Decentralization, Democracy, and Development in Africa

Jan Erk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351259507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Decentralization reforms introduced to Africa in the 1990s have not always delivered the intended long-term outcomes. This is a collection on the consequences of these reforms two decades on. In addition to general and comparative overviews, the book contains case studies on Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Uganda. The common theme across the chapters is that the reforms seem to have engendered political consequences beyond decentralization itself – mostly through interaction with the broader historical, political, social, and economic context. The book thus speaks both to the scholarly literature (on decentralization, democratization, and development) and to the community of development practitioners.

Most of the literature on decentralization and development emphasizes questions of institutional design and policy, but here the harder-to-pin-down political patterns marking the workings of decentralization are the main focus of analysis. The debates on development, through the case studies, are connected to the scholarly literatures on comparative federalism, comparative decentralization, and local democracy.

The main conclusion that emerges from the studies in the book is that no magic formula that can turn countries into peaceful, stable, and prosperous democracies overnight exists. Furthermore, there are risks involved in importing formal institutions without regard to the local historical, political, social, and economic context.

The chapters of this book were originally published as a special issue in Regional and Federal Studies.

Iron Houses in the Tropical Heat: Decentralization Reforms in Africa and their Consequences

JAN ERK

ABSTRACT Decentralization reforms introduced to Africa have not always delivered the intended outcomes. Through interaction with the broader historical, political, social and economic context, reforms seem to have engendered political consequences beyond decentralization itself. Most of the literature on decentralization and development emphasizes questions of institutional design and policy, but here we expand the focus of analysis and incorporate the harder-to-pin-down political patterns marking the workings of decentralization in Africa. Through the case-studies of Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ethiopia and Uganda we seek to connect the debates on development with the scholarly literatures on comparative federalism, comparative decentralization and local democracy. The conclusion that emerges is that no magic formula which can turn countries into peaceful, stable and prosperous democracies overnight exists. And, importing formal institutions without regard to the local historical, political, social and economic context risks leaving us with elegant but dysfunctional iron houses in the tropical heat.

Introduction

Not far from the Constitutional Tribunal in downtown Maputo stands a beautiful old building which seems a little out of place in the tropical heat. With the various shades of green of the botanical gardens of Mozambique’s capital city providing the backdrop, the two-storey building glitters and gleams in the African sun. It is made up of iron and steel. Panels of galvanized steel and cast iron joints were built in Europe in the late 1880s, and then shipped to what was then called Lourenço Marques in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, instantly connecting Africa to the technological advances in Europe.

The state-of-the-art technique based on assembling prefabricated steel panels through the use of standardized iron joints had been patented by Joseph Danly in 1887. Just a couple of years after that, the steel panels and iron joints manufactured by the Belgian company Societé Forges d’Aiseau arrived in Lourenço Marques; they were quickly assembled in a way that showcased the technological efficiency and modernist zeal of the times. The spirit of the industrial revolution had arrived in Africa. The so-called Danly system of steel panels and iron joints was going to help lift the standards of housing in Africa to European levels.

The building housed various colonial offices throughout its history, but despite its beautiful outward appearance, Maputo’s so-called Iron House (Casa de Ferro) never became an object of affection for those who worked in it—probably mostly because of the near-smelting temperatures inside. But that should not matter; what should matter is that the building represented the most advanced state of scientific knowledge, sophisticated methods and techniques to construct it, and the good intentions of helping speed up development. And Mozambique was not the only country in the developing world which was lucky to benefit from cutting-edge scientific advancement. From Congo to Angola, elsewhere in Africa a number of iron houses were built showing how it was possible to instantly export Western levels of development to Africa. But the African iron and steel revolution never took off. Scientific advances, sophisticated methods and techniques, and good intentions were not enough. The ‘best practices’ that worked in Europe did not automatically work in Africa—mostly because the context within which the Danly system worked was as important as the design of the steel panels and iron joints.

A century later, the developing world had another chance to adopt the ‘best practices’ from the West that would help bring modern development. This time decentralization reforms were to do the job.¹ Following the end of the Cold War, various international organizations and donor agencies started extensively exporting decentralization programmes to the Global South. A recent World Bank Policy Research report on decentralization and development states that the bank has given US$80 billion to various decentralization programmes across the developing world (Mansuri and Rao, 2013: 1). The US Agency for International Development is another important player in supporting and sponsoring various decentralization programmes throughout the developing world (USAID, 2009). As a result, since the early 1990s all states south of the Sahara have now adopted various political reforms towards decentralization—in particular, towards the territorial devolution of power to the local government level. A few of the first territorial decentralization programmes on the continent in fact precede this wave and can be traced back to the late 1980s, but overall most decentralization initiatives aiming for development share similar underpinnings in terms of strong international support—both politically and financially.

