Challenges of Improving Livelihoods by Slum Upgrading A Sociotechnical Transitions Perspective

Abstract

The role of infrastructure in transforming livelihoods is crucial, especially in the global south where over a billion live in conditions without basic service infrastructure for water, sanitation, mobility, solid waste and lighting popularly known as slums. Most such initiatives deliver infrastructures that often fail to improve livelihoods and that even deteriorate a few years later. I investigated how programs aimed at providing such infrastructures can improve slum residents’ livelihoods. To facilitate the investigation, I collected data from 16 slums in Kenya, which were part of the Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Program that installed new basic service infrastructure in 80 slums. Findings indicated that new infrastructure disrupts or improves the following four dimensions to secure basic services and livelihoods: when residents conduct activities, how they use space, organize around provision and access, and pay. Residents take up such infrastructures critically or complementarily based on whether or not trust is broken during participation, transforming them to fit their needs and maintaining them in cases where the infrastructure has a net value to their livelihoods. In addition, only actors oriented to market thinking e.g. contractors, professionalism e.g., engineers and the community need be collaborative during participation to deliver infrastructure that benefits livelihoods. Lastly, failure to integrate insights about challenges in different slums by different actors to facilitate program learning leads to missed opportunities for improving livelihoods at city and national scales. For infrastructures to improve livelihoods, implementers need to ensure participation retains trust and anticipates post implementation infrastructure appropriation to improve livelihoods, understand and improve capabilities of different actors to involve residents, and plan for and finance program learning. Doing this will ensure sustained infrastructures that improve residents’ livelihoods in the long term.