Fatoumata Diallo, Défier la ” bonne pratique ” : stratégies d’appropriation du Bus Rapid Transit à Lagos, Espaces et sociétés, 2023

The article written by Fatoumata Diallo and titled “Challenging “best practice”: appropriation strategies for the Bus Rapid Transit in Lagos, was published in October 2023 in the journal Espaces et sociétés.

Abstract

A select number of public policies generate strong interest on the international stage because of the success attributed to them. They are labeled best practices, a description that endows them with legitimacy in the eyes of decision-makers in other countries. In this article, we examine Bus Rapid Transit (brt) policies initially implemented in several South American cities to remedy deficiencies in the provision of public transport, and subsequently reproduced in hundreds of cities. We discuss the role of an internationally structured policy community that worked together to make the brt one of the most popular best practices of the early 2000s by branding it as a low-cost device for urban transformation. Here, the attraction of best practice lies mainly in the strict set of criteria that a bus system must meet to qualify as a brt network. However, some decision-makers contest these criteria in the implementation of their own bus system. Through an analysis of the implementation of brt-Lite in Lagos, this article retraces the discursive and material reinventions of the brt as a concept and as a transport network. In so doing, it highlights the role of resistance, opportunism and challenge to the initial policy in processes of policy transfer. The article hence qualifies claims regarding a convergence between city-making modes.