Governing Africas Changing Societies: Dynamics of Reform 9781626371064

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies Dynamics of Reform Edited by

Ellen M. Lust Stephen N. Ndegwa

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lust, Ellen. Governing Africa’s changing societies : dynamics of reform / Ellen M. Lust, Stephen N. Ndegwa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-834-1 (alk. paper) 1. Africa, Sub-Saharan—Politics and government—1960– 2. Africa, Sub-Saharan—Social conditions—1960– 3. Africa, Sub-Saharan—Economic conditions—1960– I. Ndegwa, Stephen N. II. Title. JQ1879.A15L87 2012 320.967—dc23 2011053494 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments 1

2 3 4 5 6

7

8

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The Challenges of Governance in Africa’s Changing Societies Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa

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The Democracy-Governance Connection Michael Bratton

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Democracy and Economic Performance Peter Lewis

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Contested Land Rights in Rural Africa Catherine Boone

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Property Rights: Preferences and Reform Ato Kwamena Onoma

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Women’s Rights and Family Law Reform in Francophone Africa Susanna D. Wing

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Religion, Democracy, and Education Reform in the Sahel Leonardo A. Villalón

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Rethinking the Dynamics of Reform in Africa Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa

203 213 229 231 243

Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book v

Acknowledgments

We thank the World Bank–Netherlands Partnership Program, the

Yale University Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the John K. Castle Fund for Ethics and International Affairs, and the Councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies (with US Department of Education Title VI funding) for supporting a series of meetings at which the authors of this book gathered to take stock of societal transformations, and their implications for governance, in Africa and the Middle East. We are also grateful for the comments and contributions of the others who attended those meetings, as well as for the responses of two anonymous reviewers, whose insights strengthened the book. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in the book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations that they represent. —Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa

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1 The Challenges of Governance in Africa’s Changing Societies Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa

Sub-Saharan Africa has undergone significant social, economic,

and political changes in the past two decades. Political and civil liberties expanded dramatically. The number of countries that Freedom House rated as Not Free declined from twenty-seven in 1980 to seventeen in 2011; the number rated as Free rose from four to nine; and another twenty-two of Africa’s forty-eight countries that were reviewed were rated Partly Free. 1 Combined, the two categories of Free and Partly Free accounted for 63 percent of the continent’s population. The continent has also experienced extraordinary economic improvements. While in 1980 real average incomes had regressed to below the levels of the 1960s, in 2011 six African economies were reported as being among the fastest growing economies in the world for 2001 to 2010.2 Significant variations exist across African countries, however, and even within them experiences are mixed. Countries like Zimbabwe and Senegal—both with celebrated democratic pasts—saw declining conditions while others like Benin and Ghana improved significantly. A number of coups d’état, in Comoros, Guinea, and Madagascar, signaled the difficulties in store for new democracies and, in some cases, violence (e.g., Kenya and Nigeria) and civil war (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone) have often marred elections. Yet Africa also witnessed an unprecedented number of peaceful elections and transfers of power in countries like Botswana, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia. 1

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Prevailing Views of Reform Scholars looking at the continent surmise differing, and at times diametrically opposed, conclusions, and predict decidedly different fates for development. One set of scholars sees continued suboptimal performance or persistent shortcomings in reform,3 while another—small but increasingly vocal—highlights unprecedented progress or resurgence. 4 The key analyses underlying and propelling each strand of thinking are theoretically and methodologically sound, and there is no clear ideological divide between the two perspectives. Thus, students of African development confront an important analytical conundrum with practical implications regarding policy choices for citizens, governments, and development partners. Tumult, Not Progress

The prevailing view of reform is one of tumult, but with no change in the underlying logics of politics and development. This view is perhaps not surprising, given the cycles of autocracy and economic decline in the roughly fifty years of independence from colonial rule and the fact that reform has been a permanent theme of public affairs in Africa.5 Major developments began with structural adjustment in the 1980s and continued with political liberalization in the 1990s, which triggered substantial change in how power is acquired and exercised, in the rights that citizens experience, and in the institutional density for managing public affairs. Students of African development responded by analyzing and debating the profundity of these changes, examining privatization and growth trajectories, civil service reform and the quality of service delivery, and political liberalization and turnovers in leadership. Some argue that the executive continues to dominate most transitioned political systems and that, though sometimes celebrated, periodic elections are unable to generate stable outcomes or smooth transfers of power. Others note civil societies lack the autonomy or leverage to constrain state behavior, and yet others find checks-and-balance systems ultimately lacking the independence or incentives to constrain the political class.6 The overall verdict is disappointment. In part, this is because the reform efforts and attendant evaluations rest on a central assumption that macroreforms should produce major—indeed, emphatic—results in the targeted political and economic arenas. Success is measured by the

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degree of change from a status quo ante, with anything short of a turnaround generally portrayed as failure. Political Barriers to Reform

More recent analyses move away from a focus on the technical aspects of reform and toward embracing political fit. They examine donorsponsored reforms, especially in public sector governance, and conclude that failure arises not from a lack of the right technical designs but from a lack of political will or programmatic fit.7 Such authors point out that donor-preferred reforms failed in countries with high levels of political competition—where one might expect a rising tide of participation to break reform resistance—and conclude that political competition forced ruling parties and executives to undermine reforms by favoring continued clientelism over new forms of public management. The challenge for policymakers is thus how reform can move forward in particular political contexts.8 This approach moved many reformers, especially donors, to examine the political barriers to reform. Reforms should not only be “technically appropriate” for the country in question, but they should also be “politically appropriate,” with modest ambitions tailored to the political context.9 This perspective argues for abandoning mainstream models of reform that emphasize “best practices”—essentially copying practices from developed economies—in favor of “good enough,” “best fit,” or “second-best” models that fit reforms to the political economy of the country in question.10 A More Positive Account

Recent studies showing institutional advances in spite of the tumult of less than complete reform suggest, however, that even this perspective does not explain how good governance emerges in the context of rapid change. These studies record a resurgence of legislatures, an evolving constitutionalism, and stability in democratic institutions such as term limits—with emphatic strides noted even in countries with otherwise blemished transitions.11 To be sure, when observed in the short term or in motion, the emergence of countries from the doldrums of conflict and dismal growth often seemed bumbling, inchoate, controversial, and overshadowed by their past (e.g., Tanzania in the 1990s) or simply off the analytical radar (e.g., Mali). Yet, rebounds were realized, often in seemingly unpropitious circumstances.

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Scholars examining economic resurgence—growth, investment, and technology—find a break in decades-old patterns, especially when “Africa” is disaggregated. Steve Radelet, who put the counternarrative of African development on the global map, argues that seventeen emerging African economies have growth rates, political reforms, and technological advancements that put them on par with the best-performing economies in Asia.12 These countries—accounting for 300 million people—averaged 5 percent annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) between 1996 and 2008—a dramatic contrast from the two previous decades, in which growth was flat and conflict widespread. Moreover, if the path to success was unpredicted, at least in hindsight, it is not entirely unexpected. In these seventeen and another six “threshold” countries, Radelet argues the turnaround story was driven by five factors: more legitimate and accountable governance; reformist economic management, including maintaining modest fiscal deficits; debt restructuring; integration of technology, especially with regard to public and business information; and shifting social expectations among citizens increasingly willing (and able) to act to counter poor governance, whether as individuals, bureaucrats, or politicians.13 Radelet is not alone in highlighting success. The Economist, hardly a bastion of Afro-optimism, reports that between 2001 and 2010 “six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa” and predicts that from 2011 to 2015, seven of the top ten will be African, outnumbering Asian economies in growth. 14 In terms of returns to investments, performance in Africa is similarly robust. The New African notes: “Investment returns in many African countries far exceeds what is achievable elsewhere, even in other emerging markets. Ghana’s stock exchange [which did not exist until 1990] had the best performing index worldwide in 2008 and has been a top performing index in emerging stock markets for several years.”15 Such empirical evidence has led major development actors—especially the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB)—to conclude that a significant turnaround is afoot, to seek to understand its drivers, and to build relevant policy responses. 16 For instance, the World Bank’s former managing director and now Nigeria’s minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, points out that “in the early 1990s, there were twenty-six African countries with inflation greater than 20 percent; by 2007 there was only one: Zimbabwe.”17 Further, she notes that in the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) index, which measures policy and institutional performance on

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a six-point scale, the average performance score for African countries rose from 3.1 in 2001 to 3.25 around 2005. Studies from the AfDB offer similar analyses and conclusions. For example, the AfDB reports a rebound in postcrisis growth in 2010 (up from 3.1 percent in 2009 to 4.9 percent in 2010) and an expected acceleration to 5.8 percent in 2012.18 This comes atop a decade of growth averaging over 5 percent. In addition, the AfDB analysis shows Africa’s exports stood at over US$100 billion in 2008—twice the value in 2003 and three times that of 1998.19 Both the World Bank and the AfDB studies provide three explanations for the turnaround: macroeconomic reforms that have induced investment and growth; the rise of commodity prices, including but not limited to oil; and external assistance and changing trade relations, especially with China’s intensified role in trade and aid on the continent. As we argue below, these explanations are much too general and blunt. They fail to demonstrate how positive results emerged from the stated drivers, which themselves were simply the boldest policy strokes in a messy canvas of multiple strokes. Present analyses are also incomplete because researchers do not investigate the dynamics unleashed by change and how those dynamics impact the fate of reforms. Both pessimists and optimists focus on outcomes, linking these outcomes in a linear relationship with particular reforms and assuming static environments. An understanding of the relationship between evolving economic and political contexts and reform—of how and why reforms proceed—is needed. Reforms generate layered effects and complex nonlinear forces that can both challenge the reform and take advantage of the postreform environment to make new demands and to create new facts on the ground. They can change political calculations, shift barriers and incentives, and invite new actors into the reform arena. For example, when we note that privatization reforms have failed because the discharge of public companies was done nontransparently or at a loss to the state, such a conclusion is incomplete. It says nothing about how the new owners—as private businesspersons or as politicians—might alter the nature of the private sector and market competition, and, by their positioning or actions, trigger downstream consumer or demand-side action on subsequent sector policies. An example of failed privatization reform in the 1990s illustrates this concept. Kenya was among African countries with the highest proportion of uncompetitive and nontransparent privatization transac-

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tions—53 percent. The privatization of the monopoly dairy company in 2000 was among the most nontransparent and corrupt transactions, a peak in slow-burn reforms that started in 1992. For example, the former monopoly company was reacquired by the government three years after privatization. Yet even amidst such reversals new entrepreneurs took advantage of the liberalization to set up small firms. A decade later, with intervening policy change related to aspects other than privatization and driven not by donors but by a set of new owners responding to market competition and self-interest, the industry transformed along its entire value chain. Today, the industry processes 516 million liters of milk a year—a 258 percent increase from 144 million liters in 2002— and contributes 14.5 percent of the agriculture GDP, ahead of tea, historically the key cash crop due to its export earnings.20 This and other examples point to the importance of going beyond the static notion of best fit or political economy of reform in understanding the dynamics unleased by change. Reform confronts political barriers that mutate; political will has varied vectors; and successor interests differ significantly from original intents of the reforms and reformers, including donors. These factors not only determine success, but also define it, at times more or less expansively than originally imagined. Most importantly, reform—especially donor-sponsored reform—enters and becomes part of a continuous contest, a piece in an ongoing multiplex drama of change.

