Higher education institutions (HEI) in the South face a wide range of challenges in which they function, evolve and engage with knowledge production, teaching and learning. Building on earlier work where we developed a framework to analyse these challenges in planning education against the backdrop of urban equality, this paper takes a closer look at the larger political economy of higher education. Using four distinct cases, we explore the diversity in institutional contexts and the HEI’s ability to enable pedagogic disruptions, reflecting from perspectives of urban educators and practitioners in Asia and Africa. We argue that institutional structures, their governance and the external environment play a significant role in enabling or disabling the HEI’s ability to initiate and sustain pedagogic innovations in their teaching and learning around the questions of urban inequality.