Oliver Harman

Economic geographer and spatial economist working on decentralisation, urbanisation and local public goods in Africa, and on global value chains and regional development.

I study how power and connection shape economic development: how power is distributed within developing countries, and how places connect to the global economy.

Abridged CV Full CV

I am Lecturer in Urban Economics at the African School of Economics’ Africa Urban Lab in Zanzibar, where I have taught since 2024, and Research Officer in Economic Geography and Spatial Economics at LSE’s Department of Geography and Environment and Global School of Sustainability. I am also a DPhil candidate in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford, where I am a Doctoral Affiliate of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and a Research Affiliate of the Blavatnik School of Government.

Fields: urban and regional economics; political economy of development; global value chains and foreign direct investment. Regions: sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Featured paper

Status without Power: The Political Economy of Administrative Unit Creation in Uganda

On 1 July 2020 Uganda’s ten new cities commenced together, a reform that changed their status and resources without decentralising formal authority. This paper asks which dimensions of local power that change actually moves, comparing the ten against cities that were declared but never commenced.

More on my research   Draft available on request

Recently published

In press

  • Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Regional Development. With R. Crescenzi. Cambridge Elements, Cambridge University Press

Work in progress

  • Measuring Metropolitan Authority in Africa: A Regional Authority Index for Five Countries, 1994–2024. With J. Hayward and G. Sampó
  • Green Foreign Direct Investment in Africa. With J. Alvarez-Vilanova, R. Crescenzi and C. Lippitsch
  • Transforming SME Integration into Global Value Chains. With R. Shukla
  • Degree of Urbanisation in Ethiopia. With S. Franklin, G. Kakoulaki, K. Molla and M. Read

All working papers and abstracts

On power, my thesis, Power and Place, asks how power is distributed within African states and what follows for local economic development. I treat the power of urban governments as three things that need not move together: capacity, how well they perform in the eyes of their citizens; authority, what the law formally grants them; and means, the fiscal resources behind both. I measure each, drawing on two decades of Afrobarometer surveys, a model-assisted coding of metropolitan legislation since the early 1990s, and IMF fiscal data, and then trace what they do for local public goods and for Uganda’s new cities, where status and resources changed but formal authority did not. On connection, I ask how foreign investment and global value chains land in particular regions, and whether those regions capture anything durable from them as the economy turns green.

I came to research from a decade in policy. I worked with mayors, city governments and national ministries across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean: as Cities Economist and then Senior Policy Economist on the International Growth Centre’s Cities that Work initiative, and before that as an ODI Fellow embedded in Guyana’s Ministry of Communities. I was focal point for city programmes with UN-Habitat, the European Commission and the UK’s FCDO, and my policy research has 61 externally validated instances of uptake by decision-makers across 27 countries.

I teach urban economics at the Africa Urban Lab and LSE, and co-convened the BREAD-IGC virtual PhD course in urban economics with Edward Glaeser. In 2026 I received the Class Teacher Award in LSE’s Department of Geography and Environment.

This site collects my research, teaching, policy research and commentary.

My best email is , and I am on Google Scholar and LinkedIn. If you are ever in London or Oxford, I am nearly always available for a cup of tea.

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