Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa

Gedion Onyango

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000513943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Handbook provides an authoritative and foundational disciplinary overview of African Public Policy and a comprehensive examination of the practicalities of policy analysis, policymaking processes, implementation, and administration in Africa today.

The book assembles a multidisciplinary team of distinguished and upcoming Africanist scholars, practitioners, researchers and policy experts working inside and outside Africa to analyse the historical and emerging policy issues in 21st-century Africa. While mostly attentive to comparative public policy in Africa, this book attempts to address some of the following pertinent questions:

• How can public policy be understood and taught in Africa?
• How does policymaking occur in unstable political contexts, or in states under pressure?
• Has the democratisation of governing systems improved policy processes in Africa?
• How have recent transformations, such as technological proliferation in Africa, impacted public policy processes?
• What are the underlying challenges and potential policy paths for Africa going forward?

The contributions examine an interplay of prevailing institutional, political, structural challenges and opportunities for policy effectiveness to discern striking commonalities and trajectories across different African states.

This is a valuable resource for practitioners, politicians, researchers, university students, and academics interested in studying and understanding how African countries are governed.

1 A public policy approach to governance in Africa An introduction

Gedion Onyango

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143840-1

Introduction

The purpose of this volume is generally twofold – to provide a foundational understanding of African Public Policy and policy processes in Africa. The first involve moderate attempts to re-evaluate, readjust and apply policy concepts, approaches, models and theories to explain Africa’s unique governing and governance contexts. The second objective involves understanding different components of policy processes composites that explores, evaluates, examines and empirically puts into context different governance approaches, strategies and frameworks that have characterised the past and present of public policy as a practice of governments, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and transnational networks in Africa. Both exercises take stock of the extant literature while also exploring new analytical paths for African Public Policy. This volume establishes an understanding of public policy within its broader contexts, which can be better undertaken by looking into governance domains often mostly subsumed in Africa’s development discourses and programmes. Generally, this book emerges from the prevailing gap in understanding public policy as a governance domain, given how the government, politics and management in Africa have been studied over the years. A few observations deserve a mention in this regard: First, Public Policy as a field of research and practice is generally understudied as a discipline in Africa, especially in African Political Science as other social science domains. Just like it was the case in the 1970s United States, most studies on governance in Africa “have only occasionally turned to policy and government. [B]ut the tendency has been to do so only because the interesting conflicts are around issues, and many issues involve basic policies” (Lowi 1972, p. 299). Studying, teaching and training public policy in Africa is generally at the peripheries of development policy and governance discourses leading to a lack of conceptual clarity, under-theorising and understudying public policy in Africa.

Recently, however, this seems to be changing in some quarters, even though, these efforts are still insufficient. Anthropological studies by Francophone Africa’s governance scholars in West Africa, for example, have addressed some of these theoretical gaps by looking into how the Africa state works, presenting critical insights on public policy (political action) dynamics or realities on the ground (e.g. Bierschenk and Oliver de Sardan 2014). With donor funding, non-governmental research organisations have also been recently making pathways in generating critical policy data, especially in social policy sectors to inform policy actions across Africa. Generally, therefore, and judging by fewer edited volumes and books published since the beginning of this Millennium (e.g. Kalu 2004; Goldman and Pabari 2020; Onyango and Hyden 2021), the African scholarship on public policy is seemingly lagging in setting the agenda for studying public policy as a field and as a practice.

Second, rich data from case-study methods in Africa remain unintegrated to bring relevance and rigour in understanding public policy as an area of study and practice. The extant literature on Africa’s public policy is siloed and highly fragmented alongside different social science disciplines, sectors and professional lines resulting in a lack of theoretical and disciplinary developments of public policy as a field of study in tertiary institutions and a lack of intersectoral and interdisciplinary lesson drawing by policy scholars, practitioners and development actors in Africa. Undoubtedly, enormous literature or case studies on policy effectiveness exist, mainly and more explicitly in Health Sciences, Development Studies, Environmental Studies, among others. Still, this differs from one country to another, with other countries and sectors being more studied than others. Also, insights from these studies have neither stimulated comprehensive theory-building for studying African Public Policy or governments in Africa, nor adequately inform policy studies in other policy sectors that may generally benefit from their findings.

Third, most of what we may know about public policy in Africa lies in the grey literature or publications and survey reports by donor organisations and researchers whose lenses and frames of analysis align to serving their funders’ interests. As such, corresponding debates on how to order institutions and governance structures and the search for policy solutions have been chiefly confined and shaped by donor-friendly data that apply international instruments (or global indices) keen on generating comparative conclusions on how African countries perform in relation to the Western countries (Hyden 2021; Mkandawire 2001). This literature often rationalises and promotes donor-dependence by African countries, which has reduced some government institutions in Africa to mere operational ‘shells’ for donor-funded programmes to the extent that they practically collapse when funding comes to an end. Therefore, public policy analysis and research in Africa are dominated by donor frameworks, international policy systems, models and approaches (Delville and Ayimpam 2018). In other words, there is more obsession with internationalisation than contextualisation of public policy designs and instruments in Africa (e.g. Delville and Ayimpam 2018; Mkandawire 2004), even when the evidence shows otherwise (Parker and Allen 2011).