The parallels between these two episodes of exporting European best practices to Africa provide the perspective that holds this collection together.² It is not the reform initiatives towards development and democracy per se that are under scrutiny here, nor are the good intentions of their champions questioned. What is critically examined is rather the decontextualized and unconditional embrace of formal institutional blueprints without due attention to structural and contextual local factors; or put differently, what is under scrutiny are the “inflated promises of instant solutions” (Erk, 2015:). Decentralized institutions introduced to Africa in the early 1990s have not always delivered the intended outcomes that were expected of them during the phase of institutional design; instead, through interaction with the broader historical, political, social and economic context, they have engendered political consequences beyond decentralization itself. Often the newly installed institutions have failed to deliver on their promises of better democracy, policy efficiency, development and growth (Erk, 2014: 536); but more often, they have had unanticipated and unintended political consequences beyond the expectations institutional engineering.

Figure 1. Maputo’s Iron House.

Source: Photo by author.

Our collection Decentralization, Democracy, and Development in Africa contains a number of case-studies (Ghana and Senegal, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ethiopia and Uganda) that will help identify these political patterns marking the workings of decentralization in Africa. In doing so, the volume seeks to connect the scholarly debates in development studies with the political science literatures on comparative federalism, decentralization and local democracy. Most of the existing literature on development and decentralization tends to emphasize questions of institutional design and policy. What this issue aims to do is to expand the focus of analysis and incorporate the harder-to-pin-down political patterns.

From intra-party politics to the influence of traditional leaders, a number of uncodified factors influence the workings of decentralization two decades after the introduction of reforms throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Such political patterns do not lend themselves to easy conceptualization, operationalization and analysis as is the case with more institutionalist analyses. Intra-party politics is murky and its study requires a lot of in-depth within-case analysis; studying the influence of traditional authorities similarly requires the mastering of the local context. One does not have to sacrifice generalizable scholarly goals in the quest to map out the political consequences of decentralization, but the process towards this end is slower and uneven. Decoding the workings of decentralization requires surefooted knowledge of the local context, lengthy field-research, trusted and trustworthy informants, often partial research results, nuanced conclusions and cumulative but gradual growth of comprehensive and comparative knowledge.

Decentralization and Development

The changing world order of the late 1980s / early 1990s brought seismic changes to the African continent. The proxy wars the Soviets and the West were fighting throughout the continent ended with the end of the Cold War. Liberal democratic and economic ideas emerged as the winners of the new world order, while centrist and statist development policies found themselves sidelined on the margins. What was later to be labelled the ‘Washington Consensus’ placed small states, privatization and the market at the core of economic development for the Global South. Small-scale public economy and large-scale privatization in tandem would reduce the reach of the state and strengthen markets (Williamson, 2000). African states no longer had to choose between the two competing power blocks and their respective economic and political ideologies in order develop. There was now a consensus on how to bring economic development to the developing world, and international political, financial and organizational support was available for those who were ready to undertake reforms to this end. Decentralization was often a core component of reform projects aiming to shrink the state and expand the market. “[Institutional reform projects managed by the World Bank] rose from 469 in the 1980s … to 3,235 in the 2000s” (Andrews, 2014: 221). Even after the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent economic downturn, reforms have continued unabated: “more than 70 percent of new projects since this time have incorporated some aspect of institutional reform” (Andrews, 2014: 221).

Throughout Africa, international organizations and various donors spearheaded and supported various decentralization incentives (Fessha and Kirkby, 2008: 267). After all, decentralization had a good track record in the West—most advanced economies happened to have decentralized political systems with strong local governments. In the Western world decentralization seemed to correlate with indicators of good governance (Thomas, 2010). Bringing democracy closer to citizens, the empowerment of local communities, and the political accountability and transparency that come with small-scale politics were the component parts of this notion of good governance. But it was especially in the policy field that decentralization carried with it promises to quickly help lift Africa’s economic standards.

There was a scientific literature—especially from the field of development studies—extolling the virtues of decentralization, there were sophisticated research methods and techniques employed to showcase the promises of decentralization, and furthermore, all this was driven by good intentions to help, so it was only a short while before the entire continent joined the West to share the benefits of cutting-edge advances in the (social) sciences. Decentralization correlated positively with public policy efficiency indicators, so there had to be reasons for this: Local levels were more likely to address local diversity and the concerns of the people (Saito, 2008). This would enable policies to be customized to local circumstances, which in turn would improve public policy formulation and delivery (Smoke, 2003; Ahmad and Talib, 2011). Decentralization would not only help with the provision of public goods, it was also a way to avoid the risks of putting all policy eggs in one basket. There would be variation in policies, effectively turning local governments into laboratories of policy-making and implementation. The trials and errors of this variation defining decentralization were supposed to bring out the best policies (Smith, 2007). All these explained why decentralization correlated positively with public policy efficiency indicators. As a scholar of development studies and a former World Bank economist involved in all this derisively puts it: “the combination of money, good technical advice, and evident goodwill would take care of it all” (Levy, 2014: 203).

