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African Governance

The term African governance refers to two salient trends in political analysis. First, the perceived crisis of African states has led observers to set out a range of models and prescriptions concerning political renewal or, less ambitiously, the reestablishment of centralized political order. Second, the generalized interest in governance has strongly shaped academics' understandings of state reform or renewal in Africa; the broad governance agenda has provided the tools through which many researchers and institutions have made sense of state “crisis” and shaped a range of lending and policy interventions throughout the continent.

The Emergence of Governance in Africa

The term governance, and its more explicitly normative companion—good governance—entered political discourse concerning Africa in the early 1990s. This was an auspicious time for governance concepts to engage with African politics: The 1980s had witnessed the collapse of statist socialism (which had previously been a referent for some African states as a nonliberal or non-Western state form) and an increasing inability of African states to function as a result of economic recession and crippling levels of external indebtedness. Thus, from 1992, major European donors began to associate their aid allocation with good governance, meaning adherence to liberal models of political life such as the introduction of a multiparty constitution, the legalization of various kinds of civic association, and the introduction of more transparent and accountable procedures within state administration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had always had relatively “political” criteria informing its lending, re-emphasized democratization as a condition for aid. Finally, the World Bank adopted the term governance in its research literature and policy-based lending from the mid-1990s. Interestingly, the World Bank, directed by its Articles of Agreement not to intervene in the sovereign politics of its members, had to ensure that its operationalization of a governance agenda did not resemble the imposition of a specific model of polity upon African states. This rendered the World Bank's understanding of governance in Africa rather a technical affair, at one remove from the bilateral donor's more openly normative and culturally embedded exhortations to universalize the political goods of liberal democracy.

Thus, one can see that African governance, rather paradoxically, gained its entrée largely as a result of developments outside the continent. Governance became an international development policy, a global set of political desiderata, and a set of conditionalities that accompanied aid and soft loan allocation. Nevertheless, developments within African countries intertwined with these international patterns, albeit in complex ways. All African states experienced significant turbulence during the 1980s and 1990s, one result of which has been the formal democratization of many states. New parties and civic organizations have emerged, some labor unions have regained their independence from state machineries, and religious and cultural organizations have gained greater public prominence in many countries. There is no easy way to make general comments on this diverse and complex bundle of political forces, but one important trend for our purposes is to note the selective incorporation of governance ideals into invigorated public realms.

Governance Politics in Africa

What have been the principal effects of governance politics in Africa? We can identify three key

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