Pre-eminent government departments (e.g. interior, economics and finance) often fail to appreciate that the ministries of energy, education, health, transport, or public works have major impacts on urban areas. Expertise in this sense requires a broad-ranging institutional view on the way the public sector as a whole affects urban processes, well beyond housing and basic services, to the framing of the economy and society. This implies that, to start with, a national authority must have the capacity to take stock of all of these impacts at the urban level as well as the authority to play a coordinating function across ministries.