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

Harvard Center for International Development

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.