In terms of pro forma institutions, what was constructed in Africa looked identical to what existed in the West, but the political and economic context into which reforms were introduced influenced the very workings of these decentralized institutions. As was the case with the Danly system of iron houses, the context turned out to be as important as design. This in turn influenced the outcomes. Reforms introduced with the economic development goals in mind had different political consequences—not all of them anticipated or intended.

In a recent piece in this journal, the present author identified five patterns in terms of the long-term political consequences of the decentralization reforms (Erk, 2014). One is an across-the-board recourse to de facto centralization. Two decades after the reforms of the 1990s, decentralized institutions remain in pro forma terms, but the workings of politics have reverted to back to nationwide terms. In other cases, decentralization has come to function in asymmetrical terms across local government units in a way that highlights their differentiated performance. In an uneven and diffuse way, decentralization has also blown new life into some of the traditional authorities who had remained political dormant until the creation and strengthening of local government. Elsewhere, setting up new local government units has led to the politicization of pre-existing local conflicts over land, water and other natural resources (Erk, 2014: 545–547). And the fifth pattern is the extinction of such political experiments with decentralization.

In broad terms, what unites the varied consequences is that they can all be seen as uncodified. That is to say, factors external to formal institutional design have often come to determine the workings of decentralized institutions designed according to the teachings of the development economics literature. One such key uncodified political factor that most decentralization and development literature leaves out is the party system in place. Whether or not decentralization can deliver on its promises hinges upon whether different political parties occupy the various local, regional and national levels of government. When a single dominant national party sits above decentralized institutions—no matter how expertly and elaborately designed—intra-party politics behind and above decentralized institutions takes precedence. This means that national political patterns superimpose themselves on the regional and local.

A narrow emphasis on policy and institutional design in the quest to export ‘best practices’ to the Global South can also lead to the underplay of a number of background structural factors that might play a role in the successful track record of decentralization in the industrialized world. Put simply, creating decentralized institutions with the stroke of a pen does not automatically bring out the same good governance indicators correlating with decentralization in the West. Lack of governance capacity at the local level, infrastructural weaknesses and deficiencies in personnel often prevent many newly created local governments from meeting their newly assigned competences. In order to get things done, some local governments become dependent on the centre for resources, know-how and patronage. In such cases, formal decentralization obscures how political power is simultaneously recentralized.

Another uncodified pattern that emerges is the resurgence of traditional authorities and leadership. The creation of local government has made it easier for traditional chiefs and elders to exert their largely informal forms of political authority in these smaller settings. Almost everywhere in Africa, the decentralization reforms of the 1990s have blown new life into traditional authorities and leadership whose powers and influence had remained dormant throughout most of the nineteenth century. Decentralized institutions are not painted on to blank canvasses of course; history has left its mark on the political landscape in way that influences the present. The resilience of traditional authorities throughout pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial times attests to this. The articles in this issue all seek to expose the workings of decentralization by casting a net wider than decentralization itself. By adopting an overtly technical language emphasizing institutional design and policy, development economics seems to have taken politics and long-term patterns out of the picture. As Morton Jerven observes, “[development studies] tend to use a methodology that focuses on the present or on a short span of time” (Jerven, 2013: 2). When the long-term results of the reforms fail to match the promises, the local context is often picked up as the explanation. But ‘context’ should be more than a hand-picked post hoc explanation as to why we don’t get what we thought we would get.

What this collection seeks to do is identify and examine the harder-to-pin-down political factors that development studies tends to leave out. But this is not a mere ‘context matters’ approach which defies generalization. Instead, our aim is to systematize the uncodified political factors through detailed case-studies written with an eye to common and comparable patterns. This, in particular, allows us to trace political processes unfolding over time as well as bring attention to within-case variation (Huntington and Wibbels, 2014). Through the use of in-depth case-studies, our collection aims to distil the various consequences of decentralization in a way that could help reintroduce politics to a topic that has so far remained insulated behind the terminology of technocratic expertise. Instead of decontextualized, variable-based large-N methodological approaches which tend to underplay gradual change over the long-term, our detailed case-studies aim to identify political benchmarks that can be the basis for future large-N studies on politics the of decentralization.

Institutional Reforms Meet Uncodified Patterns

Following this introductory article, the first case-stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Iron Houses in the Tropical Heat: Decentralization Reforms in Africa and their Consequences
• 2 Policy Decentralization and the Endogenous Effects of State Traditions: Devolution of Water Management in Ghana and Senegal
• 3 Decentralization in Africa and the Resilience of Traditional Authorities: Evaluating Zimbabwe’s Track Record
• 4 What is a Chief without Land? Impact of Land Reforms on Power Structures in Namibia
• 5 Decentralized Governance under Centralized Party Rule in Ethiopia: The Tigray Experience
• 6 Decentralization and Development in Contemporary Uganda
• Index