Uganda

The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation

Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello, Elisa Greco, Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello, Elisa Greco

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786991096
• eBook ISBN: 9781786991119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía del desarrollo

For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an African success story and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development. The neoliberal policies and the resulting restructuring of the country have been accompanied by narratives of progress, prosperity, and modernisation and justified in the name of development.

But this self-celebratory narrative, which is critiqued by many in Uganda, masks the disruptive social impact of these reforms and silences the complex and persistent crises resulting from neoliberal transformation. Bringing together a range of leading scholars on the country, this collection represents a timely contribution to the debate around the New Uganda, one which confronts the often sanitised and largely depoliticised accounts of the Museveni government and its proponents.

Harnessing a wealth of empirical materials, the contributors offer a critical, multi-disciplinary analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring since the 1980s. The result is the most comprehensive collective study to date of a neoliberal market society in contemporary Africa, offering crucial insights for other countries in the Global South.

Part I

The state, donors and development aid

1

Donor-driven state formation: friction in the World Bank–Uganda partnership

Jon Harald Sande Lie

Introduction1

The formation of neoliberal Uganda has been highly influenced by external development actors, their changing policy priorities and new modalities for delivering aid. Since the turn of the millennium, following the World Bank’s 1997 Development Report The State in a Changing World, the Bank’s emphasis changed from ‘getting the market right’ through state deregulation to ‘getting the state right’ (Moore 1999) by promoting good governance policies addressing the client state’s internal affairs (Doornbos 2003). This policy shift coincided with changes at the structural level of aid, evolving into what has been labelled the new aid architecture (Mosse 2005, Lie 2015b): instead of the donor imposing its policies on passive aid recipients, the partner government was now to take an active part in formulating and implementing its own development strategy while the donor withdrew to a role as funder and controller of the government’s initiatives. This partnership modality entailed consigning power from donor to recipient, turning passive clients into active agents, granting governments greater freedoms and responsibilities in their partnership with the World Bank and other bilateral donors.

In Uganda, the new aid architecture got its particular and contextual rendering. In the formation of the World Bank–Uganda partnership in the mid-2000s, which is the scope of this chapter, the Bank struggled to reconcile conveying greater freedoms and responsibilities to the Government of Uganda while simultaneously ensuring the government would commit to the Bank’s prioritised good governance policies. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank started to employ new, tacit and indirect governance mechanisms through which the Bank aimed to make its own policies those of the recipient. These mechanisms were premised on the Bank’s ability to frame the partnership formation and the conditions under which the Ugandan government could exercise the freedom it had been granted to devise its own development strategy. The mechanisms employed are reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of governmentality as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (1991). I refer to this indirect power as ‘developmentality’ (Lie 2015a, 2015b, see the coda section below) in order to disengage and broaden Foucault’s focus on state power (de Carvalho 2016), and to address the particularities, intentions and effects of the new aid architecture. Developmentality evolved in the nexus of freedom and control, participation and conditionality, as the Bank employed new public management structures to be able to ‘govern at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 181). These neoliberal governance structures enabled the Bank to pay heed to the new aid architecture’s rhetoric of national ownership while retaining influence over the government’s own policies. Central here is the use and framing of national ownership, where ownership, according to a donor informant, ‘exists when they do as we want them to do, but they do so voluntarily’ (cited in Randel et al. 2002: 8). As the Ugandan government gradually adopted the Bank’s policies and procedures, it was increasingly put under external supervision – and instead of acting on behalf of and being accountable to its citizens, the government has increasingly become accountable to its external donors and the Bank in particular.

The practices and effects of the new aid architecture have been instrumental in the formation of neoliberal Uganda. First, this chapter outlines some brief historical background, including the main girding tenets of the new aid architecture as manifested in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), being the new disbursement tactic of the Bank to which Uganda soon became a pilot country. The second part explores how Uganda’s existing development strategy was adopted as the country’s PRSP but gradually came to bear the imprint of the Bank’s template. The third part demonstrates the practical partnership encounter between the Bank and its Ugandan counterpart. These two parts together shows the working of developmentality, which is returned to in the final coda section.

A donor darling meets the new aid architecture

Uganda was until 2005 celebrated as a donor darling, a success story and a showcase for Western-led development efforts (Cargil 2004, Dijkstra and van Donge 2001, Harrison 2001, Kuteesa et al. 2010). There are at least three important reasons for this. First, the Ugandan government has, since Museveni assumed power in 1986, been quite successful in promoting poverty reduction, economic growth and social and political stability, while also crafting a new Constitution that, at least partly, reinstalled democratic rule. As emphasised in this book’s introduction, this brought about much needed political stability and continuity at the helm of the state, being important prerequisites for both state formation but also the state’s international relations. Second, and interrelated, Museveni won donors’ praise for his ideological affinity with Western development discourses and for adopting donors’ structural adjustment programmes demanding reforms to cut government spending, liberalise the economy and privatise state enterprises – all the while he talked about African self-reliance and independence from donor-driven reforms. Third, the extolment of Uganda was also driven by factors external to Uganda: the geopolitical momentum and rationale of the international development apparatus was lost with the end of the Cold War, pressuring donors to demonstrate results to maintain moral and economic support at home. Combined, these factors led to a massive increase of foreign aid and actors to Uganda from the mid-1990s by donors wanting to be part of and contribute to the success story.

When the World Bank in 1999 rolled out its new partnership model and disbursement tactic centred around a nationally produced Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), Uganda was chosen as one among five pilot countries. The government’s existing Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) was soon to be transformed into the country’s PRSP. This – being an expression of the new aid architecture’s focus on partnership, participation and ownership – thus marked a radical shift from donors’ previous hands-on engagement with a plethora of small projects, to the support of the government’s own strategy in the form of direct budget support. In the 2000–2005 period 48–53 per cent of the Ugandan national budget was provided for by external development assistance, thus giving external actors significant influence and leverage over Ugandan state formation and the government’s own policies and processes (Mwenda 2010, Rubongoya 2007).

