Governance for Development in Africa

Solving Collective Action Problems

David Booth, Diana Cammack

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780325972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie politique

Drawing on in-depth empirical research spanning a number of countries in Africa, Booth and Cammack's path-breaking book offers both an accessible overview of issues surrounding governance for development on the continent, whilst also offering a bold new alternative. In doing so, they controversially argue that externally imposed 'good governance' approaches make unrealistic assumptions about the choices leaders and officials are, in practice, able to make. As a result, reform initiatives and assistance programmes supported by donors regularly fail, while ignoring the potential for addressing the causes rather than the symptoms of this situation. In reality, the authors show, anti-developmental behaviours stem from unresolved - yet in principle soluble - collective action problems. Governance for Development in Africa offers a comprehensive and critical examination of the institutional barriers to economic and social progress in Africa, and makes a compelling plea for fresh policy thinking and new ways of envisioning so-called good governance.

1 | FROM ‘GOOD GOVERNANCE’ TO GOVERNANCE THAT WORKS

During the last quarter-century, the view has steadily gained ground that if sub-Saharan Africa is to become less poor, it needs to be better governed. But what does that mean? For many people, African and non-African, the answer is obvious: Africa’s leaders must be convinced or compelled to practise ‘good governance’, the elements of which are straightforward and exemplified in the institutions and practices of the democratic capitalist North (see Box 1.1). For some global leaders, this view of matters is self-evident and hardly in need of further justification (e.g. Cameron 2012). However, a growing expert consensus argues that the governance that Africa needs for development is not so easily identified with the good governance template.

This book agrees with that point of view, but also argues that not enough has been done to spell out its implications. It offers a new perspective on what an alternative agenda for governance reform in Africa might contain. It is addressed to governance reformers in Africa as well as to the international development organisations that in one way or another support the cause of improving governance for development in the region and, in the process, heavily influence attitudes and approaches on the ground.

Box 1.1 What is ‘good governance’?

According to a typical overview, good governance has eight major characteristics: ‘It is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law. It assures that corruption is minimized, the views of minorities are taken into account and that the voices of the most vulnerable in society are heard in decision-making. It is also responsive to the present and future needs of society’ (UN ESCAP n.d.).

The big debate: from ‘best practice’ to ‘good fit’

The leading edge of thinking about African governance has evolved considerably since the early 1990s, when the concept of good governance was first articulated. The idea that today’s Northern institutions provide a suitable template for the governance of development in poor countries is, increasingly, being questioned. According to a view that is now widely adopted, the governance improvements that countries need are specific to time and place. In other words, the historical background against which a reform is attempted and the way it is sequenced with other changes in society and the economy will have a decisive effect on its results.

For these reasons, generic models based on internationally acknowledged ‘best practices’ (Fukuyama 2004; Levy 2004), or on ‘institutional monocropping’ (Evans 2004), are likely to prove inappropriate and ineffective. Instead, reformers increasingly recognise that essential institutional functions for economic and social development can be fulfilled in quite varied institutional forms (Chang 2007b; Rodrik 2007a). As the discipline of economics has long recognised in relation to production and markets (Lipsey and Lancaster 1956), what are technically termed ‘first-best’ solutions are unlikely to be optimal under real-world conditions. By analogy, the governance reforms that work for development may be ‘second-best’ options in terms of some ideal standard (Rodrik 2007b, 2008). We should stop judging the appropriateness of institutions and proposing governance reforms on the basis of weak theory about the causal linkages between political institutions, especially democratic ones, and development outcomes (Khan 2007; Andrews 2008; Rocha Menocal 2011).

Practitioners are beginning to take this reasoning seriously. It has become accepted in principle that promoters of institutional change should aim to identify reforms that fit the context in which they are working and that prioritise the immediate challenges. That is, external assistance to governance improvement needs to turn its thinking ‘upside down’, starting from the country reality and how to improve it, rather than from donor ideals, assumptions or preconceptions (Unsworth 2009; Future State 2010). Development agencies should, therefore, encourage their staff to undertake studies of the political economy of the countries and sectors in which they work (DfID 2009; Fritz et al. 2009; Poole 2011; ODI/TPP recurrent). African advocacy groups, for their part, should focus on changes that meet the specific needs and possibilities of their situation, relying less on grand demands that mimic the institutional patterns attained in some of the most economically advanced countries in their very recent history (Grindle 2007; Pritchett et al. 2010).

