Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Ferguson's Africa in the Global Shadows...

I'm getting a real thing for these political-economy meets anthropology books. I wrote before about James C Scott. Ferguson seems to be another chip off the same block.

Global Shadows is the second book of his I've read - the other on the Anti-Politics Machine is a pretty detailed account of the failure of a World Bank project in Lesotho in the 1980s (I think) and how this related to a poor understanding of the realities of the context - kind of a call for more political economy analysis before you implement a project. For me, the big message (from a pretty big and detailed book actually) was that, whetever you do in development policy you are affecting the balance of power and interests of different groups of society. Even if you do nothing...

Anyway, Global Shadows is a pretty interesting read too, covering a few different themes organised around separate papers. The main highlights for me were the following:

i) Examining countries in terms of their national boundaries just because they are sovereign nations doesn't always make that much sense. Ferguson makes a clever comparison of Transkei (not a sovereign state, but a region in South Africa previously cut off as a "homeland" whose history was therefore determined to an enormous extent by the apartheid and serving as a labour pool for the mines) and Lesotho. Lesotho? Well, it might be an independent state, but actually its history is pretty much the same as Transkei (until recently at least) so why do we suddenly view poverty and underdevelopment as isolated, exogenous problems, whereas for Transkei they are considered an embedded part of the broader regional history?

ii) We hear about Civil Society all the time in the world of development. Quite apart from that opinion of Chabal that there is no such thing as civil society as distinct from politics and business (that is, they are all inextricably linked), Ferguson remarks on the fact that post-independence, government was considered the only potential driver of development while civil society was seen as some kind of receptical of backward ways. Now this has been reversed and civil society now supposedly holds the key to ensuring effective development outcomes.

In addition though, he challenges the current common view that somehow Governments are "up there", doing lots of planning and top-down stuff, while "civil society" is the real "grass-roots" stuff, down there are the bottom and at a level with "the people". As he points out, the relations tend to be much less vertically hierarchical - "civil society" organisations tend to be linked internationally, thereby tying them in to international structures, interest groups and campaign networks etc and making them more horizontally rivalrous with governments. Similarly, governments can be seen as more a collection of different local actors or "social practices", with different ministries and departments operating according to the particular circumstances and power relations with other ministries and departments. That is, states are "little bundles of society" and really not in opposition to society at all. If you have worked in a developing country government, this is evidently true but something which is infrequently formally addressed in accounts of development.

iv) In a rather philosophical chapter, Ferguson talks about what is modernity in Africa. Is it something that will be arrived at if the right policies can be put in place, or is current Africa simply an example of a different modernity. It's not at first sight that fascinating a question but still, it does impact on the way we think about development and where we think things can actually go.

v) In a more economic related point, he discusses the recent interest in business climate, pointing out that the major investments in Africa relate to minerals and extraction in general, and that resource-rich countries are usually where governance is worst. That is, investment ain't flowing to the most "investment friendly". Of course there are probably a lot more in-depth analyses of this around, and indeed I wanted to double-check somewhere else (and actually as a counterpoint I'm reading Radelet's Emerging Africa about how 17 non-oil states are leading the way in economic growth terms over the past 10 years). But still, I liked the point that all systems are efficient and effective for someone, even if not for the average investor in a normal economic sector... And, that enclave or offshore operations are even more "efficient" as they can be socially thinner- less integrated into the local economy and society - this is a little bit what EPZs do too...

Thought provoking stuff, particular for those of us recently entering into the world of "governance" and "political economy analysis".....

No comments:

Post a Comment