The Politics of Development
For more than two decades donors have been trying to improve development in Africa by importing models of ‘good governance’ from the West – promoting multi-party elections, supporting civil society, implementing rule of law programmes, and encouraging an independent media, among other things. In spite of these efforts Africa continues to lag behind other developing regions on a number of indicators, notwithstanding the recent global commodity boom. This has prompted thinking in parts of the development community about possible alternatives to good governance – alternatives that harness local institutional resources instead of trying to transplant them from outside.
These efforts to think through Africa’s current impasse are inspired by empirical evidence that most successful developers have built on the indigenous. European states, for example, developed step-wise from pre-modern foundations over long expanses of time: they did not adopt a raft of good governance reforms in advance of rapid development (Chang 2002). East Asian states have demonstrated that development can proceed extremely rapidly in the context of norms of governance that are generally regarded as a problem in an African context, and without the wholesale adoption of Western institutions (Khan and Sundaram 2000; Moore and Schmitz 2008). An explanation for why this is so can be found in theoretical literature that points to the high costs of ‘retooling’ culture, and to the comparative economy of adapting institutions from the past (Swidler 1986; Greif 2006). It can also be found in research that points to the positive impact of shared identities and moral solidarities in the solution of collective action problems (Tsai 2007), suggesting that development will work best by harnessing communal sentiments that have been built up over time. Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa had similar ideas when it wrote that Africa needed ‘workable hybrids’ and that, ‘outside prescriptions only succeed where they work with the grain of African ways of doing things’ (Africa 2005: 35).
In 2007 an international consortium called the Africa Power and Politics Programme (APPP) with partner organizations in France, Ghana, Niger, Uganda, the UK, and the United States embarked on a five-year programme to investigate these issues in more detail.1 For more than two decades conventional development policy in Africa has regarded African society and culture as a problem. It has been argued that African societies share a pre-scientific, pre-rational culture, in which the extended family forms the foundation for an ‘economy of affection’, presided over by a patriarch, ‘big man’, or chief. The norms generated therein have infected economic and political governance, where damaging forms of nepotism, patron-clientelism, and neopatrimonialism are the norm. Bureaucracies have become mere prebends, ill-suited to supplying public goods or services, while politicians view the economy largely as a source of rents for redistribution to political cronies, rather than a resource that should be nurtured and grown (Hydén 1983; Joseph 1987; Chabal and Daloz 1999).
Conventional donor assistance has tried to solve these problems by making African governments more like governments in the West, imposing a range of ‘best-practice’, ‘good governance’ modalities. These have ranged from ‘supply-side’ interventions, like privatization and public-sector reform programmes using ‘New Public Management’ techniques, to ‘demand-side’ interventions, including national multi-party elections, local government decentralization, and a variety of participatory approaches to service provision that attempt to harness client power and boost social accountability.
Generally speaking, the performance of these interventions has been disappointing. With the partial exception of financial management initiatives, public service reform programmes have gained very little traction, and most of the continent still suffers from poor civil service morale, professionalism, and capacity. In some countries multi-party democracy has taken root, and surveys reveal that it is generally popular with citizenries. However, a clear link between multi-party democracy and better development has not been convincingly established, and in certain countries electoral pluralism has been associated with increased ethnic tension, violence, and state breakdown. Documented successes with decentralization and social accountability are also rather few, and in most parts of the continent public goods provision at local level, ranging from road maintenance, to sanitation, health services, and security, is dismal (Crook 2010; Booth 2012). Facts such as these encouraged the APPP to investigate whether or not it was possible to find ways of doing development in Africa that, rather viewing African culture as a problem, worked successfully ‘with the grain’ of existing social, cultural, and economic institutions.
