The research team, led by Md. Zia Uddin with co-authors Jannatul Ferdous and Maisha Subah Promi, grounded their work in an integrated theoretical framework drawing on urban governance theory, institutional governance theory, and political economy theory. This combination allowed them to examine not only how multiple agencies interact in housing delivery, but also whether formal institutions have the capacity and willingness to enforce regulations, and how political patronage and economic incentives shape outcomes on the ground. The framework proved essential, because the study found that Bangladesh’s housing regulations are often well designed on paper yet systematically fail in practice.

Methodologically, the study relied on a qualitative case study design. The researchers conducted eleven Key Informant Interviews with city officials, urban planners, housing experts, university teachers, and community leaders, alongside seven Focus Group Discussions with 49 residents and stakeholders, for a total of 60 respondents. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on their knowledge of urban housing governance, and the sample spanned multiple neighborhoods of the city, including Dharmapur, North Chartha, and Chawkbazar. Interviews followed semi-structured guides with open-ended questions, and the data were analyzed using NVivo 12 software through inductive thematic analysis. All participants gave written informed consent, and the study received ethical approval from the Departmental Academic and Research Ethics Committee at Comilla University.

The analysis revealed four interlocking problems. First, poor planning control and weak monitoring during the planning, implementation, and construction phases allow irregularities to flourish. Respondents reported that most housing areas in Cumilla have developed without an effective master plan or zoning system, leaving no clear boundary between residential, commercial, and industrial land uses. Many developers begin construction before obtaining approval, and environmental considerations such as drainage and natural canals are routinely ignored. One district urban planner told the researchers that many housing projects begin before approval, reflecting weak development control and poor transparency during the planning stage.

Implementation failures compound the planning deficits. Residents and officials described substandard bricks, cement, and reinforcement rods being used in construction, approved designs being violated, and buildings rising several stories beyond their sanctioned height. A city corporation official explained that when the corporation issues notices against unauthorized construction, cases can drag through the courts for years, by which time the building is complete and demolition becomes impossible. The official described monitoring during implementation as almost zero, noting that officials must handle hundreds of files without the capacity to inspect every site. The consequences are visible in cracked walls, water seepage, and electrical faults that residents report as daily occurrences.

Corruption emerged as the second major theme, taking two dominant forms. Nepotism and favoritism accounted for roughly a fifth of the corruption-related responses, with respondents describing construction contracts decided before tenders are even called, typically awarded to relatives of councilors, officials, or influential local figures. A housing construction consultant working with the corporation said that members of the same family receive contracts one after another, making it difficult for qualified and transparent contractors to survive. Financial corruption, reported at a similar frequency, involves embezzlement from project budgets, inflated bills that list high-quality materials while low-quality substitutes are actually used, and undocumented cash transactions designed to leave no paper trail. A former city corporation engineer recalled that a large portion of project budgets would simply disappear during his working days.

The third problem concerns public awareness and enforcement. Most residents interviewed knew little about housing policies, building codes, or approval procedures, partly because information is difficult to access and often written in complex legalistic language, and partly because there are almost no public outreach campaigns. This ignorance undermines social accountability: citizens cannot identify violations or assert their rights when they do not know the rules. At the same time, respondents were emphatic that Bangladesh does not lack laws, it lacks the will and capacity to enforce them. An urban planner noted that building codes and setback rules exist on paper but are not followed, and that fines go unimposed because of political pressure on the administration. Residents cited buildings constructed at double their approved height that remain standing and rented out years after receiving violation notices.

Institutional fragmentation formed the fourth pillar of dysfunction. Multiple agencies share responsibility for housing and urban services, yet they do not coordinate, producing duplicated work, wasted resources, and gaps where no one acts. A councilor described a situation in which the city corporation builds roads, the water and sewerage department digs them up for drainage, and the power utility lays cables, with no agency knowing what the others are doing. The result is chronic waterlogging and roads left unfilled for months. Ordinary citizens bear the administrative burden: respondents described spending months seeking approvals, encountering missing officials and misplaced files, and being asked for informal payments at every step. One resident estimated that his father wasted nearly six months obtaining building approval, paying a broker and still facing obstacles.

The downstream consequences are severe and measurable in daily life. Respondents identified environmental degradation and infrastructure destruction as the most visible impacts, with 25 of the 60 participants raising the issue. Canals have been filled in for construction, drainage systems have collapsed, and even brief rainfall now floods entire neighborhoods. Waste collection is irregular, with garbage dumped on roadsides and in canals, breeding mosquitoes and contributing to dengue, diarrhea, pneumonia, and skin diseases. Beyond the physical harm, participants described a corrosive loss of trust in public institutions. An elderly resident who has watched the city deteriorate observed that unplanned housing, corruption, and lack of coordination are dragging down quality of life, leaving the city falling behind rather than advancing toward Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities.

The authors argue that these findings carry direct implications for SDG 11 and SDG 16, the latter targeting effective, accountable institutions. They propose a reform agenda centered on strengthening inter-agency coordination through clearly defined roles, enhancing regulatory enforcement with regular inspections, digital monitoring, and stricter penalties for unauthorized construction, introducing e-governance platforms for building approvals and procurement, and building institutional capacity through training and adequate staffing. Public awareness campaigns and accessible grievance mechanisms are also essential to restore social accountability. By shifting empirical attention from Dhaka’s megacity problems to an under-researched secondary city, the study demonstrates that housing irregularities in Bangladesh are embedded in institutional practice and political economy rather than isolated administrative errors, and that sustainable urban development will remain out of reach until transparency, coordination, and enforcement are rebuilt from the ground up.

