Housing Program intersect with community-driven mobilizations. Grounded in Lefebvre’s right to the city, participatory governance theory, and models like Hamdi’s incremental development concept, the study interrogates how government-grassroots interfaces shape the politics and praxis of sustainable urban transformation. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, the research draws on twenty-five in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions with residents, grassroots leaders, and government officials, thematically analyzed with MAXQDA. Findings reveal that state interventions remain primarily infrastructural and politically instrumentalized, while grassroots movements advance alternative logics of co-production rooted in adaptability, inclusivity, and everyday agency. These practices destabilize the state-residents binary and illuminate how residents negotiate urban citizenship through participatory and mobilization strategies. The article argues that sustainable transformation requires reconfiguring urban governance toward resident-centred frameworks that embed Afrocentric epistemologies and indigenous spatial rationalities. By theorizing co-production as a mode of Southern urban governance, the study contributes to ongoing debates in Urban Studies on inclusive urbanism, state-residents’ relations, and the epistemic reorientation of urban theory beyond Eurocentric paradigms.