In 2008 I published an inaugural article entitled ‘Going With the Grain in African Development?’ It attempted to make sense of the ‘grain’ metaphor, fleshing out our hunch that development could be improved by building on indigenous resources, and detailing some areas where that process could already be observed. It also provided a number of purely speculative suggestions of ways in which extant notions of moral obligation and interpersonal accountability might be harnessed for development (Kelsall 2008). I revisit that article here. In the first section I provide a précis of the original argument. Next, I consider some objections, before proceeding in the third section to discuss what recent empirical research has told us about this debate.
In my 2008 article I argued that several enduring features of the African social fabric, including the extended family, ethnicity, religion, and ‘big man’ rule, might conceivably provide the foundation for a new development strategy. Part of the reason these institutions had so much motivational force, I argued, was that they had their roots in pre-colonial times. Over much of pre-colonial Africa, the basic unit of economy and society was what anthropologists have called the ‘lineage mode of production’. Under this mode older men used the institutions of marriage and bridewealth to accumulate wives, children, dependents, and resources. In some societies, the more successful became ‘big men’ or chiefs, establishing their authority over several extended families.
Often the chief was a proven warrior who could protect the community from external attack, or add to its wealth through warfare or raiding. Sometimes he oversaw the production of public goods, like bush clearing for settlement and agriculture, or the distribution of granaries during periods of famine. Very often he intermediated with the spirit world, influencing the weather, curing disease, and augmenting performance in battle. In other cases the chief was able to control trade with other communities, and in places this led to the development of kingdoms or even empires (Lonsdale 1981, 1986; Vansina 1990).
Commonly, this pattern of political economy was underpinned by an ideology of patriarchal rule, which emphasized the rights of older men over those of women and junior males, and which conceptualized the polity as an extension of the leader’s household or family. A ‘big man’s’ power was not absolute, however. Although having rights to accumulate wealth a leader was also expected to redistribute it, materially assisting clients in times of need and handing power to a new generation when the time was ripe. In many polities the chief was expected to consult with elders before making important decisions for the community, and if a leader failed in his responsibilities to bring health and welfare to his people he was vulnerable to usurpation. Sometimes this might take the form of dynastic competition, witchcraft attack, poisoning, outright rebellion, or more often simple migration. In most parts of Africa ethnicity was fluid, land was plentiful, and labour scarce, and dissatisfied subjects could often move to live under the protection of another chief or ‘big man’ (Feierman 1990; Kitching 1980; Koponen 1988; Lonsdale 1981, 1986; McCaskie 1995; Vansina 1990).
In the article I claimed that there was nothing intrinsically anti-developmental about the lineage mode of production, patriarchal governance, and patron-client politics: what was anti-developmental was the unfortunate way in which they had come to be institutionalized, at least in much of contemporary Africa. To grasp this it was necessary to appreciate that colonial rule changed these institutions in significant ways. To begin with, the bonds of accountability between a chief and his followers were weakened by the fact that chiefs were now agents of colonial power. Next, colonialism fixed ethnic categories in a way that made it more difficult for ordinary people to move and switch leaders. In addition, colonialism unleashed economic forces and developmental interventions that tended to increase inequalities, making it more difficult for ‘big men’ to fulfil their obligations to clients. New religions and opportunities for education also created a new class of men critical of chiefly power, often attacking them by reference to new ideas about public probity and corruption that were themselves imports from Europe. All of these factors combined to place the moral economy and ‘moral ethnicity’ that had once characterized pre-colonial polities under enormous stress (Berman 1998; Iliffe 1995; Lonsdale 1992, 1994).
To some extent independence, and the access to central state resources that this promised, was expected to ease the strain. In fact, in most cases the pressure intensified, since ethnic groups now found themselves in competition with others for government power. Aspiring politicians reacted by building clientelist machines. As part of this process they tended to style themselves as living embodiments of ‘moral ethnicity’, generous big-men who would lavish patronage on their political followers. To this end, they bought the support of local notables with jobs, contracts, and credit, while local electorates were promised developmental ‘club goods’ like roads, health centres, and schools (Allen 1995; Berman 1998).