Understanding Change: Microtransitions By providing a more nuanced conceptualization and empirical analysis of reform dynamics in a variety of settings in this book, we offer a better basis for understanding how reforms provoke both intended and unintended consequences. We present analysis that stands in contrast to research that finds explanatory variables at macro levels—that is, largescale events or factors as signifying or driving change. We contend that while macroevents are important—and even structure choices—it is the interplay of evolving factors at more micro levels that determines outcomes. This argues for the need to design reforms that not only fit context at the outset, but also reshape the leverage of reform constituencies in iterative contests. The current literature on governance reforms in Africa, even in its most sophisticated form, ignores the significance of partial reform,

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inconclusive contests, and subverted progress.21 Such analysis focuses on the fate of macrotransitions while ignoring the nature and importance of microtransitions. We define microtransitions as changes in segments or subsystems of social, economic, and political spheres.22 Such microtransitions are not necessarily consistent with the original ambitions of reform, but they nevertheless become part of a new context or calculus of politics. The issue is not one of simple incrementalism, though that is important, but of shifts in multiple aspects of each policy or political contest. It also is not an issue of unintended consequences but of a constantly shifting web of conditions that define the terrain on which new institutions and actors arise, old actors activate or change their claims, and all pursue iterative contests that often imply instability of rules and outcomes. Rarely, if ever, does transformation issue from a single shift, but rather it emerges from cumulative shifts. Even revolutions, examined up close, reveal that the ultimate transformation is the result of piecemeal changes, each sparking off and reacting to that which came before it.23 Focusing on the importance of microtransitions, this book addresses several questions left open by previous analyses. First, though specific reforms may have a limited effect in the short term, how do they change the broader context for reform over the long term? Even if political context undermines reforms, how does partial reform impact the public arena over time? Finally, if only partial reform is possible— for a variety of reasons, from poor design and lack of fit to public opposition and lack of political will—what aspects of partial reform might nevertheless produce game-altering dynamics that are still worth pursuing? In contrast with much of the existing literature, which considers political context or design as having a homogenous, and sometimes a determinant, impact on reforms, we argue that reform, including partial reform, can be understood to have a heterogeneous and significant impact in the policy space. Three Mistakes

Ignoring microtransitions and their cumulative effects often leads scholars to ask the wrong questions in research and reformers to design policies that are sometimes misaligned with the shifting context of politics, economics, and society. Three mistakes are especially notable. First is an overriding assumption of linearity in social progress, with any deviation from a presumed forward trajectory of reform and outcome viewed

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as undesirable. In fact, setbacks can expose inadequacies that new reform agents can galvanize around, expanding both the constituency and energy behind reform and at times shifting the political calculus in favor of reform. Second, to the extent that analysts consider incremental changes, they do so by looking at one type of change or institution independently (e.g., security reform, parliamentary strengthening, economic reform, and gender reforms) and fail to recognize the important—sometimes even determinant—interrelationships between these changes. Third, in both the scholarly and policy communities, discourse and practice remain focused on judgments pegged onto the macroreforms (e.g., democratization, privatization, and anticorruption) that often are measured by large and dramatic, but infrequent, events (e.g., elections, turnovers, electoral crises, economic collapse, security breakdowns or crackdowns, and regime change). As a result, governments and external actors often miss opportunities to accelerate change, or, worse, they may exacerbate the challenges inherent in the process of change by, for example, withdrawing in the wake of “half reforms.” In this book we aim to highlight the less obvious transformations that have taken place in Africa—paying particular attention to the ways in which they have reshaped the context of power and politics—as well as the fortunes of attempted reforms. We examine how reforms that are often rendered in standard narratives as incomplete, stalled, or failed actually reveal significant change. These reforms alter the scope and capacity of the state to manage society and they reshape citizens’ expectations about future prospects. The immediate outcomes of these contests are important in and of themselves, and they attract most of the attention in academic studies and in development discussions (though often resulting in negative assessments of outcomes given that none tend to represent a triumphant turnaround).24 However, we are concerned here with showing the interrelationship between seemingly unrelated changes and how they cumulate to reshape the contours of state power and the emergence of new actors and arenas of contestation. These, we argue, represent the appropriate milestones of progress—in a long arc of change that is often neglected except in retrospectives.25 We maintain that it is both theoretically desirable and practically possible to understand change in Africa in this long view rather than through the typical binaries of success or failure of discrete, short-term reforms, seemingly unrelated to a larger dynamic web of actors, institutions, and interests. Through the study of different social, economic, and political changes from across the continent, we elaborate this argument in two

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ways: first, we demonstrate the changes or contestation under way in a particular area of political economy or public policy, paying attention to the ways in which these arenas influence and are influenced by changes in other spheres; second, individually and collectively, we illustrate the complex transformations that we posit. Rather than being simply additive effects of discrete reforms, the transformation of state and society is a result of the interrelated microtransitions in political, economic, and social spheres. Although path dependency is a widely shared notion in both scholarship and development practice, it is most often assumed with respect to discrete reforms (i.e., a single path) rather than multiple paths scrambled by diverse changes. As Mark Beissinger writes with regard to the colored revolutions, “Causal mechanisms cumulate, contradict one another, aggregate, and link together, unfolding simultaneously on multiple levels.”26 Thus, as we show in this book, economic crises have fostered particular economic reforms, but also political and social transitions in response. Social changes—including increased urbanization and demographic shifts—have created economic and political pressures as well as triggered further changes in the policy landscape (e.g., claims for Islamic education resulting from political liberalization); and political changes have both resulted from and created catalysts for transformation in all three spheres. In this way, societal transformation in Africa over the past two decades has led to the emergence of new social forces; has changed the importance of others; and, consequently, has altered relationships among various social and political actors and fostered new coalitions. In this context, the success and failure of discrete reforms pursued by governments and development partners are largely determined by the nature of the shifting equilibriums they encounter in implementation over time. It is more important to understand these shifts than to simply track success or failure of reforms, which are often explained by notions of political will, or, at best, political economy, which is rendered as unchanging or innately hostile to reform.

Three Transformations: Implications for Governance In response to the divide over whether Africa has experienced profound transformation or incremental reconfiguration since 1990, we focus on the more important question of how change comes about. In this volume we show how sometimes seemingly small social, political, and

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economic changes, accelerated by the effects of globalization, have significantly altered the governance environment in Africa. Three effects are especially important. The first is the rise of new institutions, changes in the significance of older ones, and the demands citizens make in liberated public spaces, which reveal gaps and tensions in state performance. Second is the rapid mutation of the public space within which contestation occurs, especially with regard to the role of the state, its autonomy, and the functions that existing institutions are serving in a transformed environment. Third is a rise in uncertainty as reforms reveal the efficacy of new claims and new coalitions, but also expose the insufficiency of institutions—old and new—and the limits of change, suggesting impermanence to rules and uncertainty in presumed outcomes. This results in a tense status quo that may lead to legitimacy crises, especially when the state is unable to manage competing claims. Managing Claims with New Institutions

Overall, we point to two sets of demands that societal actors make on states in Africa. The first includes demands for substantive benefits that different groups seek from state authorities: for example, better social welfare, expansion of rights for women, and economic prosperity. Some of these demands are new, others are not, and none remain subtle or passive given the information and transparency revolutions that propel demonstration effects and make the state less distant or illegible. These demands strain state authority due to limited capacity and demonstrate its inability to resolve important social contests more or less permanently. The most important of these new claims are those that are rendered as claims for public goods rather than patronage— ones that require institutional responses and legal, bureaucratic, and large-scale financial prerequisites to produce and distribute. Second, and equally important, embedded in these substantive contests are struggles over the nature of the state and over state-society relations, especially around defining realms of authority and autonomy for the state and for society. This implies a social contract gap—one that requires institutional resolution to various citizenship questions such as those brought to the fore over issues of women’s rights as Susanna Wing documents in Chapter 6, land reform as Catherine Boone and Ato Kwamena Onoma detail in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, and

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political reform that responds to both democratic and religious impulses as Michael Bratton and Leonardo Villalón show in Chapters 2 and 7, respectively. Bratton in Chapter 2 and Peter Lewis in Chapter 3 illuminate this two-level challenge especially well. Bratton examines whether democratization in Africa in the past two decades has led to improved governance. Through analysis of aggregate data and, at the microlevel, drawing on a comparative survey of the attitudes of African citizens and a case study of Mali, Bratton reveals a consistency between democratization and positive movement in various dimensions of governance (e.g., rule of law and control of corruption, and accountability through elections). However, he shows that responsiveness of elected officials to citizens is wanting, creating an important representation gap where African citizens expect much more from their elected government than they receive. This is a dynamic that is unlikely to stay static for long and, instead, potentially triggers its own dynamic of change from rising discontent. Bratton also determines that citizens find new democratic regimes less transparent than desired. Lewis examines whether democratic regimes in Africa perform better economically. Using data over twenty-five years, he shows that the quality of a democracy is associated with better economic performance, although citizens do not seem to notice this relationship and poverty reduction has been uneven. Both Bratton and Lewis see new democracies in Africa as having resilient citizen support and view the main challenge as that of accountability. In particular, the continued patrimonialism and the patronage in electoral politics not only produce gaps in state efficiency and performance, but also lead to “tensions between popular expectations and political realities” (Chapter 3). Such representation and accountability gaps limit opportunity for democratic consolidation, but also sow the seeds of resolution through contest. All of the chapters suggest that institutional reform remains a critical need. The pressure for substantive outcomes exceeds the capacity of existing institutions and political economy arrangements to meet the demand. Yet, the agenda for institutional reform—viewed by state elites and external donors as assuredly destabilizing—has been thus far subordinated to an agenda of service provision and economic growth. These have failed to have the anticipated transformative results because of institutional inadequacies. More importantly, these reform agendas, often pressed from outside, have not tapped into existing constituencies

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that are primed for and can support the major reforms in which they are interested. The State, Altered and Challenged

As Wing and Villalón show, the state remains at the center of the policy context, but its autonomy is no longer assured. Indeed its ability to project its dominance or monopoly over societal actors is increasingly limited. For example, Villalón shows in Francophone and Muslim countries of the Sahel the changing nature of state-society relations under democratization (which has provided space to make significant claims that were unthinkable before) and the limited fiscal capacities of the state (which has blunted its domineering instruments) have forced it to compromise and retract the traditional preeminence of state-provided and state-defined formal education. Instead, in a significant retreat, the state has accepted reforms to the formal state system, including adopting characteristics from informal societal institutions, such as the introduction of religious education in state schools. These reforms have given a new significance to Arabic language and religious instruction, justified by the democratic expectation of the state “giving parents the educational system they want” (Chapter 7). Similarly, Wing shows how multiple actors have emerged in the democratic space in Sahelian countries to significantly limit family law reforms that were seen as imminently passable given their congruence with (liberal) democratic politics, the sizable majority or electoral advantage of incumbent chief executives, and the states’ ratification of relevant international conventions. In fact, the democratic opening allowed conservative elements to beat back advances in family law, as politicians made strategic calculations to “fight another day” as they realized local claimants were able and willing to exact a swift electoral punishment if ignored. As Wing notes in Chapter 6, echoing Bratton and Lewis, “Democracy does not necessarily create anticipated support for ‘modern’ democratic institutions and leaders. Not all good things go together.” Yet the state has not lost control. As Lewis and Villalón demonstrate in the studies that follow, state elites adjust to new constraints and to new forces, thereby retaining power even as they retreat. More importantly, this “retreat and extension” dynamic, as Mine Eder calls it, provides state elites latitude for patronage that is both quite extensive and unrestrained by institutions or by formal political relations or

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norms.27 This is quite different from the prevalent understanding in the literature that social actors choose to exit from relations with the state when the state fails to deliver services or that the state necessarily weakens its hold on society when forced to retreat from social welfare provision. Peter Lewis’s analyses of macro-level economic reforms show how resilient the state remains, despite reforms ostensibly aimed at distancing the state from the economy. He finds that the state has continued to play a dominant role: rather than the withering of the state, as once anticipated, patrimonial structures of the state drive the very nature of economic reform. Democracies yield economic benefits over time, but regime change in Africa has not necessarily resulted in greater poverty reduction. As he explains, “Political reform in Africa has produced important changes in actors and institutions, yet resilient structures of politics limit the depth and extent of change” (Chapter 3). Strong presidentialism, dominant parties, and a largely unchanging elite cohort limit achievement of popular expectations. At least two implications for governance reform arise from this analysis. First, reformers should not assume that one-step measures (e.g., privatization or shedding social welfare responsibilities) will resolve underlying inefficiencies or inequities. Instead, as Onoma argues, they should anticipate secondary opportunities for patronage given that reforms to restrain the official role of the state in the economy can result in an extension of its informal and therefore less accountable forms of action (Chapter 5). Second, divesting the state from direct provision of services should not imply that the state should exit markets entirely; its regulatory role remains significant, particularly when there are no competent market- or civil society–based actors. This is important in terms of achieving efficiency and equity, especially when access to state benefits is easily politicized via patronage networks or identity politics. Uncertainty Amidst Reforms

