Climate Change, Digital Data Commons and the Politics of Urban Transport in African Cities

This podcast was originally recorded on Friday, February 11, 2022, for the CID Speaker Series featuring Jacqueline (Jackie) Klopp, Co-director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development and a Research Scholar at Columbia University. Jackie continued the conversation with CID Student Ambassador, Manasa Acharya, after an appearance at the virtual CID Speaker Series event. Many rapidly growing African cities are experiencing large-scale transportation investment in a time of climate change and deep inequalities. Current choices around this critical urban infrastructure will have enormous impacts into the future- on public health, land-use, carbon emissions, and overall urban livability with the danger of high carbon, low livability lock-in. Despite the importance of these decisions, they tend to be made in profoundly exclusive ways. Using Nairobi as a case study, this talk explores the politics of decision making in the urban transport sector and argues that one important approach to enhancing accountability and advocacy for more just, low carbon transport in African cities involves nurturing locally driven "Digital Data Commons". Such open, shared and publicly discussed data on transportation, equity and emissions, can enhance transparency on impacts of decisions and help provoke badly needed, more inclusive planning and investment conversations.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.