Unfortunately most states did not possess sufficient resources to satisfy clientelist demands, and many descended into chaos shortly after independence. Those that survived normally did so by introducing some variant or other of authoritarian rule. The resulting regimes were ‘neopatrimonial’ in the sense that some of the substance and much of the ideology of pre-colonial patriarchy was combined with the modern institutions bequeathed by colonial powers. In the more successful neopatrimonial states, personalistic authority was melded with bureaucracy to good economic effect, a phenomenon to which we will return. For the less successful, however, the constant need to buy political support through patronage together with a lack of interest in sound economics made growth impossible (Allen 1995; Sandbrook 1985).
In the less successful regimes public offices tended to function as prebends. Either by default or design, officials were permitted considerable discretion to use their positions to extort money from the public. Often, a legitimating veneer was provided by the fact that in the pre-colonial period, public and private spheres had not been demarcated, but frequently a hefty dose of colonial-style tyranny and despotism was also involved. As economies shrank further in the 1980s, this situation tended to degenerate into a ‘generalised informal functioning of the state’ (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006). It proved impossible to achieve much in the way of development goals. In most states this situation has continued, and in some cases it has even been exacerbated by the return to competitive politics in the 1990s.
In my article I argued that the combination of a Western-derived public–private divide together with competitive clientelist politics had driven distributional politics underground. Politicians needed to engage in money politics in order to win power, yet illegality made resource transfers opaque. This led to an information asymmetry and prisoner’s dilemma situation in which ‘even those groups and individuals who would prefer to co-operate in the responsible use of the nation’s resources, feel impelled to act in selfish and damaging ways for fear of being left empty-handed’ (Kelsall 2008: 636). However, this need not be an inevitable situation. If good governance reforms were not working, it was possible to imagine ways in which development might progress better by returning to African societies’ historical grain.
Contemporary Africa, I claimed, is home to a range of indigenous resources with pre-colonial roots that could conceivably act as foundations, not obstacles to development. In Africa today, I argued, the extended family represents the bedrock of social identity and moral obligation, much as in the pre-colonial period. This can be seen in a variety of spheres. Most Africans do not hesitate to contribute significant sums of money to committees created to celebrate life-cycle rituals, such as marriages and deaths. Wealthier or more fortunate family members often provide financial support for poorer extended family, especially in cases of ill-health or bereavement. Family elders devote considerable time to resolving conflicts. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that these extended family institutions not only attract considerable commitment but that monies within them are much better managed than within the state, or other modern organizations like nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The question for development specialists was whether these moral imperatives could be harnessed for use in organizations that transcend the extended family.
One answer is that to some extent they already are. Based, like families, on the idea of kinship, clans and ethnic groups are among the most familiar features of the African institutional landscape. These groups – the precise boundaries to which often shift according to situation – have sometimes proved effective as a foundation for developmental or potentially developmental activities. For instance, in Somaliland they have acted as vehicles for natural resource conservation. In Nigeria and Benin they have provided a network for business transactions in sectors as diverse as drugs and automobiles. In Tanzania and Cameroon they have been a basis for hometown associations or district development trusts, which raise contributions in the national and international diaspora to fund development in the provinces. In many African societies they oversee land transactions and resolve land disputes (for further details see Kelsall 2008).
Ethnic groups acquire their efficacy by reproducing some of the moral adhesive that binds members of extended families, even though they transcend face-to-face levels. This can even be seen in the field of public administration. In many African countries, bureaucratic agencies have been so weakened by a combination of material dearth and informal pressures that citizen entitlements have failed. In their absence, some people secure services by appealing to kinship, as when one has a ‘relative on the inside’. In my 2008 article I speculated that creating multi-purpose ethnic service ministries might be a means of tackling the chronic lack of commitment to service provision shown by many staff in African public administrations – although I was cautious to note that this was a risky option, which no African countries were currently in a position to undertake.