The final lessons highlighted in this book focus on how heightened uncertainty accompanying transformations impacts governance reforms. Bratton documents this uncertainty most clearly. He shows how African citizens’ increased uncertainty over the rules of the game, combined with rising expectations, led them to become increasingly frustrated with government performance. Citizens may continue to

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accept limited economic progress, as both Bratton and Lewis document, but how long they will continue to be optimistic as their expectations are persistently unmet in nascent democracies remains a question. Both Onoma and Boone show the outcome of such heightened uncertainty in the long term. In the past two decades, land reform processes have become notable in attempts by governments, often with donor assistance, to reduce inequity, bring stability and predictability to tenure systems, and reinvigorate agriculture. What reformers imagine as a simple goal of getting land institutions “right” reveals itself to be, according to Boone in Chapter 4, “a complex bundle of political and constitutional issues that complicate efforts to promote the individualization and formalization of land rights” igniting violent conflict (Kenya) and unintended market behaviors (Ghana). Onoma points to three lessons: first, the difficulty of changing actors’ preferences through project-based institutional reform; second, the complex bases of and differences in these preferences, which are often overlooked because similar actors (in this case, chiefs in the same country) are believed to have identical preferences; and third, the ways in which the donor community and reformers privilege replicating and extending the Weberian state runs counter to divergent institutions that exist to govern land rights. Onoma’s analysis shows both the state and donors assume uniformity. Central elites, dependent on local chiefs and their customs to manage land relations, do not understand the different modes of relations their intermediaries engage in to achieve stability. Donors suffer the same fate due to misapplied analysis on what institutions and hybrids exist and therefore what and how reform can be sustained that is capable of providing for stable, predictable land tenure revisions. There are important changes in societal forces and in the demands citizens make, but we caution against assuming that these transformations necessarily induce preferred outcomes. For example, evidence from broader-level views and country cases from other regions show that the impact of economic reform on long-established class interests should not be overstated. In the case of the Middle East, Ibrahim Saif and Farah Chouhair conclude that even where new business classes have emerged and the public sector has contracted, as in Egypt and Jordan, established elites manage to maintain the upper hand by relying on their neopatrimonial networks.28 The point is not that the institutional reforms are inconsequential, but rather that to understand the impact of such reforms and to devise appropriate strategies for development,

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scholars and policymakers have to pay close attention to evaluating the interests and power of critical actors, both old and new, as they (re)emerge from reform. Collectively, the wide range of countries and themes we explore in this book underscore the complexity of the story of change in subSaharan Africa. We challenge the easy answers offered by prevailing perspectives and take readers beyond the now trite notions of continuity and change, and the even more outdated perspectives of success and failure, to reveal how multiple changes in society, economies, and politics affect specific policy realms that are often examined and acted on as discrete arenas. We demonstrate continuous struggles between interests and actors that do not fit neatly into favored categories of reformers and conservatives, winners and losers, or insiders and outsiders. Most importantly, we show how the process of reform—often viewed by the development community as a set of technocratic choices informed by ever increasing knowledge—is in fact a set of iterative contests induced by constantly shifting interests, actors, and resources. Given the gap between institutional reforms and actual practice, this book points to the need for a new direction in development policy. It is time for policies that not only recognize, but explicitly exploit, the microtransitions that form the basis for, and engine of, development. Notes 1. Freedom House, Map of Freedom: Sub-Saharan Africa, 2011 (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2011), http://www.cabinda.net/Freedom _House_2011.pdf, accessed March 11, 2012; Freedom House, Freedom in SubSaharan Africa, 2009 (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2009), www.freedom house.org/sites/default/files/Freedom%20in%20Sub%20Saharan%20Africa.pdf, accessed March 11, 2011. 2. Raymond Muhula and Stephen N. Ndegwa, “Tempered Hope: African Development in the Last Decade,” Africa, 4th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 3. For example, Elsa V. Artadi and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, “The Economic Tragedy of the XXth Century: Growth in Africa,” NBER Working Paper No. 9865, July 2003 (National Bureau for Economic Research, Cambridge, MA); Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Shimelse Ali and Uri Dadush, “Is the African Renaissance for Real?” International Economic Bulletin, September 30, 2010, http://carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/30 /is-african-renaissance-for-real/4ew, accessed March 17, 2012.

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4. Steve Radelet, Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2010); Shantayanan Devarajan and Louis A. Kasekende, “Africa and the Global Economic Crisis: Impacts, Policy Responses, and Political Economy” African Development Review 23, 421 (2011); United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Governing Development in Africa—The Role of the State in Economic Transformation (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: UNECA, 2011). See also, G. Pascal Zachary, “Africa’s Amazing Rise and What It Can Teach the World,” The Atlantic, February 25, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive /2012/02/africas-amazing-rise-and-what-it-can-teach-the-world/253587/, accessed March 17, 2012. 5. For instance, Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Paul Collier, “The Political Economy of State Failure,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25, 2 (2009): 219–240; Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower (London: HarperCollins, 2010); Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); “George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos,” TED, 2007, www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_on_cheetahs_vs _hippos.html, accessed March 11, 2012; Brian Levy and Sahr John Kpundeh, eds., Building State Capacity in Africa: New Approaches, Emerging Lessons (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004). 6. For a review of these themes and country cases, see, for example, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). See also H. Kwasi Prempeh, “Africa’s Constitutionalism Revival: False Start or New Dawn?” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5, 3 (2007): 469–506; Rotimi T. Suberu, “Nigeria’s Muddled Elections,” Journal of Democracy 18, 4 (October 2007): 95–110. 7. For example, Levy and Kpundeh, Building State Capacity; or more recently, the Centre for the Future State, An Upside-Down View of Governance (Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2010). 8. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, “Researching the Practical Norms of Real Governance in Africa,” Africa Power and Politics Discussion Paper No. 5 (London: Overseas Development Institute, December 2008), www.institutions -africa.org/. 9. M. Stevens and S. Teggemann, “Comparative Experience with Public Service Reform in Ghana,Tanzania, and Zambia,” in Building State Capacity in Africa: New Approaches, Emerging Lessons, ed. Brian Levy and Sahr Kpundeh (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), pp. 43–86; World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011).

The Challenges of Governance

17

10. Merilee S. Grindle, “Good Enough Governance Revisited,” Development Policy Review 25, 5 (2007): 533–574; World Bank, World Development Report 2011. 11. Joel Barkan, ed., Legislative Power in Emerging African Democracies (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2009); John Hatchard, Muna Ndulo, and Peter Slinn, Comparative Constitutionalism and Good Governance in the Commonwealth: An Eastern and Southern African Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Daniel N. Posner and Daniel J. Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 18, 3 (2007): 126–140. 12. Radelet, Emerging Africa. 13. Radelet’s sociological statement on the role of the “Cheetah generation”—a new generation of Africans impatient with old style politics and public management—is brave for an economist to make, but he is not alone. George Ayittey, not known for having a soft spot for African public management, echoes the same in his description of the “Hippopotamus” and the “Cheetah” generations—the former a broody, uninnovative bunch given to handouts and historical blame-games and the latter a fast-footed, worldly, technologically savvy, “going places” pack. Both see Africa’s turnaround and future prosperity as dependent on the Cheetahs’ attitudes and actions. See Radelet, Emerging Africa; and “George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos.” 14. “The Lion Kings? A More Hopeful Continent,” The Economist, January 6, 2011, pp. 72–73. 15. Sigi Osagie, “A Rising Africa!” New African, November 20, 2011, pp. 56–57. See also World Bank, Africa’s Future and the World Bank’s Support to It (Washington, DC: World Bank, March 2011). 16. Among the many reports, studies, and blogs that give ample evidence of turnaround and discussions of related empirical analysis is the blog hosted by the chief economist of the World Bank’s Africa Region, Shanta Deverajan, Africa Can . . . End Poverty. See http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/, in particular, Devarajan’s “African Successes,” accessed March 11, 2012; and Waly Wane and Jacques Morisset’s “Yes, Africa Can End Poverty . . . but Will We Know When It Happens?” accessed November 3, 2011. 17. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, “Africa’s Growth and Resilience in a Volatile World,” Journal of International Affairs 62, 2 (2009): 176. 18. African Development Bank, Africa Economic Outlook 2011 (Tunis: ADB, 2011), p. 2. 19. Ibid., p. 3. 20. Kenya Dairy Board, www.kdb.co.ke, accessed March 11, 2012. 21. Centre for the Future State, An Upside-Down View; Brian Levy and Francis Fukuyama, “Development Strategies: Integrating Governance and Growth,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (Washington, DC: World

18

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Bank, January 2010); Hazel Gray and Mushtaq Khan,“Good Governance and Growth in Africa: What Can We Learn from Tanzania?” in The Political Economy of Africa, ed. Vishnu Padayachee (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 339–356. 22. For instance, an expansion in the number of civic associations may not itself be a microtransition. However, changes in the operation or modus operandi of associations and their relations with other spheres would constitute microtransitions that cumulatively have effects on a larger scale. 23. See, for instance, Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 24. For example, while the Kenyan election of 2007 and the violence following it were easily recognized as significant setbacks, according to Michael Chege and Maina Kiai, to view them as simply that would be a mistake. The postelection “political settlement” has resulted in a further dynamic of change—elite realignments, a revamped constitutional review process, and state institutions forced to transform (e.g., electoral watchdog and security organs, executive-legislature relations) making possible (imminent now) the passage of a new constitution—the cumulative macrotransition. Such underlying changes forced by evident setbacks underlie what Larry Diamond and Richard Joseph identify as reform in “suspension” at the “frontier” of “the interplay of risk, reward and uncertainty of political and economic life.” See Michael Chege, “Kenya: Back From the Brink?” Journal of Democracy 19, 4 (2008): 125–139; Maina Kiai, “The Crisis in Kenya,” Journal of Democracy 19, 3 (2008): 162–168; Larry Diamond, “The Rule of Law Versus the Big Man,” Journal of Democracy 19, 2 (2008): 138–149; Richard Joseph, “Challenges of a “Frontier” Region,” Journal of Democracy 19, 2 (2008): 94–108. 25. For example, Douglas North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 26. Mark Beissinger, “Mechanisms of Maidan: The Structure of Contingency in the Making of the Orange Revolution,” Mobilization 16, 1 (2011): 25–43. 27. Mine Eder, “Retreating State? Political Economy of Welfare Regime Change in Turkey,” Middle East Law and Governance 2, 2 (2010): 152–184. Eder also shows the state has maintained the authority to legitimize and sanction emerging social welfare institutions, thereby extending its power. 28. Ibrahim Saif and Farah Choucair, “Status Quo Camouflaged: Economic and Social Transformation of Egypt and Jordan,” Middle East Law and Governance 2, 2 (2010): 124–151.

