e ven Maputo's middle -class residents are increasingly being pushed out of the city center by the high- end capture of the city's housing core; instead they seek affordable shelter in less serviced but increasingly commodified peripheral or peri-urban neighborhoods (Jenkins, 2013; Sumich and Nielsen, 2020).

## Cultivating a logic of convenience: International complicity in stagnating urban autonomy

Rampant evasion or underpayment of property taxes, weak collection efforts, and the slowness of updating the property cadaster propagate Maputo's fiscal dependence on other sources of revenue for urban development projects - including intergovernmental transfers and international development aid. The availability of international capital particularly is a balm for municipal authorities like those in Maputo who are as aware of local housing and infrastructural needs as they are of local financial resource scarcity. International partnerships with longstanding foreign partners are prized by city authorities in Maputo for their predictability and regularity. Maputo City Council's Head of International Relations, Natacha Morais, and her colleague, Chadreque Massingue, for example, celebrated Maputo's cooperation partnership with the city of Barcelona, 10 positioning it as the city's strongest relationship with a foreign stakeholder. They explained that Barcelona's support was based on assistance that is programmed into Barcelona's own budget by law, annually. Barcelona, like other levels of government in Spain, apportions 0.7% of its annual budget for international assistance programs, making its support for cooperation projects in Maputo much more predictable than that of other partners whose aid commitments are more variable. Felip Roca Blasco, then Director of International Relations and Cooperation for Barcelona, in turn explained that the city's aid strategy was to couple with other extant 11 cooperation relationships, for example, between civil society groups. Few partners - and few own-source revenues - lay claim to this type of budgetary predictability, however. Morais complained that it is not possible to actually plan in Maputo because of the lack of budget predictability -excepting contributions like Barcelona's . In other words, even while plans are made, planning is a meaningless exercise - save for projects for which the city knows or can predict foreign assistance. Instead of implementing plans then, the city rationally employs a logic of convenience and implements that for which foreign assistance is most readily available. The turn to international aid as the mainstay of financing key urban development projects may be practical from authorities' perspectives, but it also delimits what taxation scholars globally argue is a key bargaining tool for the public to make political demands. Prichard (2015) details the different but important causal pathways that connect taxation with government responsiveness and accountability in Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia. These pathways are dependent or relate to a number of both structural and contextual factors. Prichard (2015: 70-77) argues that the most intuitive and straightforward structural influence on the public's potential for tax bargaining- or its capacity to secure concessions from government - is the revenue pressure that governments face, which in turn is determined by a gover nment's access to non -tax revenue. In Mozambique, and Maputo more specifically, access to non-tax revenue in the form of international assistance is strong, and couples with other structural and contextual factors that weaken tax bargaining potential. Critically, these latter factors include the lack of strong civil society organizations (independent of linkages with the ruling political party, FRELIMO), the