Another powerful and double-edged institutional resource in Africa is religion (see Ellis and ter Haar, and Villalón, both this volume). All over the continent, people evince high levels of spiritual belief and religious commitment, encompassing everything from credulity concerning witchcraft to high attendance at church and mosque. The former appears to be associated with all manner of anti-developmental behaviour, from a failure to appreciate etiology to a reluctance to discipline staff in the workplace. However, in the pre-colonial period witchcraft was often used as a means of holding leaders to account, and there is some evidence that ritual oathing and cursing could be more widely used as props to accountability in contemporary Africa (see the discussion of Rwanda below). High levels of commitment to organized religion appears to be more positive, since churches and mosques are among the major suppliers of social services in African countries, and their performance in this field is often equal to or better than what the state can provide. One hypothesis is that church workers feel an obligation to perform well because they are accountable to a higher power. Another is that the competition for religious adherents encourages good management in religious service providers (Leonard 2000).
My 2008 article also discussed the issue of African leadership. Hereditary leaders, including clan elders, chiefs, and kings remain influential at local level in many African countries. They often act as vital coordinators of collective action in activities such as bush clearing, path cleaning, and road maintenance, not to mention being intermediaries for interventions by NGOs and international agencies. They often also organize defence and security committees, and are frequently a vital part of the local justice system. In some African states, like Botswana and Somaliland, there has been a conscious decision to build on indigenous leadership. Some states, like Mozambique, where chieftancy had formally been abolished, have reintroduced it; in others, like Ghana, chieftancy has been given greater recognition through parliamentary ‘Houses of Chiefs’ at the national level. It seems probable that the role of hereditary leaders in development could be expanded in places where traditional legitimacy is strong, not least because traditional legitimacy provides a leader some leeway to make decisions concerning environmental health and public works that, although unpopular, are sometimes necessary. That being said, the performance and legitimacy of chiefs varies greatly across the continent, partly because in some countries they have never been anything other than a colonial invention. Trying to build on ‘traditional’ authorities in places where the foundations are shallow, then, would seem an unwise move.
It is notable that many African presidents, particularly in the immediate post-independence period, adopted some of the symbolism of traditional authority. In some cases, sycophantic followers were only too willing to bestow titles such as ‘president for life’. Today that has changed with the introduction of two-term limits in most countries. This has undoubtedly reduced the incentives for political rivals to organize coups or armed rebellions and so is in one sense a positive thing. At the same time, though, it introduces a narrow time horizon into political-economic decision making that is not necessarily helpful to development. In my 2008 article I argued that discussion of increased term-times and limited franchise or indirect elections should not be considered taboo, especially given that the reverse seems to go against the grain of long traditions of hereditary rule.
Going with the grain immediately proved to be a controversial hypothesis, even within the APPP. Most notably, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan argued that the approach should be sidelined infavour of a more broad-ranging investigation into what he called ‘practical norms of real governance in Africa’ (Olivier de Sardan 2008). The gist was that going with the grain risked institutionalizing a romanticized view of ‘merrie Africa’, a kind of structural-functionalism in which timeless communities used their own cultural resources to create harmony and development. There were a number of strands to this argument, which I will dissect below.
The first strand consisted of an objection to the use of various stereotypes like ‘ethnicity’, ‘witchcraft’, and ‘neopatrimonialism’ in Africanist social science. According to Olivier de Sardan, ethnicity and the occult, although often depicted as atavistic hangovers from a pre-colonial past, have actually been profoundly changed by the colonial and post-colonial periods, and are in fact modern responses to contemporary problems. Neopatrimonialism, on the other hand, while an undeniable element of African social reality, was a lazy, ‘catch-all’ concept, too often invoked to explain all of Africa’s ills. In my view these objections do not represent a serious challenge to going with the grain. The original article was quite cognizant of the fact that ethnicity had changed considerably in the colonial and post-colonial periods, and even if it did not stress the same for witchcraft, this should have been obvious from the context. The point about neopatrimonialism also rings hollow, since part of the inspiration for going with the grain is that some types of neopatrimonialism may be better for development than others, suggesting that the concept is not monolithic, at least in my eyes.