2 The Democracy-Governance Connection Michael Bratton

Over the past two decades, Africa’s political environment has

opened up. To varying degrees in different countries, military and de jure one-party regimes have made way for multiparty competition. To be sure, the quality of democracy in Africa is often strained. In many countries, fragile multiparty regimes coexist with persistent social conflict, imperfect elections, weak political institutions, and presidents who seek to govern outside the rule of law. But there is no gainsaying the fact that, over the period from 1988 to 2011, sub-Saharan Africa became a more democratic region. According to Freedom House, the number of countries designated Not Free dropped by half (from thirty-two to sixteen), alongside an almost doubling of those that moved from Not Free to Partly Free (from twelve to twenty). Most importantly, the number of countries that became Free increased from two to nine.1 From a very low starting point, the rate of political liberalization in the post–Cold War period was actually greater in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other world region apart from the former Soviet bloc.2 But does democratization lead to improved governance? Do freely elected regimes automatically perform better at public management than regimes installed by authoritarian means? Even if multiparty rule offers certain advantages, do these apply equally to all dimensions of governance? And what is the causal direction of any democracygovernance connection? After all, if democratization occurs more commonly in countries that are already relatively well governed, then it 19

20

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

would be a mistake to attribute any improvements in governance to political liberalization and free elections. In this chapter, I seek preliminary answers to these questions with reference to a cross-section of sub-Saharan African countries in 2005. I find that the presumed linkage between democracy and governance is not always as anticipated. My study examines the democracygovernance connection both at the macro level, using aggregate data, and at micro level, drawing on a comparative survey of the attitudes of African citizens. I also employ intertemporal analysis in a bid to advance the debate on causality. I compare perceived governance performance before and after electoral alternations, both across countries and in one particular country (Mali).

A Democracy-Governance Connection? A valid inquiry into linkages between democracy and governance requires strict independence of key concepts. It is necessary to set aside at the outset the conflated, hybrid notion of democratic governance, which merges concepts by definition. A more fruitful approach begins by breaking apart the two components and describing each separately. For the purposes of this chapter, I define democracy in minimal, procedural terms as a political regime installed by a free and fair multiparty election in which all contenders accept the results.3 I define governance broadly as the act or process of imparting authoritative direction and coordination to organizations in an environment.4 But I apply the concept narrowly to central governments, excluding global, corporate, civic, and local forms of governance. 5 Thus, when the democracy-governance connection is boiled down to operational essentials, we are left with the following research question: Do free elections foster capable governments? It seems sensible to suppose that the advent of a freely elected political regime would have beneficial consequences for governmental performance. One possible reason is that elections confer political legitimacy: having voted for rulers, citizens are more willing to comply with their directives, thus reducing the costs of enforcing public policies, especially unpopular ones. Secondly, democratic regimes are installed by means of a mechanism of political equality: one person, one vote. Especially where poverty is widespread, political democratization implies an enhanced prospect of social and economic redistribution, including making public services more accessible, efficient, and

The Democracy-Governance Connection

21

fair. A final and more explicit route from democracy to good governance concerns political responsiveness. Because political leaders— from local government councilors all the way up to the national president—are subject to reelection after a fixed term of office, they face incentives to attend to the expressed needs of constituents in the intervals between elections. Of course, democratization may undermine good governance; for example, by encouraging populist policy responses that exceed the limits of prudent governance. 6 A transition to democracy may also allow an increase in corruption; since the prospect of open elections raises political insecurity for incumbent elites, they may choose to discount the future by accelerating the rate at which they grab rents.7 Or because they diffuse power and multiply the number of potential veto points, democratic procedures may make decisionmaking less transparent and more confusing to ordinary citizens.8 In theorizing mechanisms through which democratic elections might plausibly affect governance, it becomes apparent that governance has multiple aspects. Analysts have long recognized the multidimensionality of the concept. The World Bank Institute, for example, proposes six dimensions ranging from voice and accountability to control of corruption.9 I find this classification useful and employ it in an initial analysis below. But for theoretical and methodological reasons, I prefer to decompose governance along different lines in order to identify additional governance dimensions and to enable operational research using indicators available in Afrobarometer surveys. My alternate scheme proposes three main types of governance: administrative, economic, and political. Each can be broken down in three ways, making a total of nine dimensions in all. The administrative dimensions of good governance concern: ● ●

●

Legality: whether the government observes a rule of law Transparency: whether government procedures are open for all to see Honesty: whether government officials are free of corruption

The economic dimensions of good governance cover: ●

●

Effectiveness: whether government is able to attain its stated policy goals Efficiency: whether public goods are delivered on a cost-effective basis

22

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

●

Equity: whether citizens enjoy equality of access to available public goods

Finally, the political dimensions of governance consist of: ●

●

●

Responsiveness: whether elected officials act according to popular priorities Accountability: whether unresponsive public officials can be disciplined Legitimacy: whether citizens willingly obey government commands

A fine-grained framework of this sort allows us to unpack the encompassing notion of governance as a prelude to exploring the possibility that democratization has differential effects. For example, I hypothesize that free elections will boost the political legitimacy of an incumbent government, especially if elections precipitate an alternation of ruling parties. On the other hand, I expect that elections and alternations offer no guarantees that political representatives will readily respond to popular preferences in the periods between elections. Having presented evidence in support of these hypotheses, I conclude this chapter by arguing that new African democracies manifest a worrisome “representation gap” between the electorate and representative institutions.

Macroconnections If the recent wave of free elections in sub-Saharan Africa has fostered gains in the quality of public management, then a general democracygovernance connection should be evident across countries. The availability of aggregate indicators of democracy (e.g., from Freedom House) and governance (e.g., from the World Bank Institute) facilitate such an analysis. But words of caution are due about the limitations of common data sources.10 Take the measurement of democracy. The Freedom in the World survey published annually over the past thirty years by Freedom House evaluates the political rights and civil liberties available to citizens, now across 193 states. It measures the range of voter choices and the enjoyment (or not) of supportive constitutional guarantees. As such, the survey tends to capture the openness of political regimes as

The Democracy-Governance Connection

23

experienced within society—that is, popular freedoms—rather than the democratic qualities of political institutions per se. Hence, freedom indicators are best supplemented and validated by institutional indicators. The Polity IV Project, for example, distinguishes democratic and autocratic forms of authority (on a scale of +10 to –10) with reference to institutional characteristics like the mode of executive recruitment, the extent of constraints on executive authority, and the degree of political competition.11 Due to complex dimensionality of the concept of governance, its measurement is not straightforward. The World Governance Indicators currently set the methodological standard by providing systematic estimates of relative public sector performance for 212 countries and territories from 1996 onward. Reflecting inherent imprecision, the World Bank Institute provides explicit margins of error for each country estimate. For the purposes of this study, I find utility in only five of the six dimensions of governance in the World Governance Indicators: political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The sixth dimension, voice and accountability, is based partly on Freedom House scores for civil liberties and political rights (among ten other representative sources). Thus, to reduce possible circularity in estimates of the effects of democratization on good governance, I dropped the voice and accountability dimension of governance. Table 2.1 is a summary of the macro-level connections between metrics of democracy—as measured by Freedom House and Polity IV—and the World Governance Indicators. All aggregate data are drawn from the universe of sovereign states in sub-Saharan Africa (N = 48). Cell entries are bivariate correlation coefficients.12 The first result worth noting is that, regardless of the method of measurement, democracy has substantively strong and statistically significant links to governance. Democracy is positively associated with every governance dimension (as these are conceived by the World Bank Institute) and with a mean World Governance Indicators score calculated as an average of five dimensions (excluding voice and accountability). Without imputing directionality to the relationship at this stage, a simple macroanalysis suggests an apparent structural affinity within African countries between democracy and governance: the more democratic the regime, the better its record at governance. Second, the strength of this democracy-governance connection depends on the method of measurement. When democracy is measured

24

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Table 2.1 Democracy and Governance: Macroconnections, 2005 World Governance Indicators Political stability Government effectiveness Regulatory quality Rule of law Control of corruption Mean World Governance Indicators score, 2005

Indicators of Democracy Freedom House Polity IV .706*** .730*** .684*** .751*** .693***

.455*** .525*** .488*** .526*** .488***

.774***

.545***

Sources: Freedom House, “Freedom in the World Country Ratings, 1972–2011,” 2008 (N = 48); Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2007, 2008 (N = 41); World Bank Institute (Kaufman et al. “Governance Matters VII,” 2008). Notes: Cell entries are bivariate correlation coefficients. *** signifies p = < .001.

using Freedom House scores, correlations are systematically stronger than when democracy is measured using Polity IV indicators. Indeed, the Freedom House World Governance Indicators coefficients are so large (r = .774 for a mean index, rising to r = .830 when the dimension of voice and accountability is included in the index) as to call into question the independence of indicators. Could it be that all World Bank Institute indicators overlap with Freedom House scores? Stated differently, are the World Bank Institute indicators a methodological analog of the hybrid concept of democratic governance? One possibility is that the compilers of the World Bank Institute source materials inadvertently incorporate knowledge about a country’s status of freedom into their judgments about the quality of its governance. The Polity IV indicators were developed for a separate purpose and are not employed as a World Governance Indicators source. Perhaps for this reason, the Polity IV and World Governance Indicators coefficients— although positive, strong, and significant (mean r = .545)—are more plausible because they provide a greater degree of assurance that democracy and governance are conceived and measured separately. Third, and notwithstanding the method of measurement, there is rough equivalence in the relative importance of democracy to different dimensions of governance. For both Freedom House and Polity IV, democracy is more closely associated with rule of law and government effectiveness than with regulatory quality and control of corruption. I

The Democracy-Governance Connection

25

take this as prima facie evidence that, if democratization has formative effects on the subsequent quality of governance (a proposition yet to be confirmed), then it does so more through some governance channels than others. I would expect, for example, that democracy—a form of constitutional rule requiring regular elections and term limits on officeholders—helps to reinforce a rule of law. But precisely because free elections may compel politicians to seek an expanded pool of patronage resources, democratization is less strongly associated with policies to deregulate economic markets or to control corruption. A key purpose of the rest of this chapter is to further explore such differential effects.

Microconnections So far, macro-level analysis suggests a crude association between democracy and governance, with the strength of the connection dependent on the dimension of governance. In this section I seek to refute, corroborate, or refine these results at the micro level using survey data on the popular perceptions of ordinary Africans. Do Africans themselves think they are obtaining good governance? By way of an answer, I compare public opinions across democratic and nondemocratic regimes. I draw data from 25,397 face-to-face interviews conducted in 2005 during Round 3 of the Afrobarometer. I pool data from 18 country surveys, all of which used a standard survey instrument.13 Each country is represented by a national probability sample in which every adult citizen had an equal and known chance of inclusion. Sample sizes range from 1,161 to 2,400 respondents per country, although, in the descriptive statistics that I report here, the data are weighted to represent each country equally (n = 1200). The margin of sampling error is never more than 3 percent at a 95 percent level of confidence.14 Afrobarometer surveys are concentrated in countries that have undergone at least some degree of political and economic liberalization in the past decade. As such, the results represent the continent’s most open societies and cannot be taken as representative of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole.15 To measure the extent of democracy, the Afrobarometer asks, “In your opinion, how much of a democracy is (this country) today?” The response options are on a 4-point scale: 1 = not a democracy, 2 = a democracy with major problems, 3 = a democracy with minor problems,

26

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

and 4 = a full democracy. For the purposes of this analysis, those whose answers are coded 3 or 4 are held to live in a democracy; those whose answers are coded 1 or 2 are said to reside in a nondemocracy. The distinction between democracies and nondemocracies, which appear as column headings in Table 2.2, is employed as a device to distinguish among popular attitudes toward governance. To confirm the face validity of Afrobarometer’s democracy indicator, I note that in 2005 fully 71 percent of Ghanaians thought that their country (a model of clean elections) was a democracy compared to just 14 percent of Zimbabweans (whose leader is increasingly dictatorial). Moreover, in an external validity test for the same year, Afrobarometer assessments of the extent of democracy (aggregated to country level) correlate extremely highly with the Freedom House index (r = .802), which suggests that citizens and experts come to remarkably similar judgments about each country’s democratic attainments. And to address the conceptual validity of a minimal, electoral definition of democracy, it is reassuring to discover that public opinion about the quality of the last election (how free and fair was it?) is the best single predictor of whether Africans think that they live in a democracy.16 The nine dimensions of governance, as defined earlier in this chapter, appear as row headings in Table 2.2. For example, to assess if the government operates within a framework of legality, the survey asks whether citizens think “the president usually observes (or often ignores) the constitution.” A strong and significant difference in public opinion is detectable between regime types: in democracies, almost two-thirds of citizens (65 percent) perceive respect for a constitutional rule of law in the president’s office as compared to less than one-half in nondemocracies (46 percent). To evaluate whether the civil service is honest, the survey asks how many public officers are perceived as corrupt. Whereas in democracies just over one-quarter of citizens (28 percent) perceive corruption among most or all government officials, more than one-half (51 percent) do so in nondemocracies. In this initial test, therefore, I find no evidence that democratization is associated with higher levels of perceived corruption. Indeed, on this dimension of governance, the positive democracy connection is especially strong. It is also worth noting that, in democracies, most Africans interviewed (69 percent) consider that their government is effective at solving the most important problems in society. When quizzed in open-

Table 2.2 Popular Perceptions of Democracy and Governance in Eighteen African Countries: Microconnections, 2005 Dimension of Governance, Indicator

Democracya

Administrative Legality The president usually observes the constitution. The president often ignores the constitution. Transparency Government procedures are easy to understand. Government procedures are too complicated. Honesty No or few government officials are corrupt. Most or all government officials are corrupt. Economic Effectiveness Government can solve most important problems. Government cannot solve important problems. Efficiency Public services are easily accessible. Public services are difficult to obtain. Equity Government usually treats people equally. Government often treats people unequally. Political Responsiveness Elected representatives usually try to listen. Elected representatives often fail to listen. Accountability Elections allow people to remove poor leaders. Elections do not ensure the will of the people. Legitimacy The government must always be obeyed. If you did not vote for a government, you need not obey it.

