Panel 17: Public Policy Formation in Africa in the Wake of the Global Economic Meltdown: Can a New Order Emerge?

The global economic meltdown (2007-2009) which arguably had its antecedents in the United States sub-prime crises triggered a slew of discourses directed (for and against) at some of the dominant guiding tenets around which not just economic policy but public policy generally has been crafted in a globalizing world in the last thirty years. These discourses - which have tended to be trenchant and explicit- seem to emerge in the main from centers of thought in the global North and train their disquisitions on the state-market divide (one of such tenets) in relation to public policy formation. The African response is at best muted if existent at all.

Undoubtedly the global economic meltdown has offered a compelling backdrop for interrogating the neo-liberal paradigm of public policy formation which seemed triumphant on a global scale post 1979. Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” claim might have been overwrought in the face of a global economic crises-traceable to a market triumphalism which frowned on regulation- which wiped out about, by some accounts, $50trillion worth of wealth. Given that Africa’s development path in the last thirty years has been constrained and conditioned in some measure by public policy formation ideas from the West the panel seeks to catalyze thinking on alternative African public policy formation approaches in the light of the global economic crises and the emergence of new development models especially in Asia. In particular this panel invites cross disciplinary papers on the theoretical and practical possibilities and challenges that will attend the framing of public policy in Africa in a post global economic downturn world if the most developmentally challenged continent is to engage her own existential questions and the world on her own terms.