oppression of government critics, and the historical legacy of Mozambique's socialist government. As a planning scholar at the University of Eduardo Mondlane related, after Mozambique won independence from Portugal, the FRELIMO government had little inclination to tax the public, as doing so was reminiscent of Portuguese colonial rule and its forms of 12 taxation (or compulsory labor). Indeed, scholars of former Portuguese African colonies have long argued that tax collection in the post-colonial period has been just as difficult as during the colonial period, and that this reflects a specific strategy among elite African leaders who understand the options that non-tax revenues afford them (Havik, Keese and Santos, 2015). The national government's budget under FRELIMO, for example, largely depends on revenues from customs duties on exported raw materials, in addition to foreign aid and loans. However, tax and development research has long argued that this route of revenue generation comes at the price of building a robust and independent own-revenue resource base that is directly accountable to the public rather than external stakeholders (Bräutigam &Knack 2004; Bräutigam et al. 2008; UN- Habitat 2013; Prichard 2015b). While the challenges of effective local taxation are clearly rooted in local governance dynamics and the persistence of incentives to avoid the pursuit of tax revenues, what is typically obscured in scholarly discussions therein is how international actors are also engaged in tax avoidance and can perversely stymie the advancement of reforms. Foreign technicians or consultants working on international cooperation projects in Maputo are obliged to pay ten percent tax on their incomes by Mozambican law. However, Morais and Massingue recounted how Portuguese partners, with which the city of Maputo had had several cooperation projects, tried to have the city's Of fice of International Relations intervene with tax authorities on their behalf to cancel the ten percent payment. They also reported that other cooperation agencies - like the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) used loopholes in the system to avoid having their consultants pay the ten percent tax. Instead, JICA (and others) listed consultants or technical staff on specific cooperation projects as ' diplomats ' of the Japanese embassy, thereby creating tax immunity for them. Morais quipped that on the one hand, donors attempt tax evasion, and on the other hand, donors tell Mozambican government officials they need to do a better job with tax collection. Maputo City Council's Director of Urban Planning and the Environment, Luis Nhaca, spoke of two other ways that internal negotiations with international stakeholders negatively shape 13 municipal government capacities to implement projects in the city. The first is the seemingly basic rule of project procurements. According to Nhaca, different procurement rules used by the increasing multitude of international partners can result in losses of project efficiency and 14 effectiveness when rules are unclear and inflexible. He described how in a trilateral cooperation project in Maputo's Chamanculo neighborhood with Brazil, Italy, and the Cities Alliance, there are effectively four funders (including Maputo city government itself) - each with its own procurements rules, modes of financial disbursements, and different organizational mandates. The coordination of different players creates project implementation delays and political complexities that could be diminished if international partners all agreed to at least use