Nondemocracyb

65 16

46 36

21 64

17 71

72 28

49 51

69 31

45 55

64 36

51 49

56 44

37 63

30 70

18 82

51 28

31 48

90 9

84 13

r (democracy)c

r (free elections)c

.268***

.216***

.102***

.069***

.280***

.286***

.265***

.253***

.160***

.152***

.207***

.173***

.172***

.139***

.262***

.240***

.088***

.108***

27

Notes: Cell entries are percentages of adults surveyed. Calculated using binary or 3-point scales. Totals may not add to 100 where “don’t knows” are not reported. *** p = < .001. a. Respondents regard the political regime as a full democracy or a democracy with minor problems. b. Respondents regard the political regime as having major problems or not a democracy at all. c. Pearson product moment correlation coefficient (range 0–1), calculated using full variable ranges (i.e., 4- and 5-point scales).

28

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

ended fashion about the nature of these problems, respondents most often mention unemployment, food security, and the paucity of health care. One is struck that affirmative views of administrative capability are at odds with academic portrayals of African governance as an arena of state failure.17 To be sure, the survey data reveal variations across regimes—only 45 percent of citizens in nondemocracies see the state as effective—but even this result hardly amounts to the journalistic trope of African state collapse. For serious analysis, we require a nuanced portrayal of state failure as a variable quality whose manifestations are hardly universal across the continent. Admittedly, democracy’s association is weaker on other dimensions of governance. According to the 2005 Afrobarometer data, the public sees more fragile linkages to government efficiency, procedural transparency, and regime legitimacy. To be sure, all these relationships are positive and statistically significant, suggesting an underlying democracy advantage, but they are feebler than democracy’s association with a rule of law and official probity. For example, in both democracies and nondemocracies, majorities within the national adult population think that public services are easily accessible (64 percent and 51 percent) and that the government should always be obeyed, despite whether an individual voted for it (90 percent and 84 percent). As such—and, like effectiveness, perhaps surprisingly—perceptions of government efficiency and regime legitimacy are widespread across a range of regime types in Africa, including electoral autocracies. Citizens in democratic regimes also see a slight advantage with regard to the transparency of governmental operations, thus undermining the hypothesis about the complicating effects of veto points. Perhaps freedom of the press helps to offset a shortage of information. But it is worth noting that majorities everywhere, regardless of the type of political regime in which Africans live, regard government procedures as too complex to fully understand (64 percent and 71 percent). Reportedly, the process of political decisionmaking is relatively more transparent in Africa’s emergent democratic regimes but, even there, this dimension of governance remains opaque to almost twothirds of citizens. Because these results are based on pooled data, it is necessary to ask whether the democracy-governance connection holds true for all eighteen countries that I studied. There is strong evidence that the general model fits well. When run separately for each country, the same variables almost always (96 percent of the time) generate coefficients with the same signs as in Table 2.2. 18 To be sure, the democracy-

The Democracy-Governance Connection

29

governance connection fits more tightly in some countries than others. In Senegal, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, citizens perceive an especially strong linkage between the extent of democracy and legal, effective, and accountable governance. In Senegal, which has a long history of multiple parties and a relatively strong legal tradition, the connection is at the high end of both scales. In Zimbabwe, which by 2005 faced a twin crisis of illegitimate government and state failure, both democracy and governance are seen to be well below average. There are few country exceptions. Only in Tanzania do citizens perceive a link between democratization and unequal treatment, and only in Uganda do they worry that free elections are tied to a lack of responsiveness among public officials, an issue that I explore further below.19 I end this stage of analysis by considering the centrality of free elections to the associations with governance just described. The last column of Table 2.2 depicts coefficients when the nine governance dimensions are correlated with popular African perceptions of the freeness and fairness of the last national election in their country. Without exception, the perceived quality of elections generates predictions about governance with the same sign and statistical significance as a broader democracy standard. Since democracy is more than mere elections, the observed relationships may not always be quite as strong. But importantly, citizens seem to see a direct line of connection between free and fair elections and two leading elements of governance: control of corruption and legitimacy of government. Stated differently, high-quality elections seem to give citizens confidence that abuse of public office will be reined in and that official policy directives ought to be obeyed.

The Arrow of Causality So far, I have established a democracy-governance connection in subSaharan Africa at both macro and micro levels. But correlation is not causation. To establish the direction of any arrow of attribution, it is necessary to ask, Is democracy in Africa built on the foundation of strong states that have already established a semblance of capable governance? Or, in the key question for this chapter, Does the installation of multiparty electoral democracies in Africa create conditions for improvements in public governance? The preponderance of relevant theory in political science suggests that state building, including the governance function of effective poli-

30

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

cy implementation, is a prerequisite of democratization. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan stake out a definitive position: “No modern polity can become democratically consolidated unless it is first a state.” 20 Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin add that new democracies tend to be unstable because they democratize “backwards,” that is, by introducing mass elections without prior benefit of modern state institutions, including a rule of law and a working bureaucracy.21 With reference to Yugoslavia among other places, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder contend that, lacking foundational political order, new democracies are more susceptible to conflict than stable autocracies, a proposition pertinent to sub-Saharan Africa’s conflict-prone settings.22 I am persuaded by the powerful argument that democracy can hardly be established in the absence of political order. Simply stated, the existential dilemma for African citizens is this: Why should they turn out to vote in a founding election if, in so doing, they risk being intimidated, assaulted, or killed? The establishment of political order requires a capable state that can, without abuse, assert authority throughout a territory. One irreducible requirement of such authority is that citizens voluntarily comply with state commands, thus granting legitimacy to rulers. But what better way has been found to establish political legitimacy in the modern world than through the installation of rulers in open and competitive elections? In other words, democratization may itself be a prerequisite for well-governed and consolidated states. The question of which comes first—democracy or governance— has found expression in the so-called sequencing debate among democracy scholars and practitioners. Thomas Carothers argues that, because “persuading people to defer their ambition to vote in a free election is most often not an option,”23 democracy promoters should not “put . . . off for decades or indefinitely the core element of democratization—fair and open processes of political competition and choice.”24 Rather than “sequentialism” (rule of law first, elections second), Carothers favors what he calls “gradualism,” which involves slowly creating conditions for free and fair elections wherever possible. Indeed, “prescribing more rule of law . . . as the basis for eventual democratization gets it backwards: more democratization is vital to strengthening the rule of law.”25 Those democratic theorists who see the rule of law as a pillar of democracy support this view.26 Testing the sequencing debate against African materials, Michael Bratton and Eric Chang find some support for both sides. On one hand, they report that democratic regimes (measured as Freedom House’s Free countries) have only arisen in stronger African states

The Democracy-Governance Connection

31

(i.e., with an above average World Governance Indicators mean score). In other words, the continent’s eleven current democracies—from Benin to South Africa—are all erected on a foundation of states that enjoy relatively solid capacity to create political order, to govern through legal means, and to control corruption. On the other hand, these researchers employ a simultaneous equations model to show that the relationship between state building and democratization is thoroughly recursive. Not only do strong states breed democratic regimes but, in turn, democratic regimes foster the law enforcement capacity and political legitimacy necessary for good governance. By demonstrating statistically that the establishment of a rule of law is an implicit product of democratization, Bratton and Chang make a case that democratization can come first.27

Electoral Alternation In this chapter, I build on this groundwork by devising an additional test of causality in the democracy-governance relationship. On the common assumption that prior events are candidate causes for subsequent outcomes, this with-and-without test rests on the concept of electoral alternation. An electoral alternation is the peaceful transfer of power from one ruling party to another by means of a free and fair election. Sometimes called a turnover of governments, alternation is a relatively infrequent outcome in African elections, having occurred some 63 times across 344 elections between 1990 and 2011.28 I start by observing that electoral alternation boosts mass commitments to democracy, both on the demand side and (especially) in terms of popular estimates of the supply of democracy. 29 By demonstrating that incumbency is not forever, alternation deepens democracy by giving both electoral winners and (especially) electoral losers an incentive to support the rules of the democratic game.30 It seems reasonable to wonder whether, as a core attribute of democratization, a turnover of political elites also contributes to improved governance. I therefore propose that an electoral alternation will be followed in time by positive upward increments in indicators of good governance. Table 2.3 presents largely supportive evidence of this sequence. In column headings, I distinguish African countries that underwent an electoral alternation at any time after the country’s founding multiparty election but before the Afrobarometer measured perceptions of gov-

32

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

ernance in 2005.31 An alternation is scored as 1, its absence as 0. On eight of the nine governance dimensions, significant differences in popular perceptions of performance are evident for citizens in countries that experienced alternations. In six of these nine cases, differences run in the expected direction. For example, citizens who experienced a democratic turnover were significantly more likely to regard the government as effective at problem solving. And, by the same token, experience with alternation made citizens less likely to regard all or most public officials as corrupt. But there are anomalies. The coefficients for three dimensions of governance have unexpected signs. One is not statistically significant: the occurrence of an electoral alternation seemingly makes no difference to popular perceptions of equity in treatment by government. But two dimensions of governance—transparency and responsiveness—

Table 2.3 Popular Perceptions of Electoral Alternation and Governance in Eighteen African Countries, 2005 Dimension of Governance Administrative Legality Transparency Honesty Economic Effectiveness Efficiency Equity

Indicator

Country Has Had an Electoral Alternationa Signb

The president usually observes constitution. Government procedures are easy to understand. Most or all government officials are corrupt. Government can solve most important problems. Public services are easily accessible. Government treats people equally now (vs. before).

Political Responsiveness Elected representatives listen. Accountability Elections are efficacious. Legitimacy The government must always be obeyed.

.056***

E

–.074*** –.068***

U E

.109*** .040***

E E

–.011ns

U

–.065*** .071*** .123***

U E E

Notes: Cell entries are Pearson product moment correlation coefficients (R, range 0–1), calculated using full variable ranges (i.e., 4- and 5-point scales). *** p = < .001; ns = not statistically significant. a. Scored 1 for electoral alternation if any presidential election after 1989 leads to a turnover of ruling parties; 0 if not. Legislative elections are used in parliamentary systems. b. E = expected sign; U = unexpected sign.