More interesting for our purposes is whether or not these phenomena, though altered, have an identifiable link to the pre-colonial period, what the nature of the link is, and whether it makes a difference. For going with the grain, historical links can come in three broad kinds. The first is a concrete link, in the sense that it is possible to identify the historical threads that link a contemporary institution to a pre-colonial one, even though it may have evolved or transformed over time. For example, when clan elders in Tanzania meet to adjudicate land conflicts, it is possible to trace the threads of a practice that has existed since the nineteenth century at least, even though the context of land adjudication has changed significantly. A second type of link is a fictive one. In Kenya, when Kikuyu politicians mobilize their ethnic followers to ‘defend the house of Mumbi’, they draw in part on an imagined history that is actually a colonial invention; the link with the pre-colonial past here is in the minds of the ethnic membership. Finally, a third type of link is of the ‘family resemblance’ kind. When African leaders keep exotic religious or occult specialists as part of their entourages, they are not the direct descendants of pre-colonial leaders who frequently sought out itinerant occult practitioners to buttress their rule, but they do draw on shared understandings about the nature of politics, power, and the occult that have a definite resemblance to ideas that existed pre-colonially.
In all these cases the connection with the pre-colonial past has a special ability to motivate behaviour. In part this is about people knowing how to ‘carry on’ with practices really rooted in history, investing a little in modifying them slightly in response to changing circumstances, instead of investing a lot in creating or trying out entirely new and unproven institutions, with all the risk that entails (Greif 2006). In part it is because practices that bear a resemblance to ones in the past are familiar or – to borrow a term from Michael Schatzberg (2002) –’thinkable’ in ways that entirely new or imported practices may not be. Finally, it is because tradition, even if invented, is often its own source of legitimacy, with a curious capacity to elicit commitment from its followers. None of which is to say that it will be impossible to find ways of doing development in Africa which, while ‘anchored in local realities’, to use a phrase preferred by Olivier de Sardan, have only the shallowest historical roots. However, the peculiar power of the past does provide good reasons for thinking that a significant proportion of the solutions to African development problems will be found there. That being said, I should stress that my characterization of the types of historical resource that might prove useful to development was not meant to be exhaustive. Discovering which historically rooted institutions work should be an empirical matter: solutions cannot be read off from preconceptions of Africa, and the historical literature merely provides pointers.
Another of Olivier de Sardan’s objections was that going with the grain placed too much emphasis on morality. I think the motivation for this point was that a focus on ethics might blind us to strategies and ‘logics’ that, while developmental, are not specifically moral. It is certainly true that rather few development solutions will be explained entirely by their ethical underpinnings. Nevertheless there is reason to think that ethics – by which I mean norms that, among other things, promote trust, honesty, reciprocity, and unselfishness and which discourage shirking, opportunism, and free-riding – will be pivotal in encouraging developmental behaviour in much of Africa, not least because external monitoring and rule enforcement tends to be weak. Support for this hunch comes from the burgeoning literature on common pool resources, social dilemmas, and collective action problems (Ostrom 2005). The APPP made a conscious choice to situate its research within this tradition, and since ethnic and religious sodalities seem to be obvious, if not unique, cradles for the growth of the aforementioned norms, the rationale for going with the grain appears justified (Booth 2008; Kelsall 2009).
It is true that some recent research suggests that the role of morality in these processes may have been exaggerated. Habyarimana et al. (2007) report that the positive relation between ethnic homogeneity and public goods provision in Kampala is better explained by the monitoring capability of ethnic groups than by ‘shared values’ or ‘altruism’ between members. Be that as it may, it is difficult to understand how monitoring systems for public goods provision can work without someone being motivated by more than material self-interest.
