Southern African Development Community

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is the successor to the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC). It is necessary to have a brief understanding of the SADCC in order to introduce the SADC. The SADCC was created in 1980 as a result of an agreement among Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, which had undergone a process of regionalization for over a century. The SADCC created a political regionalism based on two key concerns that united the member states. First, these economically weak states wished to assert a collective strength in contrast to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Second, the SADCC aimed to facilitate the disbursement of aid from Western donors, the more progressive of which understood support for the SADCC as part of an anti-Apartheid development policy.

The SADCC was formally replaced by the SADC in 1992. This was a result of the abolishment of Apartheid in South Africa, and indeed South Africa joined the SADC in 1994, the year in which Nelson Mandela won the presidency of that country. The SADC now includes Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Institutionally, the SADC is constituted by regional summits, a complex regional bureaucracy mainly based in Botswana, interministerial groups, and an SADC interparliamentary forum.

With the entry of a democratic South Africa, both of the founding raisons d'être for the SADCC melted away; the SADC is an attempt to maintain a southern African regional project in light of these historic [Page 910]changes. But, the entry of South Africa—which has an economy that is larger than the sum of all the other members—has been far from straightforward, and in fact the SADC has at best instituted a halting and tentative regionalism. The key issues underpinning the SADC's limited progress are listed in the following paragraphs.

The SADC's regional economic strategy has undergone a substantial change. The assumptions about state planning and inwardly focused regional economic development have been replaced by a more market-driven development strategy that aims to make southern Africa a more competitive region within a global economy reflecting a broader global shift toward neoliberalism. This form of regionalism—often called open regionalism—can only work if the member states have adequate levels of economic integration and complementarity. Southern African states are not highly integrated or complementary in this sense.

South Africa has established itself as the hub of the region. Where there is regional integration, it is not multilateral but rather “hub-and-spoke” in its spatial patterning: Mozambique, Botswana, and others all maintain strong linkages with South Africa but have far less interaction with other neighbors. The economic inequalities of the region have not been significantly mollified; South Africa remains a core in a region of peripheries. And Western aid strategies have been refocused on South Africa.

The SADC is now one form of regionalism in a complex of overlapping regional organizations. The East African Community and the Community of Eastern and Southern African States have also incorporated SADC members into their own institutions. It is unclear how this multiregionalism will affect the SADC.

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