The Democracy-Governance Connection

33

stand in significant negative relationships to democratization. Even after democracy begins to take root through peaceful electoral alternation, citizens are apparently less likely to find government procedures easy to understand or to consider that elected representatives listen to them. Perhaps citizens remain uncertain about the exact roles that elected representatives are supposed to play. Or they soon discover that novice occupants of these offices are even less responsive than the leaders they replace. These inverted democracy-governance relationships, although hardly strong, nonetheless raise red flags about possible areas of governance in which the affinity with democratization begins to break down.

The Case of Mali In the previous section, I unearthed trace evidence that an electoral alternation—an event that signals the deepening of democracy—has a positive causal impact on the perceived quality of governance. While this result takes the passage of time into account, it is based on a cross-sectional research design, which compares average citizen attitudes to governance in groups of countries with and without alternation. We still do not know whether these average results apply equally to all African countries or whether specific changes in governance are discernible in particular countries over time. One solution is to devise a before-and-after test of governance conditions in a given country, with a democratic alternation as the pivotal event. But which country? Of the eight countries in the Afrobarometer that have undergone alternation, there is only one in which survey data are available on a full array of governance indicators both before and after such a landmark event. That country is Mali. Mali experienced electoral alternation in May 2002, when Amadou Toumani Touré (known colloquially as A.T.T.)—a former military leader who had earlier helped pave the way for Mali’s transitional multiparty elections—won presidential elections without, at the time, a party label or organization. Applicable data for Mali are found in Afrobarometer Round 1 of January 2001 (the before survey) and Round 2 of November 2002 (the after survey). Mali is an interesting case in its own right. The country has embarked on an experiment in decentralized democracy against a legacy of centralized governance inherited from ancient kingdoms;

34

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

French colonial administration; and, after independence in 1960, military and one-party regimes. By the end of the 1980s, students and public employees signaled their displeasure with postcolonial leaders who had violently repressed opposition, confiscated food surpluses from the countryside, and failed to pay public salaries and student stipends. With the help of the military these popular forces ousted President Moussa Traoré and convened competitive elections that, in May 1992, voted Alpha Omar Konaré into the national presidency with a mandate for political and economic change.32 Elected governments have since accumulated a mixed record. The major political achievement was a negotiated peace agreement with guerrilla forces of the seminomadic Touareg peoples of Mali’s northern zone, which culminated in the symbolic burning of weapons of war in a 1996 Flame of Peace ceremony.33 Through personal example, Presidents Konaré, who stepped down after two terms, and Touré, who has since attracted a coalition of parties known as the Alliance for Democracy and Progress (ADP), have sought to cultivate a culture of democracy. Their policies have allowed regular citizen concertations on policy matters and the formation of the most vibrant network of community radio stations in West Africa. The government of Mali aims at a comprehensive decentralization program that, once fully implemented, would give some 700 elected communes substantial control over local budgetary, developmental, and environmental affairs.34 Not all has gone well, however, especially on the governance front. Citing poor organization of voter registration, the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the 1997 presidential elections, and opposition parties subsequently called for election boycotts. Voter turnout in Mali remains among the lowest in the world. Local government polls were repeatedly delayed and not completed until 1999. Within the public service, too many officials continue to see themselves as directive state functionaries rather than responsive civil servants while others have failed to wean themselves from habits of rent seeking. Because the capacity of the central government remains weak, many citizens rarely come in contact with the state. And because decentralization was undertaken from the top down according to a standardized administrative blueprint—for example, all villages in a given territory, regardless of cultural traditions, are grouped together into rural communes—local government programs have not all won popular support.

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35

Some of these political dynamics are reflected in the survey data from Mali. Table 2.4 shows changes in public opinion along the nine dimensions of governance from Afrobarometer surveys before and after the May 2002 elections that led to a turnover of leaders. Because the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percent for each survey, I infer changes in opinion only if there is a 6-percentage-point difference across surveys. By this criterion, Malians perceived no discernible change in the equity (up only 3 percentage points) or transparency (down only 2 percentage points) of governance procedures that could be attributed to a democratic alternation. Other alternation effects are much more clear. Most strikingly, the legitimacy of the government—measured as a popular willingness to abide by official commands—registers a 36-percentage-point upsurge. Whereas in January 2001 fewer than one-half of Malian adults (42 percent) agreed that the government had a right to demand citizen compliance, by November 2002 more than three-quarters (78 percent) felt this way. Admittedly, the question in the second survey mentioned specific institutions: the courts, the police, and the tax department rather than the government writ large. While these stricter criteria could have inflated the observed differences across time, they could just as easily have reduced it. In any event, a virtual doubling of the proportion of the population who regard the authorities as legitimate constitutes powerful evidence of the impact of leadership alternation by means of a free election. Other changes of opinion mark incremental improvements in governance. In the postalternation environment in Mali, citizens are significantly more likely to think that public services are more efficient (plus 9 points), that the president bases decisions on a foundation of legality (plus 8 points), and that official corruption is in decline (minus 7 points). Notably, however, a before-and-after comparison in Mali reveals that electoral alternation has negative effects on the responsiveness of elected officials. This incongruous result repeats a pattern seen earlier in cross-sectional analysis. In the case of Mali, the proportion of adults who thought themselves able to make representatives listen to their needs in January 2001 (36 percent) was more than halved by November 2002 (15 percent). Again, there were slight variations in question wording: Afrobarometer Round 1 referred to “a community” and Round 2 to “people like you,” but in each case the root of the question asked

36

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Table 2.4 Popular Perceptions in Mali of the Effects of Electoral Alternation on Good Governance, 2001–2002

Dimension of Governance Administrative Legality Transparency Honesty Economic Effectiveness Efficiency Equity Political Responsiveness Accountability Legitimacy

Indicator

The president usually observes constitution. Government procedures are easy to understand. Most or all government officials are corrupt. Government can solve most important problems. Public services are easily accessible. Government treats people equally now (vs. before). Citizens are able to make representatives listen. Elected representatives look after citizen interests. The government has a right to demand compliance.

Before Alternation (January 2001)a

After Alternation (November 2002)b Change

55c

63

+8

27

25

–2

66

53

+7d

55

61

+6

49

58

+9

14

17

+3

36

15

–21d

49

55

+6

42

78

+36d

Sources: Afrobarometer Round 1 and Round 2, www.afrobarometer.org/data. Notes: Cell entries are percentages of adults surveyed. a. An alternation of leader and ruling coalition occurred in Mali’s presidential election of May 2002. Afrobarometer Round 1 survey in Mali (before alternation) was conducted prior to this event, namely, in January and February 2001 (N = 2,089). b. Afrobarometer Round 2 survey in Mali (after alternation) was conducted following the electoral alternation, namely, in October and November 2002 (N = 1,283). c. The question on legality was not asked in Afrobarometer Round 1. Thus the cross-national average for sixteen countries in Round 2 (2002) is used as a point of comparison for Mali in 2002. d. Values may embody minor changes in question wording or response categories.

whether or how often these groups were “able to make . . . elected representatives . . . listen.” While not identical, the questions were at least conceptually equivalent. In any event, a 21-percentage-point gap between pre- and postalternation observations is almost certain to reflect a real diminution in the receptiveness of elected leaders to constituent needs in the aftermath of a landmark election.

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37

A Representation Gap This finding draws attention to a representation gap in new African democracies. African citizens have high expectations about the amount of time that legislative representatives should spend on constituency service: on average, some 12 percent unrealistically think that members of parliament (MPs) should reside in their electoral districts all the time, with higher percentages in Mali (19 percent) and Malawi (26 percent). Yet citizens estimate that, in practice, only 3 percent of MPs or legislative deputies actually establish a permanent presence. The rest are judged to stay away for longer periods of time and, on average, 35 percent are held to never visit the district (Mali represents the Afrobarometer norm in this respect). The representation gap can be measured by subtracting citizen estimates of the amount of time legislators actually spend with constituents from the amount of time citizens think they should spend. Whereas three-quarters (76 percent) think it reasonable that representatives ought to visit constituents at least once per month, only one-quarter (26 percent) say that they actually do so. A huge, 50-percentage-point representation gap (with Mali again exactly representing the Afrobarometer mean) bespeaks African electorates estranged from their leaders. This sort of public alienation is common in representative democracies in other parts of the world and is hardly unique to Africa. But is the African version a real governance problem or a manifestation of unrealistic expectations on the part of citizens? One way to address this question is to test whether popular perceptions of a representation gap are reinforced by an absence of actual contact between constituents and elected agents. With reference to the year prior to the surveys, the Afrobarometer asks, “How often have you contacted any of the following persons: a member of parliament/legislative deputy?” Across eighteen countries an average of only 11 percent of respondents had any interaction with a parliamentary representative. Citizens report infrequent political contacts in countries at all levels of democratic development, whether in South Africa’s liberal democracy (only 6 percent) or in Nigeria’s ambiguous regime (a mere 8 percent). But such contacts tend to be more commonplace in countries that have undergone an electoral alternation, as in Ghana (17 percent) or Kenya (16 percent). Moreover, counter perhaps to intuition, the rate of citizen-legislator contact is slightly—but significantly—higher in Africa’s rural rather than urban areas. If nothing

38

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

else, this result suggests that legislators face greater demands for personal, face-to-face service from villagers rather than from townsfolk.35 The available data also suggest that the representation gap is an empirical reality rather than simply a function of excessively high expectations among the electorate. Table 2.5 shows that the higher the frequency of actual citizenlegislator contact, the lower the perceived representation gap. At minimum, therefore, popular attitudes toward legislator performance seem to be based on citizens’ concrete experiences. This conjecture is strengthened when we separate expectations (how much time should the MP spend in the constituency?) and actual performance (how much time does the MP spend?). There is no statistical relationship between expectations and contact, but there is a strong and significant link between the physical presence of the legislator in the district and the reported frequency of citizen contacts. As such, I conclude that the representation gap is an existential reality and not simply a figment in the imaginations of African citizens who long for more responsive forms of governance. Explanations for shortfalls in the responsiveness of governance in Africa are plentiful. The representation gap could be a function of formal institutions. Electoral systems based on proportional representation (e.g., especially where representatives on national party lists are not tied to any defined electoral district) provide little inducement to legislators to attend to popular preferences.36 Alternatively, informal institutions may matter more. The representation gap may be a manifestation of a deep-seated cultural preference for a direct (rather than representative) form of democracy in which Africans insist on personal, face-to-face contacts with elected officials. Or it could result from

Table 2.5 Behavioral Correlates of the Representation Gap

Representation Gap Citizen-legislator contact

.096***

Time MP Should Spend on Constituency Service

Time MP Does Spend on Constituency Service

.009ns

.126***

Notes: Cell entries are Pearson product moment correlation coefficients. *** p = < .001; ns = not statistically significant.

