L’analyse des politiques publiques a renouvelé l’analyse du politique (politics et policy) dans les pays développés au cours des 20 dernières années. En Afrique cette approche est toujours controversée et méprisée. Cependant, elle est susceptible de donner une connaissance approfondie des processus de décision politique sectorielle et des liens intimes associant politics et policy.
ENGLISH
Public policy analysis has been renewing the analysis of politics and policy in developed countries in the last 20 years or so. In Africa it is still a highly controversial of depicted perspective of analysis. However, it is liable to allow scholars to build an in-depth knowledge of policy-making processes and of the intricate relation existing between politics and policy.
L’analyse des politiques publiques a renouvelé la compréhension du politique (politics et policy) dans les pays développés. En Afrique, ces travaux sont toujours minoritaires dans la littérature universitaire alors même qu’ils pourraient être particulièrement importants. Ce type d’analyse impose de coller à la politique au quotidien pour comprendre les politiques suivies et inversement de suivre de près les processus de formation des politiques pour comprendre le politique. En se focalisant sur des politiques sectorielles ou limitées pour comprendre comment cela fonctionne (ou pas…) il faut alors s’intéresser aux institutions, aux cadres conceptuels et aux groupes sociaux et à leurs stratégies. Une bonne analyse de politique publique suppose que les institutions comptent (en Afrique aussi….), qu’une connaissance précise des règles formelles (de quelque origine que ce soit) ne suffit pas pour comprendre les processus sociaux et politiques mais est necessaire pour comprendre les significations sociales mobilisés par les acteurs, et que la décision politique est un processus de négociation permanent entre groupes développant des stratégies complexes y compris dans le champ du symbolique. Des notions comme celles « d’agenda », de communautés , réseaux de politique, de reférentiels et de référents, de rationalité limitée ou de multi rationalité, communautés épistémiques et de dépendance au chemin….devraient permettre aux chercheurs de trouver une substance au « ghost state ».
Ce séminaire a pour objectif de discuter de l’intérêt d’une telle approche pour une meilleure compréhension du politique et des politiques en Afriques. Deux types de papiers sont recherchés :
Public policy analysis has been renewing the analysis of politics and policy in developed countries. In Africa public policy analysis are still in a minority in the academic literature while they could prove highly valuable. Public policy analysis compels scholars to stick to everyday politics to understand policies and to policy making processes to understand politics. While focusing attention on specific sectorial policies or relatively limited matters in order to understand how things actually work (or do not work), they have to pay an interest to institutions settings, ideas frameworks, social groups and their strategies. Sound public policy analysis accepts that institutions matters (in Africa too...), that a clear knowledge of formal rules (of any origin) is not enough to analyse political and social processes but is a necessary premise to understand how people build their social meanings, and that policy making is a permanent bargaining between groups developing complex strategies including in the field of symbolic politics. Such notions and concepts as “agenda setting”, “policy community”, policy frameworks, policy networks, bounded rationality, multi-rationalities, epistemic communities, référentiels, path dependency to quote but a few, should allow scholars of African politics to find some flesh on the ghost state, ie to substantiate analysis on “the State”.
It is the objective of this seminar to discuss the interest of public policy analysis for a better understanding of politics and policy in African countries. People are invited to submit two type of papers:
Recent shifts in world geo-political circumstances have propelled the West into Africa with a failing mission to eradicate African ‘corruption’. Deep within this failure is the quiet obliteration of indigenous ways of managing local wrongdoing. The paper explains these matters within the framework of neo-colonialism. It case studies the inappropriate transfer of British concepts of “corruption” and public interest disclosure (whistle-blowing) to the jurisdictions of South Africa and Nigeria The purpose is to confront the current managerial outlook, question its hegemonic claims, identify its neo-colonialist aspirations and suggest a complete framework overhaul, with a new focus on an African-centred form of crisis management.
Bill De Maria is responsible for the ethics core in the MBA program at the UQ Business School. His research focus is 'corruption' and public interest disclosure. In 2003 he was in Tokyo advising the Japanese Cabinet Office on its new whistleblower law. He has recently been a visiting fellow at Transparency International’s world headquarters in Berlin where he advised on “corruption” strategies for the transition economies. As a guest of TI, he consulted and taught in Germany, Hungary and Poland. He recently gave a plenary paper on whistle-blowing and neo-colonialism at the 4th National African Business Ethics Network Conference in Zanzibar.
In the discourse of development, the concept of a vibrant civil society nurtures the hope of an inclusive and empowered sphere to engage with as well as limit a potentially oppressive and inefficient state apparatus. The recent history of Tanzania epitomizes such encompassing development agendas, with the fundamental structural changes of the past two decades resulting in political pluralism and economic deregulation. However, the democratisation and liberalisation processes have not led to the intended economic, social or political results: pervasive poverty, endemic corruption, a weak private sector and a marginalised civil society indicate that the developmental problems encountered are intricate and complex. The key objective of governance policies is the strengthening of state performance and the creation of favourable institutional conditions for economic growth, but the question is whether these transformative processes do achieve the results predicted by governance theory, namely enhanced accountability and transparency and hence greater capacity and responsiveness of public institutions. The social reality of transformation becomes more salient in an African context, for two reasons: first, the state and political order in general are structured along more personal and informal lines, thus blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, and between state and society; second, international actors play an extremely important role in shaping the state as well as society, in terms of the large influx of financial, economic as well as technical resources.
