Many formerly poor countries have seen remarkable economic and social progress in recent decades. Large parts of Asia and South and Central AmericaâIndia, China, Brazil, to mention only the most obvious instancesâhave achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity in recent times, even though inequality remains a deeply ingrained problem.
Africa presents a different picture. Many African countries have reached rather impressive economic growth rates since the mid-1990s. However, the gains have been unequally divided and have been diluted by population growth. Scattered islands of economic improvement are set in an âoceanâ of countries mired in extreme poverty and social dislocation.
Thirty-eight African countries are among the bottom 25 per cent of the countries in the United Nations human development index for 2016 (a measure assessing human emancipation and security alongside material prosperity).
Persistent poverty correlates with high rates of population growth. African economic weakness means that not enough jobs are created for a burgeoning younger generation.
Despairing of their future if they stay at home, many young people, especially young men, set their sights on emigration , especially to European countries to the north. A considerable number are prepared to risk putting themselves into the hands of smugglers, who run what is, in effect, a modern slave trade across the Mediterranean.
And yet, Africa has abundant (agrarian) resources. Many of the trans-Mediterranean migrants come from West Africa. Why is this belt of relatively lightly populated and well-watered land on the margins of the tropical rain forest not playing the same role as the agrarian frontier of nineteenth-century North America as a generator of jobs and prosperity?
A number of explanations have been advanced to explain the failure of West African agriculture to catalyse far-reaching economic change.
Some stress geographic and environmental constraints, such as poor soil or diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. Others point to human factors, such as the consequences of several centuries or more of the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades, or the exploitation of small-scale farmers under âextractive â colonial and postcolonial economic regimes. Yet others point their fingers at âbackward technologyâ (a lack of machines or high-yielding seeds).
These arguments, though hotly contested, are not necessarily wrong.
In this book, however, we pay attention to a different dimension of the African agrarian puzzleânamely, institutional factors. Institutional constraints, we argue, permeate, and shape these other constraints. They have a logic and dynamic of their own. Institutions are important. They require to be addressed in their own right. Any fuller understanding of the potential for African agrarian change requires sustained attention to the institutional dynamics of agrarian society and economy.
What are institutions? We engage with this question more thoroughly in the main body of the book. But to start with, a couple of instances might be helpful here.
Soccerânow a universal gameâoriginated as a medieval form of street ritual in which two crowds drove a pigâs bladder towards opposing goals. The ritual evolved into a field sport played in a number of British schools in the first half of the nineteenth century. The modern game emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when players who had learnt to play under variant rules met at university and wanted to continue to play. They founded the Football Association to administer a single set of written rules. The point we wish to emphasize is that the institution of soccer long predated the formal rules under which it now operates. The existence of an institution is not to be judged by whether or not it has a set of formal rules.
A second instructive example is provided by the rule of the road. Archaeologists working on a Roman quarry site in Wiltshire established from the relative depth of track grooves made by empty and laden carts leaving the site that Roman vehicles kept to the left when passing (Walters 1998). Keeping to the left seems to have been the preferred order for armed riders passing on horseback from ancient times. Right-handed riders would want their sword arm on the passing side, and about 85 per cent of the population is right handed. A change towards driving/riding on the right spread across Europe in the wake of the conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, driving on the right is the norm in a majority of countries sharing land borders. The older custom of driving on the left survived mainly in island countries, such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Expense is often given as the reason for not agreeing on a single universal standard.
These examples illustrate two key points about institutions.
The first is that many institutions emerge as customs (the consolidation of effective practices), rather than through rational planning.
The second is that customary norms can be codified or standardized, but sometimes, reforms are less logical than reformers think. There is no practical or logical reason to prefer to drive on the right or left. The only necessity is to have an agreed rule. It is sometimes claimed that Napoleon changed the rule of the road in continental Europe because he thought it more auspicious to drive on the right. If true, this would be an instance of institutional reform designed to accommodate a superstition.
That so many institutions are so often shaped and modified through the accumulation of inherited practices helps explain the fact that it is often hard to give plausible or convincing explanations of their origins. These origins may be lost in time. âJust soâ stories are then invented, to explain an institution, or to protect it from its critics. This makes it challenging to find an objective standpoint to judge an institution as âgoodâ or âbad.â This is a problem because reformers, comfortable with their own institutions, are tempted then to claim that âinjusticeâ or âpovertyââor some other problematic conditionâare the result of not sharing the would-be reformerâs institutional values.
Some of these problems of perspective, and how they might be tackled, are addressed in the following chapters, especially Chap. 2, where we outline some of the ways in which economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists undertake institutional analysis.
At this point, however, we need to note a fundamental difference of emphasis that runs through work on institutions in all disciplines. This is between accounts that focus on successional issues (how institutions develop and evolve) and those that focus on integrational issues (how coexisting institutions combine or clash).
The distinguished Nobel laureate in economics Douglass North mainly took the first approach. Over the sweep of economic history, institutions change from limited to open access. In the first instance, a powerful ruler would mediate cases only among a noble elite. Common people could not access the court of the king. Todayâand in theory, at leastâmodern countries offer justice to all.
North also noted that the earliest institutions were informal (based around custom, taboo, or myth), but were later formalized (based around written constitutions and laws). Open access institutions and formalization reduce the transaction costs associated with many areas of social and economic life, whether we are talking about debt recovery or online no fault divorce.
This kind of approach has supported a debate about development and poverty alleviation in which the primary concern is to modernize institutionsâsometimes taken as being practically synonymous with the acceptance of key practices and organizational arrangements of advanced market economies. It is for the want of these features that poverty becomes ingrained (or so the argument runs). âWhy arenât you more like Sweden?â is the cry of institutional modernizers.
So, for example, development agencies talk about the need to reform land tenure in an impoverished region such as West Africa, in order for land to become a tradable asset, guaranteed (so it is supposed) to find the best use in the hands of the highest bidder.
Among those who have advanced the integrational approach, we find another Nobel laureate, the economist Oliver Williamson, and a major anthropologist, Mary Douglas. Their work will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 2. A key insight we will reiterate is that the way i...