However, this notwithstanding, internationalisation has been a mixed blessing. It has resulted in adopting new ideas and approaches in some policy areas that have expanded political space for policy change and innovation (Himmelstrand et al. 1994). A plethora of studies show that many of these new ideas and strategies, nonetheless, have never been fully put into practice (e.g. Ayee 2008; Olowu 2019). Simultaneously, though, their implementation in most cases has served “to entrench and stabilise reconstructed policy systems, thus constraining the scope for further change” (Howlett and Ramesh 2002, p. 31). In particular, internationalisation has also facilitated the hegemony of donor agencies and governments in Africa’s development and public policy, leaving open the question of emerging trajectories and convergences, context-specific innovations and political possibilities for change in African countries (Olivier de Sardan 2008; Onyango and Hyden 2021).

Fourth, and more broadly, like most of Africa’s social science and related disciplines, public policy epistemologies and ontologies remain analogous with the United States and Western Europe’s experiences, governing processes and systems despite a consensus that policy context matter in the study and theory of public policy. Comparative public policy has similarly been confined to the Western world, leaving out developing regions, mainly Africa. For instance, the mainstream policy theories do not consider the implications of donor interventions and institutional reforms in African countries “where society is still largely natural, and the state mandate is to forge a new nation […] that does not factor in policy or institutional designs funded by donors” (Hyden and Onyango 2021, pp. 258–9). Indeed, it is not surprising that the American and European textbooks and their theories of public policy have dominated policy studies and analysis in developing political contexts in Africa and beyond.

But this also presents both a challenge and opportunities for studying African Public Policy. While this volume demonstrates underlying theoretical and practical trajectories of Western oriented theories, it also improves related models and frameworks’ viability in different policy sectors and systems in Africa. Each chapter is keen to address the theory and practice of public policy within a particular policy sector while also generating comparable conclusions.

Given the isomorphic nature of governance approaches today, a discussion on public policy in Africa, as elsewhere, can hardly be conducted outside these comparative classifications that have come to characterise the art and the science of public policy and analysis (e.g. Peters and Zittoun 2016). Generally, the empirical and normative theory-building, teaching, modelling and framing discourses of public policy in Africa are predisposed to looking into State and the nature of its institutions a tradition that has been there, albeit in African Political Science and other social sciences for some time now (e.g. Nyong’o 2021). One of the central concerns in this volume is understanding how these have really changed over time while impacting critical microscopic governing processes, including emerging trajectories and underlying similarities across African countries. This volume’s public policy approach to analysing African governance demonstrates multisectoral and multidisciplinary integration efforts of studying governance in Africa. Perhaps such analysis may reduce common bounded rationality problems in government action (see Simon 1957) by generating knowledge and disseminating data across sectors while similarly reducing the degree of mess confronting administrators in policy analysis (see Lindblom 1959). Different studies in this volume also explicitly demonstrate the tendency of the logic of strategic ignorance (Gross and McGoey 2015) that has been employed for decades by donor organisations and governments in their pursuit of one size fits all approach over functional or contextually informed strategies in handling African policy problems.

That said, this introductory chapter lays out the public policy agenda for studying and ordering governance reforms in Africa. This includes laying out its objectives and uniqueness. It points out that given the surge of what we may term as public policy consciousness in Africa in recent years, there is a need for a policy-biased approach to governance in Africa. Public policy consciousness has been evident in the growing introduction of public policy courses and graduate training programmes across African universities, the cropping up of policy research organisations and the increased attention to narrowing the research-policy-public interfaces to improve the government quality. It primarily responds to the dearth of literature on public policy for teaching and understanding public policy and administration in African universities amid these changes. Efforts to comprehensively understand public policy both as a dependent and an explanatory variable of governing or governance have gained currency in the region in the last decade. Different governments are increasingly investing more resources in strengthening public policy research institutes (government think tanks), engaging in internal and external policy partnerships, training and creating policy advisory departments at the national and sub-national levels. Commissioning of research in Africa, especially by international research organisations, has also emphasised addressing the policy-research gaps resulting in the rise of think tanks and non-governmental research-based organisations across and outside Africa concerned with studying African public policy.

Also, African universities have recently come up with public policy syllabuses, and policy training programmes besides engaging in collaborations like that overseen by the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR). The PASGR’s initiative, for inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A public policy approach to governance in Africa: an introduction
• PART I Research, theory and teaching African public policy
• PART II Understanding policy framing in Africa
• PART III Understanding public policymaking in Africa
• PART IV Understanding policy reforms in Africa
• PART V Understanding politics and public policy in Africa
• PART VI Understanding policy implementation outcomes in Africa: country studies
• PART VII Implementing education policies in Africa
• PART VIII Understanding health policies and disease control in Africa
• PART IX Understanding food security and social protection policies in Africa
• PART X Understanding women, gender and public policy in Africa
• PART XI Understanding crisis management, migration and regional trade policies
• PART XII Understanding emerging policy issues and challenges in Africa
• Index