The Democracy-Governance Connection

39

patronage demands that representatives encounter every time they set foot in their home districts, a deluge whose volume provides strong incentives to shirk constituency service.37 Or perhaps citizens themselves bear responsibility. The gap could reflect a lack of effective popular demand for vertical accountability; other research shows that one-third of African citizens are willing to delegate to national presidents the authority for “making sure MPs do their jobs.”38 Whatever the reason, the accumulated evidence suggests that responsiveness by elected officials is the weakest link in the chain that connects democracy to good governance.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to disentangle democratization from the quest for good governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Beyond having a vague sense that these processes are somehow related, development practitioners rarely know which to tackle first or which dimensions of governance are more susceptible to reform in multiparty settings. Internally, political elites tend to be preoccupied with the acquisition and maintenance of political power; as such, they neglect needed administrative reforms and development priorities once they have won an election. Externally, donors face the conundrum of reform sequencing, as evidenced by metapolicy debates on whether a rule of law is a necessary prerequisite to the survival and sustenance of a democratically elected regime. Having defined and measured democracy and governance separately, I show consistent patterns of association. Various sorts of African evidence—macro, micro, and temporal—indicate a structural affinity between free elections and improved governance. This observation may seem glaringly obvious, but only if democracy and governance are conflated by definition. We know from recent experience in Africa that nominal democratization via less-thanperfect elections provides little guarantee of improvement in the performance of state institutions. And current cases of fast-growing “tiger” development in Asia—notably in Malaysia and Singapore— seem to indicate that some aspects of good governance are sometimes attained by authoritarian regimes. Given, therefore, that democracy and governance can vary with a considerable degree of independence, it is

40

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

encouraging—if not entirely unexpected—to discover that, in subSaharan Africa, the two types of reform tend to go together empirically. Nonetheless, the democracy connection is more consistent in relation to some dimensions of good governance than to others, namely: 1. Administrative dimensions. Democratic elections are linked more strongly and consistently to the establishment of a rule of law and the control of corruption than to the attainment of transparency in decisionmaking procedures. A lingering concern for institutional development is that mass populations still lack a broad and deep understanding of essential procedures of democratic governance such as the separation of governmental powers and the rights of citizens. 2. Economic dimensions. Whatever the nature of the test, democracy and elections have surprisingly strong and consistent associations with perceived governmental effectiveness. But the links to efficiency and (especially) equity in public goods provision are less reliable. In sum, while hardly universal in Africa, state failure undoubtedly occurs in various places and sectors. And even where state institutions exist, they too often operate below capacity, at excessive cost, or with uneven coverage. 3. Political dimensions. Unsurprisingly, democratic elections are closely associated with legitimate and accountable governance, especially so where elections enable the peaceful alternation of rulers. Unexpectedly, however, democratic elections do not reliably guarantee that elected leaders will subsequently be more responsive to their constituents. A principal challenge in deepening democratic governance in Africa is to strengthen procedures for ensuring that representatives listen to the populace and respond to their needs between elections. Over the past two decades, elites and masses in sub-Saharan Africa have evinced a measure of political learning. Ordinary people have realized that democratic elections offer an opportunity to eject underperforming leaders. And elected officials have adapted their strategies for maintaining power and extracting resources to the uncertainties of electoral competition and a gradually tightening rule of law.39 In the tension between formal constitutional rules and informal ethnic ties, the latter still win the day across much of Africa, and elites and masses alike are complicit in supporting prevailing institutions of patronage

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41

and clientelism. But the advent of free elections has made it more feasible for internal and external actors to enforce norms of better governance, if only because, under democracy, there is a political price to be paid for nonperformance. I also offer evidence to support the claim that democratization and good governance are mutually constitutive. On one hand, democracies emerge more readily on the foundations of a steady and orderly—that is, already well governed—state. But, by introducing a rule of law and providing electoral legitimacy, democratization itself contributes to the consolidation of trustworthy state institutions and, in turn, to good governance. As a rule of thumb for policy sequencing, therefore, democracy promotion need not await the prior establishment of a rule of law. Policy planners and other practitioners in African governments and international development assistance may also wish to consider the following action steps: 1. Continue to promote free and competitive elections; for example, by strengthening the management of independent electoral management bodies. 2. Promote greater openness and transparency in government operations; for instance, through freedom of information legislation, media pluralism, and civic education. 3. Aim at greater equity in public goods provision with particular emphasis on the needs of poor and marginalized communities. 4. Introduce measures to allow closer citizen monitoring of public officials; for example, through electoral system reform, participatory budgeting, and popular oversight of service delivery. Notes The author thanks Erin Brookins for research assistance and E. GyimahBoadi, Carolyn Logan, Ellen Lust, and Stephen Ndegwa for comments. All remaining errors are the author’s. 1. Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, South Africa. See Freedom House, “Freedom in the World Country Ratings, 1972–2011,” www.freedomhouse.org. 2. Steven Finkel, Anibal Perez-Linan, Mitchell Seligson, and Dinorah Azpuru, Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building: Results of a Cross-National Quantitative Study (Washington, DC: US Agency for International Development, 2006); John Markoff, “The Global Wave of Democratization,” in Democratization in a Globalized World, ed. Christian

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Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart, Christain Welzel, and Patrick Bernhagen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 55–73. 3. David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49, 3 (1997): 430–451. 4. Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton, eds., Governance and Politics in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992); Jon Pierre, ed., Debating Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2007 (2008), www.systemicpeace.org /polity/polity4.htm, accessed May 2, 2009. 5. Paul Hirst, “Democracy and Governance,” in Debating Governance, ed. Jon Pierre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 13–35. 6. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Political Competition and Democratic Accountability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7. Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 8. George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Institutions Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 9. Daniel Kauffmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Governance Matters VII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996–2007,” Policy Research Paper No. 4654 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008). 10. Kenneth Bollen, “Liberal Democracy: Validity and Method Factors in Cross-National Measures,” American Political Science Review 37, 4 (1993): 1207–1230; Christiane Arndt and Charles Oman. “Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Development Centre Studies, 2006, www.oecd.org, accessed May 2, 2009; Marcus Kurtz and Andrew Schrank, “Growth and Governance: Models, Measures and Mechanisms,” Journal of Politics 69, 2 (2007): 538–554; Michael Coppedge, Angel Alverez, and Claudia Maldonado, “Two Persistent Dimensions of Democracy: Contestation and Inclusiveness,” Journal of Politics 70, 3 (2008): 632–647. 11. The Freedom House and Polity IV scores for all available subSaharan African countries in 2005 are correlated at r = .888. Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics. 12. Polity IV (N = 41) excludes island states—Cape Verde, Seychelles, and Sãó Tomé and Príncipe—and does not offer a regime score for states in conflict. In 2005, these states were Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Sudan. 13. Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 14. The large size of the pooled sample means that measures of association easily qualify as statistically significant at conventional levels of

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0.05 or even 0.01. I therefore used a more rigorous standard for the pooled data by reporting significance only at p = < 0.001. 15. For more information on the Afrobarometer, see its website at www.afrobarometer.org. 16. Michael Bratton,“Formal Versus Informal Institutions in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 18, 3 (2007): 96–110. 17. Robert Rotberg, ed., When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Bates, When Things Fell Apart. 18. Given nine governance dimensions in each of 18 countries, there is a total of 162 observations, 155 of which have the same sign. 19. Of the seven cases in which the model predicts the wrong sign in particular countries, five are not statistically significant, which suggests no relationship rather than a relationship with an unexpected direction. 20. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 7. 21. Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin, “Democratization Backwards: The Problem of Third-Wave Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 31, 2 (2001): 331–354. 22. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 23. Thomas Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy,” Journal of Democracy 18, 1 (2007): 23. 24. Ibid., p. 25. 25. Ibid., p. 17. 26. Guillermo O’Donnell, “Why the Rule of Law Matters,” Journal of Democracy 15, 4 (2004): 32–46; Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, eds., Assessing the Quality of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Axel Hadenius and Hanna Back, “Democracy and State Capacity: Exploring a J-shaped Relationship,” Governance 21, 1 (2008): 1–24. 27. Michael Bratton and Eric Chang, “State Building and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Forwards, Backwards, or Together?” Comparative Political Studies 39, 9 (2006): 1059–1083. 28. Staffan Lindberg, Democracy and Elections in Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 79. Figures updated by the author through 2011. 29. Michael Bratton, “The ‘Alternation Effect’ in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 15, 4 (2004): 147–158. 30. Christopher Anderson, Andre Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Olga Listhaug, Loser’s Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 31. There were eight such countries (alternation dates in parentheses): Cape Verde (February 2001), Ghana (December 2002), Kenya (December 2002), Madagascar (December 2001), Mali (May 2002), and Senegal (March 2000). For the purposes of this study, I included Lesotho (May 2002) and Malawi (May 2004), even though these countries experienced only partial

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

alternations: presidents formed new parties so ruling parties turned over even though the chief political executive remained the same. I excluded Benin since its latest alternation—the accession to power of independent presidential candidate, Yayi Boni—took place in March 2006, that is, after the Round 3 Afrobarometer survey. 32. Richard Vengroff, “Governance and the Transition to Democracy: Political Parties and the Party System in Mali,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31, 4 (1993): 541–62; Zeric Smith, “Mali’s Decade of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 12, 3 (2001): 73–79; Andrew F. Clark, “From Military Dictatorship to Democracy: The Democratization Process in Mali,” in Democracy and Development in Mali, ed. James Bingen, David Robinson, and John Staatz (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), pp. 251–264. 33. Robin-Edward Poulton and Ibrahim ag Youssouf, A Peace of Timbuktu: Democratic Governance, Development and African Peacemaking (New York: UN, 1998). By 2011, this conflict had revived. 34. John Uniack Davis, “A Single Finger Cannot Lift a Stone: Local Organizations and Democracy in Mali” (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1999); Jennifer C. Seeley, “A Political Analysis of Decentralization: Co-opting the Tuareg Threat in Mali,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, 3 (2001): 499–524; Hubert Ouedraogo, “Decentralisation and Local Governance: Experiences from Francophone West Africa,” Public Administration and Development 23, 1 (2003): 97–103. 35. Whereas 9 percent of urbanites report contact with MPs, 12 percent of rural dwellers do so (gamma = .120, p = < .001). 36. Robert Mattes, “The Impact of Electoral Systems on Citizenship in Africa,” Democracy in Africa Research Unit, Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town (manuscript, 2008). 37. Joanne Davies, Parliamentarians and Corruption in Africa: The Challenge of Leadership (Nairobi: Oxford University for the African Parliamentarians’ Network Against Corruption; Ottawa: Parliamentary Center of Canada, 2008). 38. Michael Bratton and Carolyn Logan, “Voters But Not Yet Citizens: Democratization and Development Aid,” in Smart Aid for African Development, ed. Richard Joseph and Alexandra Gillies (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2009), pp. 181–206. 39. Daniel Posner and Daniel Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 18, 3 (2007): 126–140.

3 Democracy and Economic Performance Peter Lewis

Can democratic reform improve African economies? To what

degree does political change benefit developmental outcomes and in what areas? Does lagging economic performance pose hazards for democratization? These enduring questions remain at the frontier of research on the world’s poorest region. 1 Many commentators have traced Africa’s protracted economic crisis to the prevalence of authoritarian rule. However, while dictatorship may foster economic stagnation, democratization offers little panacea for economic renewal. Previous studies of regime type and development have offered only a partial vantage on the economic impact of two decades of political reform across the continent. Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests that sub-Saharan Africa has shifted to a more resilient path of growth since around 1995, with implications for poverty reduction and popular welfare. In an era of political and economic turbulence, the relationships between governance and economic performance take on new importance. This chapter represents my effort to profile regimes and economic outcomes in Africa. Drawing on twenty-five years of data for subSaharan African countries, my analysis seeks to distinguish variations among political systems and dimensions of economic performance. The preliminary results, based on descriptive statistics, are compelling. Stronger democratic performance is associated with superior

45

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

macroeconomic outcomes as well as better delivery of key aspects of popular welfare. Yet poverty reduction has been highly uneven, and many Africans perceive limited economic benefits from democratization. While a “democratic dividend” may remain elusive, electoral regimes nonetheless appear to have resilient bases of support. I emphasize the problem of accountability as the key element in shaping the incentives of politicians to provide for the general welfare. I first discuss the relationship between autocracy and poor economic performance and after that the putative benefits of democratization for economic recovery. Next, I assess comparative economic performance in Africa, using broad indicators of per capita income as well as available data on poverty, health, and education. My analysis distinguishes among well-performing democracies, more constrained electoral systems, and closed authoritarian regimes. In the succeeding discussion, I show that survey data and related analysis suggest a relationship between poverty and popular legitimacy in a sample of electoral regimes. I then assess potential explanations for the patterns of performance. Finally, I address the problem of accountability and the linkages between political incentives and economic revitalization.