Another conceivable criticism concerns the potential danger of harnessing a set of essentially patriarchal institutions for development. However, going with the grain is a research agenda, not a normative position. It is an invitation to look afresh at the most successful arrangements for supplying public goods in Africa, and to ask whether or not there is a relationship between success and African societies’ historical ‘grain’. Whether or not the trade-offs involved in these solutions are worth accepting will depend on how one values democracy and development, and also on the empirical evidence regarding what actually works in practice. In fact, the original article was quite clear about the fact that the lineage mode of production is showing signs of decline in parts of the continent, and that Western ideas and practices attract a growing body of adherents. It is possible then that the more specifically patriarchal and gerontocratic aspects of Africa’s institutional inheritance will not figure prominently in more successful development initiatives, an eventuality arguably borne out by some of the examples proffered below.
As we saw in a previous section, neopatrimonial politics (a form of governance in which ‘bigman’ rule is combined with more modern bureaucratic elements) has often led to economic failure in Africa. In consequence, good governance orthodoxy has sought to reform or eradicate it, seeing the corruption, cronyism, and arbitrariness with which it is often associated as invariably negative. However, we at APPP were not convinced that eradicating neopatrimonialism is a realistic objective (for further details see Kelsall 2010; Kelsall et al. 2010). With these findings in mind, we decided to revisit the record of economic performance in Africa, as well investigating some contemporary scenarios.
We conducted research into seven roughly comparable ‘middle-African’ countries between independence and the present day, distinguishing between strong, weak, and reasonable economic performers. Of the 20 or so regimes we categorized, we found that four (Côte d’Ivoire 1960–1975, Kenya 1965–1975, Malawi 1963–1978, and Rwanda 2000–10) had actually achieved strong economic performance for periods upwards of a decade, while another three could be described as reasonably strong (Uganda 1986–2000, Ghana 1981–1992, Malawi 2004). This was in spite of the fact that these regimes showed definite neopatrimonial tendencies.
So what distinguished the strong neopatrimonial performers from the weak or merely average? We found that the key to strong economic performance was the success of leaders in centralizing the management of economic rents and gearing that rent-management to a lengthy time horizon. Certain mechanisms facilitated this. To begin with, the political leadership needed to acquire the means to protect key branches of the economic technocracy from political clientelism, and it needed to be able to discipline subordinate staff and supporters. This did not mean an end to corruption and cronyism, which were often essential to both political and economic strategy, but it did mean that the most egregious, wasteful, arbitrary excesses could be controlled. A competent, somewhat insulated technocracy was also important for the second criterion, long-horizon rent-management, since without sound policy advice economic performance was liable to be poor.
In practice, successful implementation of these mechanisms was associated with strong, personal leadership, usually by independence politicians considered ‘fathers of their nations’. Such men did not hesitate to intervene forcefully against political rivals or incompetent staff, rarely respecting the rule of law or formal managerial procedures. Most of them banned multi-party politics, and there are reasons to believe that centralized, long-horizon rent-management is extremely difficult in conditions of vigorous multi-party competition, where short-term considerations predominate.
In fact, the only strongly performing multi-party democracy in our sample was contemporary Rwanda. Rwanda is, of course, a case of a dominant party in a constrained democracy, but the story does not end there. Our research has revealed that a key mechanism for managing rents in Rwanda has been the party holding company Tristar. Tristar has leveraged clientelist relations to provide capital for joint ventures in hitherto untapped areas of economic potential, channel funds to the ruling party for electoral purposes, and profits into politically important social infrastructure projects. Financial solvency has permitted the RPF to take a tough line on corruption in other areas of the administration, creating a virtuous circle of public goods creation and development.
In sum, research into business and politics has shown that in some country contexts, it is possible to work with neopatrimonialism, cronyism, and rent-seeking to advance economic development. A type of neopatrimonialism in which key areas of the economic technocracy are insulated from political interference and equipped to give high-quality advice, may be a good second-best solution for African conditions in which it is unrealistic to expect neopatrimonialism to disappear. It is important to note, however, that even in the most successful cases ‘developmental patrimonialism’ is subject to some limitations, and is probably not feasible for every African country (Kelsall 2010).
