Dissertation Ahmed Tarek Alahwal

Working Title

The forms and impacts of accountability of urban climate action planning in Cairo

Cities' critical role and the inadequacy of international climate change action motivated the emergence of urban climate governance in recent decades. Multi-level Climate Governance (MLCG) is building structures to deal with the diverse challenges of urban climate governance. Quite often, issues of lack of capacity and power, urban fragmentation, and investment influence arise. The challenge in each city's context is embedded in a history of urban systems and urban planning. A trend that emerged with urban climate governance is voluntary accountability measures of cities' climate plans. Often accountability is motivated by the external audience of MLCG, raising the question of conflicting local and global accountability. The characteristics of the emerging climate accountability also raise questions of positivism, depoliticization, and the role of economic norms in shaping the new accountability. The extent and form of accountability also affect the impact of urban climate planning.

As MLCG approaches Cairo for urban climate planning, it encounters the city's historically developed urban governance, environmental governance, and accountability challenges. Egypt is characterized since its modernization by a large centralized bureaucracy, with a history of corruption and a lack of accountability to public citizens, whether in central, local government, state companies, media, or inspector authorities. Previous international governance frameworks resulted in the establishment of accountability-targeted structures in the fields of the environment and human rights that still struggle on the level of practice. The new urban climate accountability trend faces not only accountability challenges but also the limitations of local governance capacity and fragmentation, as well as the widescale land financialization directing urban development in the city. The forms of climate accountability and the extent of their impact on climate planning in Cairo is a target of this study.

Key words: accountability, urban governance, climate planning, land governance

Publications: Updates and publications of the project will be communicated on researchgate.