Capital cities struggle with population growth that challenges existing infrastructure and affects the quality of urban life. The failure of local governments to manage urban deterioration motivates active resident groups to improve their neighborhoods, but they struggle to play a role in neighborhood governance in contexts where citizens’ engagement in public affairs is restricted. In this article we aim to understand active residents’ roles in the neighborhood governance process and how these roles unfold in a context that challenges citizen engagement in public life. We adopted a case study methodology and interviewed active residents and local officials from selected districts in Cairo, which revealed that active residents’ influence is limited mostly to neighborhood management and implementation activities. In this limited space, the role of active residents is confined to either that of the ‘fixer’ who restores existing services, or that of the struggling and intermittent ‘self-provider’, neither of whom can influence policy formulation. This study provides a structured and zoomed-out view of local activism in Cairo, offering a starting point for scholars and decision makers seeking to enhance active residents’ roles in Cairo.

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This study investigates local activism in politically challenging contexts, focusing on Cairo. In such contexts, active resident groups strive for urban improvement, while governance arrangements often disregard citizen involvement in urban and public affairs. Cairo presents an exemplary case of local activism in a politically challenging and under-researched context. The study explores the characteristics, roles, and interrelations of active resident groups with local governance arrangements and their deviations from existing literature. It employs a qualitative methodology with observations and semi-structured interviews with local officials and active residents from nine different districts. The study uses Facebook to select, observe, and analyze the activities of multiple active resident groups and contributes to theoretical frameworks for analyzing local activism in complex contexts. It reveals the dominant and absent roles and the governance dimensions (un)attainable by active residents. It also traces the sources of limited local activism in the existing governance arrangements in Cairo, highlighting the importance and difficulty of changing governance arrangements in Egypt. The study broadens our understanding of local activism in the Global South beyond dominant forms of activism.@en

Governments are focusing on building new cities to control rapid urbanization and accommodate overpopulation in Africa. Meanwhile, existing agglomerations suffer from urban deterioration, much to the dissatisfaction of their residents. Cairo is an exemplary case of active residents’ response toward urban deterioration in their neighborhoods, resulting from local government deficiencies accompanied by a hostile culture toward citizen engagement. In this context, active residents use social media to share concerns, mobilize each other, and act on the ground. These active groups are likely to differ from local activism practices in contexts where a culture of citizen engagement is often state-supported. This paper aims to better understand how local activism manifests in the context of Cairo and its neighborhoods. We identified active resident groups and observed their main activities and aims. We subsequently analyzed the active resident groups’ level of formality, confrontational attitude, collaboration with local officials, and motives. We found that many active groups practice local activism as a right to a certain urban quality within the neighborhoods. They were either self-provisioning groups that confront and ultimately cooperate with local officials, advocacy groups that demand accountability and action from local officials in a less confrontational manner, or user groups that settle for online criticism.@en

Active citizenship related to neighborhood governance is dependent on the political and governance structures of its context, and is therefore different in the Global North and the Global South. Local active citizenship is often presented from a North-western perspective, with its own active culture of engagement. In contrast, it is often shaped by an unfamiliar culture of engagement in parts of the Global South. This difference questions the applicability of the leading literature in understanding Global South realities. The paper aims to answer this question by reviewing the literature on local activism in both contexts. This review elaborates on the commonality of "context"; while highlighting the variation of "right-based vs. need-based" and "state-citizen collaboration vs. selective state-citizen collaboration" as central dimensions of local activism in both worlds. In result, we conclude that the leading literature on active citizenship in the context of neighborhood governance is limited in its explanation of local activism found in parts of the Global South. Finally, this review paper contributes to inform future empirical research on how to better understand neighborhood activism in contexts of the Global South. In this regard, the deduced commonalities and variations offer a starting point to scholars and offer dimensions which could be investigated to improve our understanding of active resident groups, and eventually contribute to more effective local activism.@en