Urbanization in Asia: Governance, Infrastructure and the Environment

This work focuses on urban governance in the developing world, its aim being to bring a holistic perspective to the debate on urban governance in Asia and around the globe. It has been divided into three sections: The first section is on rural interventions as they influence urbanization and its problems/solutions. The second focuses on urban governance, infrastructure programs, service delivery reforms and their evaluation. The third and final section focuses on urbanization and the environment.

In the first section, we present evaluations of India’s rural programs including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and of India’s Total Sanitation Campaign. This section covers the transition from rural to urban areas, and highlights coping mechanisms in urban areas and policy implications for urban governance, from the viewpoint of rural migrants.

The section on urban governance, infrastructure and service delivery is the most in-depth and consists of papers that present state-of-the-art research on many aspects of infrastructure such as cost and time overruns, risks and their mitigation, assessments of the metro rail, and services such as solid waste management.

The focus of the final section is on urbanization and the environment. Here we examine land use change in India, the relationship between urban form and residential energy use in Bandung, Indonesia, and end by depicting a cautiously optimistic view of Asia’s urbanization-environment nexus.

Dr. Kala S. Sridhar heads the Public Policy Research in Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore, India, and is a former Ford Public Affairs Fellow. She has written several books on urban issues (from Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan), as well as several journal articles and book chapters. The recipient of several international awards, she is regularly invited to speak at international conferences. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Ohio State University received the Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, for whom she is a referee. She has also served as a referee for the Global Development Network (GDN) and member of expert committees of the government of Karnataka with regard to urban development. She was the country expert for India in ADB’s project on green urbanization in Asia, and contributed a chapter to United Cities & Local Governments’ Global Report on Decentralization and Local Democracy for Asia Pacific. She was a senior advisor to GDN’s global project on urbanization.

Dr. Guanghua Wan is Principal Economist and Head of the Poverty Unit at the Asian Development Bank. Previously, he has served as Senior Economist at the United Nations and taught at a number of Universities in Australia and China. Trained in development economics and econometrics, Dr. Wan is an award-wining scholar on the Chinese economy and an expert on Asia, with an outstanding publication record of more than 100 professional articles and a dozen books, including two published with Oxford University Press. He has led many important projects such as MDGs in Asia; Southern Engines of Global Growth: China, India, Brazil and South Africa; and Poverty and Inequality in Asia. An honorary professor at over ten top institutions in China including Fudan and Zhejiang Universities, Dr. Wan is among the top 9% of economists globally and top 5% in Asia according to the latest REPEC ranking (see http://ideas.repec.org/f/pwa395.html).