On an empirical level, it is still very dimly understood how the different actors engage with and shape these transformed institutional and social arenas. The purpose of this case study is to illuminate from within the developmental spaces and political struggles of civil society in relation to the state as well as to international actors. The paper explores two complementary facets: From a bird’s eye view, it elaborates the structural transformations that governance policies have induced in Tanzania, with a special focus on the evolution and design of anti-corruption policies. Second, from a worm’s eye view, the role and actions of professional associations with regard to such anti-corruption policies are explored. Professional associations are chosen because they constitute the hallmark of ‘progressive’ civil society organisations, in that they evolve at the interface of state, society and economy and have a specifically ‘modern’ foundation. They provide an excellent basis for a focused exploration of the emancipatory potential of civic associations in relation to the state. Furthermore, on a practical level, their engagement in anti-corruption efforts is undefined: Against the backdrop of classic governance literature, one would assume that it is in their interest to fight for predictable and accountable state institutions to enhance their own autonomy. But taking the literature on neo-patrimonial states into account, it is equally possible that professional associations have found ways of accommodating themselves comfortably within the state apparatus, and hence have no interest in weakening or threatening this arrangement. The strands of this tapestry will be traced by illuminating the actions and motivations of professional associations in the construction industry in Tanzania, and putting them in relation with the public sector, the government and international donors. This illumination from below sheds light on a more tangible and differentiated perspective of the potential and problems of civil society and governance in general.
Lucy Koechlin is a lecturer at the Institute of Sociology and for the Centre for African Studies Basel (CASB) at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Holding a licentiata philosophiae degree (lic.phil.) in Sociology, Political Economy and International Law from the University of Basel, and a Master of Science (MSc) in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), her major research interests include political order, civil society, poverty, social cohesion, governance and corruption, with a special geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently in the process of completing a PhD on corruption and development (“Global paradigms and local practices of corruption: a study of African politics and policies”).
The main aim of the paper is to look at the relationship between the policy process and democracy in South Africa. It will look at the emerging tensions between democracy and increasingly insulated styles of the policy-making process in South Africa. It details the policy process between 1994 and 2004; tracking the contestation over the content of socio-economic policies, particularly by key pressure groups, social forces and grassroots movements. Furthermore, it will evaluate their influence on the policy-making process and how this impacts on the substance of South Africa’s infant democracy. The lens through which the research will attempt to do this is the adoption and implementation by the ruling African National Congress Alliance of its market-friendly Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Strategy (Gear), as the development blueprint for the newly democratic country.
The generation of income through a tax administration is of central importance for a viable statehood as it serves as the basis for all other state functions (e.g., internal and external security, public welfare). However, exactly this “extractive capacity” (meaning: the ability to collect taxes) is the fundamental deficit of African states. This political science study will analyze the extractive capacity of two sub-Saharan African states, Zambia and Botswana, comparatively.
The political intervention in the day-to-day operation is often cited as the major problem of tax administrations in sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, the basic objective is to assess the processes which lead to the capability to raise revenue or not.
The concept of neopatrimonialism maintains that the low degree of administrative capability on the African continent is caused by the neopatrimonial penetration of formal state institutions through informal relations of the rulers (patronage, clientelism etc.). These neopatrimonial interventions in Zambia and Botswana will be specified and will be related to the importance of other factors.
Christian von Soest is a PhD candidate at the Institute of African Studies, University of Leipzig (Germany). Since May, 2003, he has been working on his PhD project 'The capability to raise revenue – a comparative analysis of the tax administrations in Zambia and Botswana'. Christian von Soest completed six months of field research in Zambia and Botswana in the end of August, 2004. From 1997 to 2002 he had studied journalism (communication studies, political science and public law) at University of Munich. In 1999, he went to South Africa and studied at University of Natal and University of Cape Town for one year. His final thesis was on the South African land reform.
The local authorities’ crisis in Eastern Africa is often given as an example to describe a situation in which they no longer provide efficient public services. The waste sector in Nairobi has been an accurate example of this situation for the past thirty years. As a matter fact, public action has developed new ways of intervening in the outcasted areas, which largely blurs the classical representations of political regulation. Indeed, local authorities lost the monopole of power and are facing a lack of legitimity (due to their inaction), and the growing of uninstitutionnalised actions’ territories.
In such a way, is it possible to say that local authorities have no longer any capacity of regulation? Should we go along with a fragmented representation of public action whose only regularity would be a more or less tolerated contingency?
If developing new action’s capacities (different from local authorities’ own capacities) put an end to common representation of power (development of numerous waste management’s popular “modes”), the analysis of Nairobi’s waste public policy since post-independence shows the various ways used by local authorities to ensure both their legitimity and authority in a continuously way. These particular modes, which are based on a specific work on popular representations of social problems, do not join the outcome which is expected by classical representations of public policy (ie to solve concretely a problem). Nevertheless, they succeed, in spite of the waste public policy’s appearent failure, in renewing the authority of local authorities and therefore their capacity of regulation.
Mathieu Mérino is Research Fellow at the Centre de Recherche et d’étude sur les pays d'Afrique orientale, Part time lecturer at Pau University and a former fellow of the French institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), Nairobi. His work is mainly dedicated to the analysis of urban regulation and its evolutions in East African capital cities, using public policy and sociology of public action as main theoretical frameworks. He has published a number of papers on those different aspects