In 2005 Uganda’s partnership relation with the international development donor community was critically challenged, effectively reconstructing the donor image of Uganda as a show case and donor darling. Since 1986 Uganda enjoyed largely cordial relations with the international donor community. These relations derailed during the political transition of 2005 when Museveni announced that he would alter the Constitution to lift the two-term limitation on the presidency, allowing him to run for a third term in office. The World Bank has a particular apolitical mandate, restraining it from involvement in its counterparts’ domestic political affairs. Simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, it also stresses the good governance agenda, through which it seeks to shape client governments according to a particular standard. Museveni’s bid to alter the Constitution, allowing him to participate in the 2006 election, triggered a harsh response among donors, including the World Bank, epitomising how external actors in the name of development seek to influence their counterpart’s state formation processes despite Uganda’s partnership relations with international aid agencies that are founded on the principles of national self-determination and domestic ownership to the externally funded development strategy. The 2005 events amplified and made visible how external actors are involved in internal political processes. The conditions for this are, however, the result of the general World Bank–Uganda partnership formation since 1999, where processes enhancing the Ugandan government’s self-determination and freedom have been accompanied with mechanisms and procedures through which the Bank seeks to make its policies those of its Ugandan counterpart. This indirect governance – or developmentality (Lie 2015a, 2015b) – is both enabled by and undermining the new aid architecture.

The new aid architecture refers to certain general changes at the structural and policy level of international aid (Mosse 2005, Lie 2015a) that also came to influence Uganda’s relationship with foreign donors. First, the new aid architecture involves donors’ withdrawal from running their own project to route their funding through aid receiving partners in support of their policies and procedures, turning erstwhile passive clients into active agents. Second, it involved greater attention to policy and public sector reforms rather than conventional investment projects, as illustrated by the emphasis given to good governance policies. Third, it meant going beyond the conventional economic growth paradigm to a wider attention to poverty reduction. Fourth, it entails a move from ex post to ex ante conditionality, meaning that aid is disbursed only after policies and processes have been sufficiently implemented: aid is not assisting implementation but rather serves as an incentive mechanism in rewarding good performance (Sending and Lie 2015). The new aid architecture thus epitomises what has been called the transition from first- to second-generation reform (Harrison 2004) – akin to what Atkinson in this volume refers to as the first and second phase of neoliberal Uganda – where the ethos is that ‘process’ is as important as ‘policy’, and where the aid relation involves constructing ‘an appropriate system of government to allow governance states to absorb and operationalise funds and technical assistance’ (Harrison 2004: 21).

The PRSP model represents the World Bank’s operationalisation of the new aid architecture. Incepted in 1999, it aimed to alter asymmetrical aid relations through changes at both the structural and policy levels of aid. It departs from the Washington consensus era of structural adjustment where the Bank’s imposed privatisation and liberalisation policies not only bypassed the state in the planning process but also aimed to dismantle state structures. The PRSP reinstates the role of the state, focusing on the state as both a means and an objective for international development, as illustrated by the dominant discourses of partnership and good governance respectively (Abrahamsen 2004). Bank-driven state formation is challenging not only because of the Bank’s apolitical mandate restricting its involvement in a client’s domestic political affairs. It is also challenging because the state formation policies of good governance are nominally, as per the PRSP model, supposed to be devised, implemented and ‘owned’ by the government subject to these policies and reforms. Hence, the difficult task facing Bank bureaucrats under the PRSP regime was how to get their Ugandan counterpart to adopt the prioritised good governance policies without jeopardising the partnership relation and local ownership.

Rolling out the PRSP in Uganda: the formation of PEAP

The Ugandan PRSP was locally dubbed the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which has its particular historical trajectory (Mugambe 2010) (from 2010, the PEAP was renamed the National Development Plan (NDP); NDP I covered the period 2010/11–2014/15, and NDP II, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the series
• About the editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. The state, donors and development aid
• 1. Donor-driven state formation: friction in the World Bank–Uganda partnership
• 2. Our friends at the bank? The adverse eff ects of neoliberalism in Acholi
• 3. Neoliberal discipline and violence in northern Uganda
• 4. ‘Movement legacy’ and neoliberalism as political settlement in Uganda’s political economy
• 5. More is less? Decentralisation and regime control in neoliberal Uganda
• 6. Neoliberal neverland: the Millennium Villages Project in Uganda
• Part II. Economic restructuring and social services
• 7. The impact of neoliberal reforms on Uganda’s socio- economic landscape
• 8. Social service provision and social security in Uganda: entrenched inequality under a neoliberal regime
• 9. Neoliberal health reforms and citizenship in Uganda
• Part III. Extractivism and enclosures
• 10. Neoliberalism as Ugandan forestry discourse
• 11. Plantation forestry and carbon violence in neoliberal Uganda
• 12. Neoliberal oil development in Uganda: centralisation, accumulation and exclusion
• 13. Water grabbing or sustainable development? Eff ects of aquaculture growth in neoliberal Uganda
• 14. The politics of land law reforms in neoliberal Uganda
• Part IV. Race, culture and commoditisation
• 15. African Asians and South Asians in neoliberal Uganda: culture, history and political economy
• 16. Religious economies: Pentecostal-charismatic churches and the framing of a new moral order in neoliberal Uganda
• 17. Youth as ‘identity entrepreneurs’: emerging neoliberal subjectivites in Uganda
• 18. Neoliberal times: leisure and work among young men in rural eastern Uganda
• 19. The transformation of national performance arts in neoliberal Uganda
• Conclusion
• Index