Category: Africa

Building an adaptive anti-corruption programme: Lessons from STAAC Ghana

As we move along 2020 and inch closer to the completion of Strengthening Action Against Corruption (STAAC), there are plenty of lessons to be learned from a programme that ICAI called “an agile, thoughtful response to Ghana’s corruption challenge” and “built on best practice for achieving sustainable outcomes.”

Later this year we will work to produce learning papers that can disseminate to the community insights as to what we did well and not so well, what our partners achieved, and what an adaptive programme looks like in practice. In the meantime, I wanted to share a previous paper I co-authored with former STAAC programme manager Isabel Castle a couple of years back.

Enjoy!

STAAC Paper 1 – Lessons from Building STAAC – March 2019

Debate: Should the West stop giving aid to Africa?

A while back New Internationalist asked me to participate in a written debate opposing the motion “The West should stop giving aid to Africa”. In front of me was Firoze Manji, a veteran Kenyan activist, communicator and intellectual. It was a tricky setup, because Firoze was maybe forced into a position that he may not fully identify with. Perhaps because of that, instead of a trite debate on the merits of aid, our exchanges veered into a bigger, more important question of revolutionary vs evolutionary change. I have always been a pragmatist and incrementalist, but Firoze really drove home the frustration that the gospel of small bets engenders in those concerned with social justice and transformation.

Here’s a couple of illustrative excerpts:

Firoze: Aid uses public funds to subsidize and encourage the implementation of neoliberal policies that have resulted in growing impoverishment of the majority, and the obscene accumulation of wealth by national elites who are among its main beneficiaries.

Pablo: Foreign aid is a very flawed tool, but one that is suited to the grey areas of development challenges. It works incrementally: testing, searching, making plenty of mistakes along the way, but also building unexpected coalitions, and planting the seeds of change.

Read the entire debate here.

“Varieties of state-building in Africa”: New comparative paper on public sector reform

ESID has just released my new working paper on comparative PSR in Ghana, Uganda, and Rwanda: “Varieties of state-building in Africa: Elites, ideas and the politics of public sector reform“.

Here’s the abstract, followed by the download link:

Why do some states in Africa seem to be stuck in a spiral of corruption and institutional weakness? Why do others somehow build effective bureaucracies that are able and willing to tackle the challenges of development? The public sector remains the inescapable anchor of development, whether for good or ill, but our understanding of the politics of public sector reform remains shackled by concepts that do not allow for variation or change over time. This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding variations in public sector reform (PSR): centring the analysis on the intersection of power relations and ideas, the paper shows how the stability of a country’s elite settlement and the coherence of its developmental ideology interact with reform ideas in the PSR policy domain. This framework is explored through a structured-focused comparison of reform experiences in three Sub-Saharan African countries with different elite settlements: competitive Ghana; weakly dominant Uganda; and dominant Rwanda. In Ghana, where successive regimes have focused on political control for partisan purposes, it has been quick reforms compatible with top-down control that have achieved political traction. In Uganda, high-visibility reforms were introduced to secure donor funding, as long as they did not threaten the ruling coalition’s power. In Rwanda, lastly, the regime has fostered and protected various public sector reforms because it envisioned them as instruments for domestic legitimation as constituent elements of an impartial developmental state. In combination, policy domain, elite time horizons, and ideational fit allow us to move beyond blanket statements about isomorphic mimicry or neopatrimonialism, and towards a more nuanced understanding of the varieties of state-building in Africa.

PDF download.

Article on public sector reform now available

Taylor & Francis has finally released online my Third World Quarterly piece with Badru Bukenya: ‘New’ approaches confront ‘old’ challenges in African public sector reform. It has been a lengthy process between TWQ and T&F, but we are finally there. Here’s the abstract:

The disappointing performance of conventional public sector reforms in developing countries has led to the rise of ‘new’ approaches seeking to overcome traditional bureaucratic barriers to change: leadership-focused interventions like the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI); accountability-focused initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP); and adaptation-focused models like those of Africa Power and Politics (APP). While these approaches are appealing to aid donors in their promise to move beyond the limitations of purely formal institution building, they fail to provide new answers to the ‘old’ analytical and practical challenges of public sector reform, in particular administrative patrimonialism, public corruption and political capture. The evidence is yet inchoate, but all points to the need for these approaches to work together with conventional ones. Beyond novel implementation tactics, however, there is a need for new strategies of sustained political support for embattled reformers who face powerful incentives against institutional change.