Mozambique's own procurement rules. Nhaca lamented that development cooperation partners rarely agree to do so in Maputo. Scholarship across other geographies where aid organizations are active suggests that a lack of coordination among donor operations in the urban space is not singular to Mozambique. Essex (2016), for example, discusses this very challenge within the context of Jakarta, where the capabilities required for donor coordination are challenged both by structures and practices within donor organizations themselves as well as the complex urban systems in which they work - characterized by land speculation, infrastructure gaps, and more. Interestingly, in Maputo Nhaca positioned the World Bank's rules as a favored alternative, given that their procurement procedures are, at the very least, familiar to staf f in Maputo's various city secretaries. Nhaca also noted that while capacity building is a popular objective of many internationally funded projects in Maputo, peculiarly, international project partners resist contracting local municipal functionaries for project work that Nhaca insisted they are qualified to perform both intellectually and technically. Instead, foreign cooperation partners contract outside consultancies, typically employing foreigners, to complete project-related tasks. The employment of foreign consultants, in effect, then crowds-out municipal authorities ' own capacity building. Morais also regarded the hiring of foreign, as opposed to domestic, professionals as a challenge in working with international development partners. She explained that international partners typically do not wish to contract municipal functionaries because they expect those functionaries to complete work on the project in their capacity as functionaries - thereby avoiding paying municipal staff more than their extant salaries for work on a project. For e xample, Japan refused to pay Maputo's municipal staff for what locals considered to be overtime on a recycling project Japan is running with the city. Municipal staff complained that Japanese partners did not respect Mozambican law, which indicates that the end of the workday for public sector employees is 3pm. Japanese partners, for their part, felt their agreement on the scope of work should be considered a part of municipal staff's basic functions, even if that meant working beyond 3pm. Nhaca argues that allowing municipal staff to take on consultancies beyond their typical workday - receiving compensation in addition to their base salaries - would motivate their work on projects, build capacities, and result in reduced costs for international partners, since local staff could be hired at considerably cheaper rates than international consultants. However, there is little movement among international partners in Maputo toward this idea. A logic of convenience, in short, is also functioning among international partners who find it easier to push fiscal reforms, rather than to implement them internally.

## Conclusion

In this paper, I argue that the growing density of international aid, accompanied by adjoining foreign private sector investments, in Mozambique is creating negative externalities within the country's capital city, Maputo. F oreign actors' housing and infrastructure needs are deepening housing and related amenity disparities in the city. The density of foreign actors is also reinforcing the local government's dependence on external, non -tax revenue funding for major urban development projects. Further, as local authorities in Maputo themselves identify, international partners often attempt to evade local taxes themselves, despite the international community's parallel efforts to improve local tax revenue systems in the city. These perversities on the ground mean that local residents in Maputo who fall outside of the propertied class are even farther from being afforded the opportunity of tax bargaining than tax reform advocates