The impact of urbanization on Governance and Civic engagement in Urban Committee

By 2050, approximate two thirds of the population will be residing in the urban settlements. Extensive and exhaustive growth of cities results  an increment of inequities and social exclusion, which can elevate social, environmental, economic, and health risks.Therefore, to develop urban health, public policies that address social elements are required very precisely. Conferring shelter to such a large proportion of the population, cities have to focus on important settings for implementing strategies that support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

What Is Urban Governance?

Urban governance is mainly concerned with the processes through which government is organized and delivered in towns and cities and the direct relationships between state agencies and civil society—an titled umbrella that is used to include citizens, communities, private-sector actors, and voluntary organizations. Governance has several meanings. For some, it means a concept and an analytical approach that opens up new methods of thinking about processes of government, urban politics, accountability, creditability and democracy. For others, governance is a more descriptive term that emphasizes concentration on concrete institutions and their financing, roles, and responsibilities.Urban governance: Good urban governance is the process of interaction, co-operation and decision-making to generate collective solutions through co-creation of practices and institutional engagement as part of a whole-of-government and whole-of society approaches. Key branches for addressing the urban governance are:-

Local Government: The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 is responsible for the establishment of Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) as a three-tier system comprising Municipal Corporations (MCs), Municipal Councils (MCs) and Nagar Panchayats (NPs). 

Role of State Government: The State Government plays an important role in urban governance by providing financial aids, technical support, and policy formation guidance to local governments.

Planning and Management: Urban governance involves the planning, sustaining and the management of multiple aspects of urban areas, including planning of using land, transportation planning, development of infrastructure environmental management, and disaster management. 

Citizen Participation: Citizen participation plays an essential part of urban governance. It includes the active indulging of citizens in decision-making processes, deliveries of services, and the vivid monitoring of government activities. 

Challenges: Urban governance in India meets several challenges, such as inadequate financial resources, poor infrastructure, lack of institutional capacity, and the biggest one is corruption. 

Urban politics:- inequalities between the multiple aspects (area wise development, widening the differences between population etc.) lead to bridging up the politics concerns 

Changing modes of democratic representation:- political parties representation after elections witness the alterations in the policies, schemes, benefits etc.

Economic competitiveness:- among municipal corporations healthy competition is good until it confines within the limits. Else it ends up in the dirty politics. 

Privatization and the new forms of public–private working:- more involvement of corporate is much focused on growing profit rather than social benefits.

Initiatives: The Government of India has launched many initiatives to improve urban governance in the country, including the Smart Cities Mission, AMRUT, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT).

Urban sustainability:

The adoption of the SDGs in 2015 transformed the notion that urban policies are indeed health policies and provided a framework to promote urban health to close the voids in health that emerge with urbanization. It also determines agencies and civil society to make cities more inclusive and sustainable. It also works on how urban inequities and risks can be effectively managed. Indeed, the same policies may have different impacts on different populations, however, this is because cities are complex systems. This variability in the effects can be attributed to the interactions between governance, stakeholders, and the civic population under forms of participatory governance with a aim to create consensus on policymaking. As urbanization trends continue, participatory urban governance (strategies that involve health governance, multisectoral action and civic engagement) gains relevance as a field of research.

Multisectoral action: A well defined relationship between part or parts of the health sector and part or parts of another sector, that has been build to take action on an issue or to achieve health outcomes in a way which is more effective, efficient or sustainable than could be gained by the health sector working alone.

Civic engagement: Involves the establishment of a new balance of rights and responsibilities and the redrawing of boundaries of state action and regulation. Engaged citizens are featured as being politically, socially, and economically independent. Civic engagement objectives to promote the HDI, quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. It also consists of political, environmental, and community activism.

Key Takeaways: Civic Engagement

@ Civic engagement is participation in activities that improve one’s community or address wider social issues.

@ Civic engagement can involve political and non-political activities.

@ Typical forms of civic engagement include participating in the electoral process, volunteering, and advocacy or activism.

Types of Civic Engagement

The act of civic engagement can be undertaken in three main ways including electoral participation, individual volunteerism, and advocacy, or activism.

Electoral Participation

The freedom of citizens to participate in the formation and procedures of their government through the electoral process is the foundation of democracy.

Activism and Advocacy

Activism and advocacy involve working to bring about political or social change through increasing public awareness of and support for particular causes or policies.

Role of media - 

Media plays a significant role in urban governance by highlighting issues, providing information to the public, and acting as a watchdog for transparency and accountability. 

Some of the recommendations made by NITI Aayog include: 

# Empowering local governments

# Creating a single point of accountability

# Improving financial management

# Strengthening citizen participation

# Enhancing capacity building

Strategy Synthesis

We extracted the data involving the characteristics of the implemented strategy (type, date of implementation, policy domains), assessed outcomes, target population, and stakeholders. To connect the urban settings in which the strategies took place, classifications of the cities by size according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development parameters (OECD) The classification depended on the number of inhabitants: large metropolitan area (1,500,000 inhabitants or more), metropolitan area (500,000–1,500,000 inhabitants), medium-size urban area (200,000–500,000 inhabitants), and small urban area (50,000–200,000 inhabitants). Furthermore, classifications of the countries where the cities are located according to the World Bank income classification low-, lower-middle-, upper-middle- and high-income. Worked on the data for the tools and indicators to assess the strategy, the prioritization of health equity gaps and gradients, and the barriers to implementation of the strategy.

Evaluation of governance, multisectoral action and civic engagement processes are assessed. Summarization the information about the impact of these strategies on different policy domains (health/healthcare, transportation, housing, sanitation, infrastructure, environment, education, economic conditions and social protection) to ultimately improve the population’s health, wellbeing, and equity. Finally, condenses the available information on the barriers and facilitators for the implementation of participatory health governance.