The APPP research was very much a product of such thinking. Aware that established forms of development support have often been ineffective for the reasons discussed above, we tried to determine what ‘working with the grain’ would look like, especially in the various contexts that present themselves in Africa today (Crook and Booth 2011). We also picked up the basic idea of a ‘good fit’ approach and expressed it as ‘building on what works’ (Booth 2011).

This shift in general ways of thinking is important. But it is not yet clear that the actual practice of international agencies or country reformers has changed very much as a result of it. Overall, development assistance policies are still more about financial transfers than about institutions. And when it comes to institutions, much of the new context-sensitive governance programming looks much like the old kind. This is, at least in part, because even the best donor governance advisers and consultants and the most reflective country activists have real trouble figuring out what to do differently.

There are exceptions, of course, but while the proponents of ‘good fit’ in governance programming have been moving in the right direction, they are not yet addressing the real challenges of African governance. The idea of basing governance reforms on country realities must be interpreted in a more radical way. The APPP research findings indicate how such an outcome can be achieved.

Principal–agent versus collective action frameworks

Our view is that not all of the reforms customarily offered as examples of good fit make a clean break with conventional thinking on good governance. In fact, most current understandings of this agenda have not gone far enough. They have, as it were, paused en route at a dilapidated halfway house, from which they need to be evicted before they settle in for good. This halfway house has a technical name: it is called the principal–agent approach to public management reform (see Box 1.2). The road ahead, in contrast, involves the identification and solution of collective action problems.

We shall make clear what we mean by this, but it will help to begin by explaining one of the most prominent manifestations of the central issue. This is the discussion of governance reform options in terms of a contrast between ‘supply-side’ approaches and ‘demand-side’ approaches.

Box 1.2 The principal–agent framework

A principal–agent problem exists where one party to a relationship (the principal) requires a service of another party (the agent) but the principal lacks the necessary information to monitor the agent’s performance in an effective way (there is ‘information asymmetry’). It is assumed here that the principal wants and requires the service, so that the difficulty to be overcome is distinctly about the agent’s compliance with the principal’s wishes and the information asymmetry that affects this.

For at least the past ten years, policy perspectives on improving governance in low-income countries have centred on a dialogue between so-called ‘supply-side’ and ‘demand-side’ approaches to governance reform. As will be seen, they are both versions of the good governance perspective. APPP research suggests that the demand/supply framework is a conceptual straitjacket and an obstacle to clear thinking about the challenges of African governance.

In the supply-side approach the implicit assumption is that governments are led by people whose central concern is to develop their countries. That is, they are genuinely, and without serious qualification, interested in effectively supplying the conditions for national development. They want governance and the economy to improve, with benefits for the population at large – this is their primary motivation. Therefore, donor-promoted reforms focus on how they can be assisted to supply the required changes and overcome the obstacles they face in meeting their objectives, especially by improving the functioning of public-sector institutions and the performance of public servants. Following the widespread failure of attempts to reform civil and public services directly by means of restructuring and training programmes, the favoured instruments of external support for the desired changes are budget support, technical assistance to public financial management and associated policy monitoring and dialogue.

In the ‘demand-side’ approach, the commitment of leaders to a development vision and to probity in public policy is acknowledged to be highly problematic in many instances – the primary political motivations are of other kinds. The supply-side approach to improving governance is criticised as managerialist and insufficiently sensitive to the political dimensions of the problem. It is argued that better governance and the effective provision of public goods are only likely when empowered citizens and mobilised civil societies begin to ‘hold governments to account’. At this point, the implicit assumption is made that the citizens of poor countries have an uncomplicated desire and at least the potential ability to make demands on their rulers in their capacity as providers of public goods. External support is therefore directed towards the strengthening of specific ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ accountability institutions and programmes to support citizen participation, ‘voice’ and empowerment, usually involving dissemination of information about rights and entitlements.