The compatibility between neopatrimonialism and strong development in contexts where some limitations have been placed on clientelism can be seen in other fields also. Although it is admittedly at an early stage, APPP research into the provision of public goods at local level has shown that these tend to be provided best when there is some maintenance of top-down performance discipline in local administration. This emerged most clearly in Rwanda, which appears to be making considerable progress in fields such as safe motherhood and sanitation, a trend that can be contrasted with countries like Niger where results tend still to be disappointing (Booth 2010). With respect to the former, APPP research found that Nyamagabe District has seen a significant increase in women attending pre-natal health checks and giving birth in health centres instead of at home. This allows women who experience complications with their pregnancies to be rapidly transferred to more specialist units, with the result that maternal mortality in the area has fallen below the Millennium Development target rate (Chambers 2010; Golooba-Mutebi et al. 2010).
A number of measures have helped to achieve this. To begin with, women who do not attend pre-natal checks within the first three months of pregnancy, and women who give birth at home, are fined. Second, most women are now members of a health insurance scheme, which helps defray the costs of modern healthcare, including a room where women can stay free of charge while waiting to deliver. Third, and very importantly, health workers, village authorities, and the population themselves are incentivized to provide these measures by what is known in Rwanda as the imihigo, a unique blend of a modern performance contract with a traditional oath of loyalty sworn by warriors in pre-colonial Rwanda to the king. According to our research, ‘[v]illage and sector-level imihigo ensure that these administrative units are held to account for their decisions and activities, encourage competition among sectors and districts to be the best performers in areas such as maternal health, hygiene and sanitation’ (Chambers 2010: 18). However, if maternal health has in one way been improved by the injection of some ‘neo-tradition’ into health services, in another way the traditional aspects of maternal healthcare have been phased out. This can be seen in the role of traditional birth attendants, who were initially encouraged to participate by accompanying women to health centres, but then increasingly made redundant by the posting of maternal community health workers in villages, before finally being banned (Chambers 2010).
The successful merging of modern, professional standards with more indexical practices was also found in the local justice sector in Ghana (Crook et al. 2010). APPP research examined popular perceptions of three different levels of the justice system: common law courts, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and chiefly land tribunals. Perhaps surprisingly, the research showed that court-users rated the impartiality, authority, and finality of justice in the magistrates’ courts most highly, a finding at odds with much of the legal anthropology of Africa, which argues that the formal adversarial nature of common law courts makes them less suitable than more informal forms of community-based, restorative justice. The conundrum is solved once it is realized that there has been a considerable adaptation of court procedure, which is notably informal, to local expectations. Chiefly courts, by contrast, were stiff, formal, intimidating, and tended to be rated poorly by users, while alternative dispute fora received middling reviews. The Ghana material bears out the thesis that development in Africa consists in successful adaptations of modern institutions to the grain of social practices and expectations, ‘practical hybrids’ in our terminology, while providing a clear warning that going with the grain does not imply a straightforward return to stereotypically assumed tradition (ibid.).
This can also be seen in the education sector in parts of the Sahel. For years, modern education there has received a poor uptake among some communities, worried about its secularizing effects. In recent years, the state has recognized or given support to what are known as Franco-Arabic schools, in which students learn both French and Arabic, with an emphasis both on modern subjects and studying the Qur’an. This is not a ‘traditional’ solution: pupils do not learn native languages and the subjects taught are importations to the Sahel of more or less recent provenance; however, it does go with the grain of local preferences for a religious component to education. The result is that school enrolment has increased impressively, especially amongst girls.
