The research will focus on the cities of Dar es Salaam and Dhaka, with emphasis on both: (a) city-wide networks/corridors of green and water structures; and (b) selected low-income neighbourhoods located or connected to that network. The network will be identified based on mapping of green and water areas, classified by type using Urban Morphology Types (UMTs)[1] mapping techniques (Cavan et al., 2012), which will enable us to locate case study low-income neighbourhoods that are connected to the broader ecosystem networks in the respective cities. To ensure depth of analysis, we shall select four settlements from each city. This selection will be based on a set of predefined criteria agreed by the Bangladesh and Tanzania teams at project inception. Emphasis will be on four variables that form the core of Ostrom’s (2007) (diagnostic approach) to studying social-ecological systems: (i) an ecological network (i.e. green and water structures by type); (ii) the (fundamental) service units generated by that ecosystem; (iii) the socio-demographic profiles of the users (low-income and other) of that ecosystem; and (iv) the institutions that affects and is indirectly affected by interactions and resulting outcomes at a particular time and place. To reflect our emphasis on the settlement dimension, we will add a fifth variable: settlement age and location (core vs. periphery and upstream vs. downstream).

• a comparative analysis in the cross-city/country contexts of green and water ecosystem services/risks for urban poor and their contributions to/ impacts on their wellbeing;
• an understanding of the ways in which institutional arrangements are contributing to/constraining the processes of, and derived services from, the ecosystems in question;
• the levels of complementarity between collective action and co-production (if present) to compare with the quantity and quality of derived services.

Ultimately, this will lead to policy-relevant knowledge about the institutional challenges facing associations of the urban poor, the state and non-state agencies and duty-bearers, and the knowledge community, in their efforts to sustain and improve the ecosystem processes and maintain and expand urban poor people’s access to the derived services across the city space .