The dialogue between these twin perspectives has structured most thinking about both domestic reform options and aid delivery for the last fifteen years or so. It was in the mid-2000s that thinkers in and around the World Bank (World Bank 2003; Levy and Kpundeh 2004) began to argue, in the name of greater political realism, for a relative shift towards programmes that address the demand side of governance. An encompassing shift in the thinking of the development assistance community as a whole, including international and national NGOs, followed in short order and has been the dominant perspective ever since.

In terms of volume, it is no doubt true that the bulk of donor funding for governance reform has continued to flow through channels viewed by their critics as supply-oriented, including, notably, packages of budgetary aid or policy-based lending and public financial management reforms. On the other hand, it is probably accurate to say that the battle for intellectual supremacy has been won by advocates of demand-side work. The results have included extensive support to community monitoring of public services (through the use of ‘score cards’ for instance), programmes aimed at ‘deepening democracy’ and a variety of initiatives under the broad heading of ‘social accountability’.

Most international development agencies still do a bit of both. Some are also making more deliberate efforts to link up what they do in the two areas. For example, they are earmarking a proportion of their budget-support spending to efforts to enhance domestic accountability, and encouraging more cross-departmental working between the teams managing budget-support operations and those working on citizen empowerment. To this extent, there is awareness that the ‘either-supply-or-demand’ structuring of governance-improvement options is unhelpful.

These bridging and rebalancing efforts do have a role to play. The ‘silo working’ that tends to characterise the departmental structures of development agencies is indeed an obstacle to effectiveness, and establishing more joined-up ways of working is a good first step. However, there is a more fundamental problem with the supply-versus-demand structuring of the options for governance improvement, one that is not so easily tackled and calls for a more radical solution.

This problem centres not on striking a better balance or generating more synergies but on something more basic. We need to revisit the assumptions both approaches make about the nature of African political reality. These assumptions produce analytical and policy weaknesses that mirror each other exactly. Since this has to do with the whole way the topic of governance for development is posed in Africa, it is an issue for domestic reformers and campaigners and not just for donors.

Throwing off the straitjacket of principal–agent thinking

The demand-side approach simply turns the supply-side approach on its head. The two perspectives share an important feature: an implicit assumption that there are sets of actors who are committed, in an uncomplicated way, to public-good objectives. They just differ about who those actors are: the supply-siders assume that national leaders are drivers of development, while demand-siders claim that it is more realistic to see the citizenry playing this role. In both approaches, the challenge of getting better governance is reduced to that of getting the other side to comply. Another way to put this is to say that both approaches are, in effect if not in intention, wedded to what is technically termed a ‘principal–agent’ model.

To avoid possible misunderstanding, the suggestion here is not that practitioners working on ‘demand for good governance’ use principal–agent concepts. Their typical watchwords are of course ‘voice’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘accountability to citizens’. We also acknowledge that actual practice varies quite a lot, and sometimes involves many of the ingredients we promote in this book. On the other hand, what we sketch here and portray more fully below is very far from being our invention: it represents the dominant policy perspective for a large range of organisations which together exercise a massive influence on what happens on the ground in Africa.

Approaches that assume that either leaders or citizens in low-income countries have an uncomplicated commitment to improving governance and the provision of public goods are mistaken in roughly equal measure and for essentially the same reason. This is not to say there are no individuals who have a genuine interest in the development and transformation of their countries. But for practical purposes this is less important than the fact that most actors at all levels spend most of their time responding to relatively mundane concerns and that, when it comes to pursuing more ambitious objectives, they often face prohibitive problems of collective action.

Summarising in everyday terms, then, our position is that governance challenges in Africa are not fundamentally about one set of people getting another set of people to behave better in the interests of development. They are about both sets of people finding ways of being able to act collective...