More often than not, APPP fieldwork has uncovered evidence of public goods being poorly provided, even in areas where both governmental and non-governmental institutions have been created to address these issues (Booth 2010). Our findings chime with a growing body of literature that critiques the performance of the ‘associational mode’ in African contexts (Dill 2009; Swidler and Watkins 2009). The thrust of the findings is that the requirement to satisfy donor demands for formal procedures and financial accounting makes these organizations vulnerable to elite capture. They tend to evolve into externally oriented vehicles for the solicitation of donor funds, and they frequently have a divisive effect on the communities they are supposed to represent. Many collapse amid allegations of financial misuse. By contrast, some of the more successful examples of public goods provision that APPP has found have occurred where solutions are what we call locally anchored, in a double sense. First, they are contextual responses to locally specific collective action problems, and second, they make use of institutional elements inherited from the past (Booth 2010).
Perhaps the clearest of several examples to come from our field research is that of Malawian ‘town chiefs’. These have emerged in many urban communities in response to the absence of traditional chieftaincy and the weakness of local government (Booth 2010: 29). Some are quite closely aligned with traditional chiefs while others are rooted more in democratic or party institutions. They are chosen for being ‘of “good character”, “respectable”, and “quiet” people of “good standing” who know “how to stay with people”‘(Cammack et al. 2009: 15). Some are retired civil servants, church leaders, or members of chiefly families in the places they were born. All stand outside the law and yet are widely recognized and valued in their communities, playing a variety of roles. Typically, they do a great deal of work in the maintenance of security and order, including in cases related to witchcraft, and also in the areas of justice and reconciliation. They also help create belonging and cohesion in urban areas where weak state capacity leads to unmet needs. They have also been known to have a positive impact in areas of infrastructure construction and social service delivery (ibid.: 31).
Town chiefs’ success can be explained by three things: the first is a felt need for their services; the second is a repertoire of concrete sanctions that chiefs can apply to non-cooperators; and the third – which is most interesting from our point of view – is a resonant template of traditional authority transferred from the countryside into the town. Town chiefs are best described as ‘hybrid governance nodes resulting from an indigenous adaptation of an existing hybrid institution to a modern environment’ (Cammack et al. 2009: 31), exemplifying the ‘constructive role of institutional elements inherited from the past’ (Booth 2010: 30).
In the areas outlined above, as well as in recent research by the APPP and others, it has been demonstrated that better developmental results can be achieved by working with the grain of African societies, and what this practically entails. I have discussed above how successful examples of public goods provision in Africa tend to share one or more of three institutional features. They are developmental forms of neopatrimonialism, in which elements of clientelism and personal rule are combined with sound technical advice and bureaucratic discipline. They are practical hybrids that combine elements of real or fictive African tradition with more modern acquisitions, and they are locally anchored in that they build on pre-existing institutions to solve collective action problems that are contextually defined.
Naturally, interested readers will want to know more about the conditions in which these features are likely to be found or what can be done to bring them about. Here, Africa’s relations with the external world and in particular the donor community seem to be important (see Brown; Mshomba; and Williams, all this volume). More research needs to be conducted in this area, but what seems clear is that development with the grain is most likely to emerge when donors are sensitive to the nature of in-country political settlements and systems of rule, appreciate their potentialities, and do not undermine them through conditionalities over elections or markets and competition. This does not mean that democracy must be sacrificed on the altar of development; it means simply that donors need to be more sensitive to the trade-offs and sequencing arrangements appropriate in different country contexts. In the same spirit, donor funding and projects should be continuous and unconditional enough to support local hybrid arrangements. Finally, government, donors, and NGOs should encourage local problem-solving and cultural borrowing, adapting to local agendas rather than prescribing associational forms or ‘solutions looking for problems’. This does not mean that donors should not care about how their money is spent. On the contrary, it implies a thicker presence on the ground, understanding and assisting African governments headed generally in the right direction, on their chosen path.
Needless to say, another important enabling condition is a will on the part of African governments to develop, instead of living off aid or other unsustainable rent streams. The contexts in which such a will emerges are complex and variable, but we believe that change in the conditions under which aid is disbursed is an important first step to encouraging a genuinely developmental outlook in a greater number of African states.
1For more information please see: www.institutions-africa.org.
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