Subject of Research: Urban housing governance irregularities in a Bangladeshi secondary city

Article Title: Urban housing governance challenges in Cumilla City Corporation Bangladesh

Article References: Uddin, M. Z., Ferdous, J., & Promi, M. S. (2026). Urban housing governance challenges in Cumilla City Corporation Bangladesh. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 268. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00587-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00587-0

Keywords: urban housing, governance, corruption, Cumilla City Corporation, Bangladesh, urban planning, institutional coordination, regulatory enforcement, SDG 11, SDG 16, secondary cities, qualitative research

The study, led by Tesfaye Abdeta and Yared Girma of Adama Science and Technology University together with Daniel Lirebo of Ethiopian Civil Service University, set out to fill a stubborn evidence gap. While large capitals such as Addis Ababa have attracted considerable research attention, secondary cities — the places absorbing much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s explosive urban growth — remain poorly documented. Bishoftu, a fast-expanding town in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, offered an ideal case: a settlement where pressure on green infrastructure is intensifying, yet where almost no empirical data existed on what residents actually understand about the ecosystem services around them.

Methodologically, the team took a mixed-methods approach. They surveyed 383 households selected through stratified random sampling, ensuring that respondents were drawn proportionally from different parts of the town rather than from a single convenient neighborhood. The questionnaire data were complemented by key informant interviews with local experts, and the results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, inferential tests, and thematic analysis of the qualitative material. The research protocol was reviewed by the Research Ethics Committee of Adama Science and Technology University, which granted a waiver of formal approval on the grounds that the study involved minimal risk and non-sensitive topics; informed verbal consent was obtained from all participants.

The headline finding is a striking hierarchy in environmental awareness. Respondents rated their awareness of different categories of ecosystem services on a scale, and cultural services — the recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits of green space — scored highest, with a mean of 3.85. Regulating services, such as climate moderation and air purification, came second at 3.28. Provisioning services, the tangible products like food and raw materials, followed at 2.9. Supporting services — the slow, foundational processes that underpin all the others — trailed far behind at just 1.5. In other words, people see the park bench but not the soil beneath it.

Drilling down to individual services sharpened the picture. Recreation scored 4.6 and aesthetic value 4.3, the two most recognized benefits of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu. At the opposite end of the spectrum, nutrient cycling registered a mean of just 1.2 and soil formation 1.4, making them the least understood services of all. The pattern repeated when residents were asked how important each category was to them: cultural services again topped the list at 3.8. Pairwise comparisons made the preference explicit — a strong majority of respondents favored cultural services over regulating services (82 percent), provisioning services (70 percent), and supporting services (85 percent).

That preference would be less concerning if the invisible services were thriving on their own, but residents reported the opposite. Most respondents perceived a decline in both the extent and the quality of urban green spaces in Bishoftu over the past decade. Alongside that physical shrinkage, they noted reductions in key regulating services: air quality improvement, flood regulation, and temperature moderation were all reported to have weakened. For a town expanding rapidly in a warming climate, the perceived erosion of cooling and flood-control functions is more than a statistical footnote — it is a warning that the benefits residents least notice may be the ones disappearing fastest.

The study also probed who is more aware of ecosystem services, and the answers carry practical weight for planners. Regression analysis identified education as a significant predictor of awareness, with a standardized coefficient of 0.18 and a p-value of .001. Physical proximity mattered too: people living closer to green spaces were significantly more aware of what those spaces provide, with a coefficient of 0.14 and a p-value of .011. Notably, gender and home ownership showed no significant relationship with awareness. The implication is twofold — environmental knowledge in Bishoftu is unevenly distributed along educational lines, and it is shaped by everyday contact with nature, meaning that access to green space is not just an amenity issue but an information issue.

Why does awareness matter so much for a town’s trees? The authors point toward the politics of urban land. Green infrastructure in fast-growing cities competes directly with housing, roads, and commerce, and when the services a park provides are invisible to the public, the constituency for defending that park shrinks. A community that values a lakeside grove mainly as a picnic spot may offer little resistance when it is cleared for construction, unaware that the same grove was moderating local temperatures, buffering stormwater, and regenerating soil. Awareness gaps, in this sense, translate directly into vulnerability for the least visible ecosystem functions.

The Bishoftu findings echo a broader challenge across Sub-Saharan Africa, where secondary cities are expanding faster than planning systems can adapt. The researchers argue that closing the awareness gap requires participatory, multifunctional, and policy-driven approaches to green infrastructure management. Participatory planning would bring residents into decisions about green space before it is lost; multifunctional design would deliberately bundle visible cultural benefits with the regulating and supporting services that currently go unnoticed; and policy-driven management would embed ecosystem service protection in the formal planning instruments of fast-growing municipalities rather than leaving green space to survive by accident.

For a town like Bishoftu, the study offers a clear diagnosis and an actionable prescription. Residents already care deeply about the beauty and recreational value of their green spaces — that enthusiasm is an asset. The task now, the researchers suggest, is to build on that visible appreciation and make the hidden economy of urban nature equally legible: to teach, plan, and design so that nutrient cycling and soil formation become as real to a city’s residents as a shady afternoon in the park. As Ethiopia’s secondary cities continue to grow, the difference between green infrastructure that endures and green infrastructure that vanishes may depend on exactly that shift in perception.

Subject of Research: Community awareness and perception of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in a rapidly urbanizing Ethiopian secondary city

Article Title: Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia

Article References: Abdeta, T., Lirebo, D., & Girma, Y. (2026). Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Keywords: urban green infrastructure, ecosystem services, Bishoftu, Ethiopia, community awareness, urban ecology, cultural services, regulating services, participatory planning, secondary cities, Sub-Saharan Africa, environmental perception