Co-production and informal settlement redevelopment: Locating the hybrid space of community development committees

This article assesses the process of committeefication and its potential for planning and redeveloping slums and informal settlements. Grounded in critical literatures on co-production and governance spaces, it analyzes four community development committees (CDCs) established in two internationally funded programs by the World Bank and UN-Habitat in the rapidly urbanizing city of Accra, Ghana. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions, the article shows that the raison d’être of the CDCs was to help mobilize diverse stakeholders, provide robust socio-technical inputs to engineers and consultants, and facilitate the collective production of knowledge. However, they faced numerous challenges, including limited incentives and remuneration, unclear selection criteria for representatives, partisan politicization, and elite capture. The findings reveal that the CDCs maneuvered both soft, fluid spaces and hard, technocratic spaces. This mix shows that in reality, CDCs navigated a hybrid governance and planning landscape. I find that a hybrid space is indeed the right orientation to unlock the CDC’s potential, but its particularities require re-imagination. I term this ‘governance within and beyond the state.’ This space should possess soft elements, i.e., allow CDCs to remain outside nested, rigid, and political institutional structures, serving as an arena for collaboration across different territories and scales. Yet, to be resilient and maintain legitimacy, some degree of hardness is required: that is, anchored to state or civil society funding streams, technical oversight, and accountability safeguards.