Muyi Yang

Urban Resilience, Climate Policy, and Delivery Advisor

Oxford MPP. City government advisory, climate delivery, planning instruments, and public-sector implementation diagnostics.

Portfolio

Three recent projects that make the level legible.

These projects focus on planning-instrument restructuring, strategic climate portfolio assessment, and government-side technical-policy review. Together they show how technical material is structured, how city portfolios are judged, and how delivery-facing advice is produced inside government for leadership use.

Planning Instruments Climate Delivery Technical Review City Government
Case 01
Portfolio analysis

Freetown climate portfolio assessment and acceleration strategy.

Designed and led Freetown City Council's Strategic Portfolio Assessment of its climate programme, authoring a 94-page advisory report with technical annexes and a condensed Executive Brief for the Mayor's Office. The assessment reviewed 37+ climate interventions against the official Climate Action Plan, and I presented the assessment and Executive Brief to senior leaders in the Mayor's Office on flagship climate platforms, delivery anchors, and acceleration priorities before 2028.

Analytical Contribution

Built the portfolio architecture from first principles

  • Developed an original two-gap framework to distinguish strategic translation gaps from implementation conversion gaps, giving leadership a clearer basis for diagnosing why delivery gaps persisted.
  • Built the conversion diagnostic used to identify where interventions were blocked by financing, approval, handover, operating model, scale-up, or evidence constraints.
  • Designed a claim hierarchy, flagship framing, and acceleration logic to inform climate intervention prioritisation, leadership communication, and partner engagement before 2028.

Impact

Turned a complex portfolio into a leadership-use framework

The assessment clarified Freetown's flagship climate platforms, evidence-backed delivery anchors, and priority conversion actions. It became a foundation for future portfolio review, MEL thinking, internal prioritisation, and partner-facing discussion by giving the Mayor's Office a disciplined way to connect evidence, claims, and delivery priorities.

Case 02
Planning and upgrading

Reframing Moyiba’s Area Action Plan for delivery and investment.

Led the restructuring of the Moyiba Area Action Plan, transforming a fragmented World Bank-supported upgrading draft into a more coherent implementation-oriented and investment-facing planning instrument. The result was a document better suited for sequencing, safeguards, and future investment decisions inside regional and city-government planning.

Role

Led the restructuring of the revised planning content

Built the translation framework between the Community Upgrade Plan and the Area Action Plan, integrated World Bank-supported upgrading evidence, and rewrote the planning logic to transform the original document into a statutory planning text and a more investment-facing instrument for regional government planning.

Impact

Converted technical inputs into planning packages

  • Converted fragmented technical material into a clearer structure for phasing, safeguards, and future investment priorities.
  • Clarified the difference between completed works, unmet needs, and longer-horizon funding pathways, making the plan more usable for decision-makers.
  • Strengthened the document's planning and investment value without reducing it to a consultant annex.
Case 03
Technical-policy review

Government-side technical-policy review of air-quality and vulnerability work.

Conducted government-side technical-policy review of external air-quality and vulnerability-assessment deliverables, identifying methodological flaws and data-resolution risks that affected how informal settlement exposure was understood and how FCC could use the evidence for policy response.

Review Focus

Methodological and policy correction

  • Identified key methodological flaws that risked understating informal-settlement exposure and weakening the policy relevance of the assessment.
  • Provided government-side review comments that helped shape FCC's policy response and made partner outputs more usable for municipal decision-making.
  • Clarified the distinction between weak evidence, monitoring gaps, and substantive clean-air conclusions, strengthening how the city could interpret and use the data.

Value

Government-side analytical authority

The review strengthened FCC's ability to challenge, interpret, and apply external technical outputs rather than simply receive them. It helped turn a technical deliverable into a more policy-relevant evidence base for city decision-making.