The Authoritarian Disadvantage Africa’s lingering economic crisis, beginning around 1975, has prompted a large body of analysis on the political sources of economic stagnation. Much of this literature centers on the nature of autocratic regimes across the region. Authoritarian governments in Africa have commonly misused public resources, impeded the development of markets, and refrained from providing crucial public goods needed for economic expansion.2 Commentators on economic failure in the region have emphasized the role of predatory rulers and patronage-driven political systems. The depredations of leaders in such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe are well documented. Long periods of authoritarianism and economic mismanagement have been equally apparent in such countries as Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Ghana, Guinea, and Ethiopia, to name some prominent examples. While a few commentators have invoked cases from Asia and Latin America to argue for an “authoritarian advantage” in economic development, African experience

Democracy and Economic Performance

47

makes it difficult to escape the association between nondemocratic rule and economic failure.3 Historically, most African regimes have had little accountability to their people, as leaders have maintained political control through military rule or monopolistic political parties grounded in patron-client networks. In these clientelist systems, leaders wield broad latitude in using public resources and they typically procure support through ad hoc redistribution rather than by furnishing collective goods such as law, infrastructure, or social services. State revenues are commonly diverted to maintain the support base of regimes, and governments serve as gatekeepers for access to resources, jobs, and market opportunities. The result has been economic stagnation, recurring fiscal crises, and deepening poverty in many countries. In these regimes, the political incentives of elites and the nature of governing institutions work at cross-purposes with the requisites of growth and popular welfare.

A Democratic Dividend? The trend toward democratization that swept the African continent in the early 1990s kindled hopes that political reform could lead to economic regeneration. If governments could become more accountable, transparent, and rule driven, they would be inclined to perform better and to produce broad economic gains as a basis for support. The presumed link between democratic rule and economic growth has several foundations. At the most general level, there is an elective affinity between democracy and markets.4 Both systems rely on open information, choice, and decentralized outlets for decisionmaking. Authoritarian regimes find it difficult to manage the flows of information and pragmatic decisions needed for a dynamic market economy. Conversely, market systems give rise to information demands and assertive social groups that impel governments to relax control. The fact that all the world’s mature democracies are also market systems affirms this association. Democratic systems also rest on accountability to voters and civic constituencies, which is likely to reinforce pressures on leaders to improve the economy and to provide gains in popular welfare. In a system characterized by regular elections, political competition, activism among civic groups, and an independent media, politicians

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

will find stronger incentives to furnish public goods, expand the economy, and enhance livelihoods for citizens. As argued by Amartya Sen, even in circumstances where accountability is limited, a relatively open public domain of information and popular voice makes it difficult for leaders to entirely disregard public welfare or to commit flagrant violations of rights.5 Information and institutions of accountability impel officials toward better performance as a basis for political survival. A further reason to anticipate improvements in economic management and distribution arises from the sources of democratic transition in Africa.6 Economic grievances were prominent among the catalysts of popular protest from around 1989 to 1994, as charges of corruption and malfeasance by rulers were levied by virtually all the opposition movements in the region during this period of political ferment.7 A similar animus was evident during later transitions in Nigeria and Kenya. While civic activists and political challengers were not wholly focused on economic concerns, the narrative of deprivation was certainly prominent in movements for change and important elements of the opposition coalition would be expected to press for better oversight of the economy. In particular, democratic reforms afforded space for business associations that could lobby for improved business conditions and more open access to markets. During the 1990s, advocates of improved governance also mobilized around such issues as corruption, legal reform, and budgetary transparency. Political change emboldened labor unions and other popular groupings who demanded social services, enhanced incomes, and efforts to improve equity. A renascent civil society (seen in Zambia, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, among others) was a potential vehicle for economic change.

The Paradox of Growth Without Prosperity For many Africans, the record of economic change has not borne out these expectations. On the positive side of the ledger, most countries have consolidated macroeconomic reforms and regional growth has accelerated significantly during the past decade. Improved policies created a foundation for better performance, though much of this buoyancy can be attributed to rising commodity prices and new sources of investment from Asia and southern Africa. A quick recovery

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from the economic downturn of 2009 reinforces the profile of resilient growth across much of the continent. In many countries, however, economic expansion has not been accompanied by rising incomes or popular welfare. South Africa, Nigeria, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania offer some examples of countries where strong overall economic performance is trailed by lagging indicators of public wellbeing. The disconnect between macroeconomic indicators and microeconomic performance is often remarked by officials as well as average citizens. Beyond the anecdotal evidence, data on poverty and social provisions do not reflect consistent improvements and citizens report discouraging conditions in surveys of attitudes and economic conditions.8 Indeed, a crucial paradox of growth without prosperity surrounds many of Africa’s new democracies. There is sound evidence that political liberalization bolsters economic policy reform and enhances some of the institutional requisites for economic performance. Yet there are only tentative signs that these improvements foster significant reductions in poverty or inequality, even when local regimes and external donors appear concerned with such change. This paradox presents a basic challenge for Africa’s new democracies. Democracy may be highly desirable in its own right; yet political liberalization does not ensure economic regeneration or popular welfare. The relationships between political and economic reform, and the politics of poverty reduction, remain problematic for researchers, practitioners, and African citizens. If democratic rule cannot deliver improvements in livelihood for average citizens, some observers suggest that these regimes will lose support and legitimacy, leading to more contentious and violent politics or even regime breakdown. 9 Alternatively, citizens in new democracies may separate their evaluation of political and economic “goods” and preserve their commitment to democracy while pressing for improvements in welfare.10 The tension between democracy and welfare is evident, though the effects on democratic performance and consolidation are less clear.

Comparing Economic Performance A review of economic performance among African regimes helps to frame these issues. Early observations suggested that Africa’s new democracies did not reflect advantages in economic performance. At

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

the end of the 1990s, one assessment of key economic indicators for thirty-six sub-Saharan African states found undistinguished economic records among many democratic regimes in the region.11 At that time, African democracies averaged slightly lower growth rates, higher inflation, and greater budget deficits than nondemocracies. These patterns suggested that political business cycles and high spending would impede growth in democracies.12 More recently, however, a number of studies have concluded that democracies display advantages in economic performance when compared to their authoritarian counterparts. Brian Levy examined twenty-one African states from 1975 to 2000, finding that countries pursuing superior policy regimes achieved better economic performance.13 When countries are categorized according to the quality of their adjustment initiatives, the better-adjusting countries are found to be democracies or transitional states, the late adjusters are predominantly nondemocratic, and the nonadjusting (“polarized”) states are all authoritarian during the period of the study.14 A larger multicountry study produced through the African Economic Research Consortium strongly affirms the relationship between regime characteristics, governance, and policy approaches to the economy, with resultant differences in economic performance. 15 Recent work by David Stasavage augments this view, demonstrating comparatively higher expenditures on education in African democracies.16 The assessment of comparative economic performance is complicated by several factors. First, there is not a straightforward democraticauthoritarian dichotomy among African regimes. The majority of African governments convene regular elections, although they vary greatly in quality and competitiveness, and are held in widely differing climates of human rights and political liberties. The most widely used governance measurement scales, provided by Freedom House and Polity IV, allow distinctions between well-performing democracies in which there are free political competition and entrenched civil rights, and more constrained “electoral” democracies in which there is a degree of political competition and rights but notable limits on voter choice or citizen freedoms. 17 While acknowledging that authoritarian regimes also exhibit a range of rights and control, I treat nondemocratic governments in aggregate for the purpose of this analysis. A second challenge is accounting for the effects of political transition, which is often a jarring or disruptive process with particular effects on economic growth and popular welfare. Many of Africa’s democratic transitions have played out in a context of protest or vio-

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lence and several new democracies emerged in the wake of civil wars. A number of authoritarian governments were also subject to these dislocations, though without culminating in changes of regime. Consequently, a straightforward comparison of broad regime types by time period could easily obscure these transition effects. Third is the problem of outliers. Several countries with abundant natural resources have experienced wide swings in economic performance, arguably independent of regime type. A number of states have been wracked by civil wars that devastate economies and people, often followed by rapid growth in the immediate aftermath of conflict. A few collapsed or failed states have lost any semblance of government functions, in which case it is difficult to speak of a regime, Somalia being the obvious example.

Regimes, Transitions, and Growth In this analysis, I seek to address the most salient problems in forming a valid profile of economic performance among regimes. I identify three categories of regimes: Democracies (often referred to elsewhere as liberal democracies) correspond to the highest rankings in the Freedom House scale, largely in line with Polity IV ratings.18 These are countries that hold regular, competitive, transparent elections, in a context of broadly applied civil liberties and a general rule of law.19 A second category of electoral democracies (sometimes referred to as procedural democracies) also convene regular multiparty elections, although competition may be limited and voter prerogatives are circumscribed to some degree. The category of authoritarian regimes includes countries where there is no meaningful electoral choice (regardless of whether polls are formally held), accompanied by broader restrictions on political rights and civil liberties. The sample includes forty-six countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Two outliers have been excluded: Somalia, where the central state has collapsed and there is virtually no data; and Equatorial Guinea, a small state of less than a million people, where the rapid expansion of oil production has yielded aggregate growth rates of about 25 percent on average during the past decade. When measuring growth, countries are included within a particular category depending on their regime profile each year, thus allowing countries to move among categories when there are interruptions or changes in regime (as for Niger or Kenya). Consequently, the

52

Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

number of countries within each regime category is shifting over time. Figure 3.1 charts the growth of real income per capita among different regimes. Performance is tracked along the path of political transition rather than by year. For instance, Zambia’s political transition dates from 1991 while South Africa’s transition arrived in 1994. Consequently, T–3 (three years prior to transition) for Zambia would

Figure 3.1 Regime Transition and Economic Performance (percentage growth in real GDP per capita, constant 2000 US$)

3

Growth in real GDP per capita

2

1

0

Autocracies Electoral Democracies

-1

Democracies -2

-3

-4

Trans-3 T–3

Trans+2 T+2

Yr 3-5 Years 3–5

Yr 10-12 Years or 10–12 latest or latest

Source: Data from World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://databank.worldbank .org/ddp/home.do?Step=12&id=4&CNO=2, accessed January 26, 2012. Calculated by author. Notes: Somalia and Equatorial Guinea omitted. “T” indicates transition year or default of 1992. For T–3 (3 years prior to transition), there are 3 democracies, 4 electoral democracies, and 39 autocracies. For T+2 (the transition year and the 2 following years), there are 10 democracies, 12 electoral democracies, and 26 autocracies. For the period 3 to 5 years following transition, there are 9 democracies, 12 electoral democracies, and 24 autocracies. For the period 10 to 12 years after transition, there are 10 democracies, 15 electoral democracies, and 21 autocracies.

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be 1988–1990 while for South Africa it would be 1991–1993. The figure also measures growth for the transition year and two succeeding years (T+2); years three to five after transition; and years ten to twelve following the transition (or the latest three years for more recent transitions such as Kenya and Nigeria). This captures the effects of transitions (and potentially also conflict resolution) for the relevant countries. In the many instances where no regime transition has occurred, the year 1992 stands in as a default for the transition year. This is the modal year of political transition during Africa’s democratic wave of the early 1990s. Moreover, by clustering countries within a fairly common chronological band, I account for such factors as commodity price shocks and other external effects. Figure 3.1 shows a notable divergence in economic outcomes among regimes. The better-performing democracies in Africa have registered steady growth in per capita income, even when transitioninduced turbulence and exogenous shocks are taken into account. In the initial period (T–3), the small number of democracies (Botswana, Mauritius, and Gambia) showed per capita growth of 2 percent on average compared with declines for the rest of the region. During the key transition period, growth slows among African democracies, reflecting both the disruption of transition (e.g., in South Africa) and the expanding population of democracies to include such low-income states as Mali and Benin. Nonetheless, democracies outperform other regimes and growth accelerates after the key transition period. Overall, for the two-decade span (roughly between 1990 and 2010) covered by the data, democracies sustained growth at higher rates than other states in the region. Electoral democracies, though far more turbulent, still reflect a positive trajectory. Most of Africa’s autocracies came under internal challenge between 1990 and 1994, and several experienced transitions to electoral rule (including the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Malawi, and Zambia). Clearly, there was a general trend of worsening per capita incomes through the 1980s and early 1990s, but democratizing states improved their performance shortly after political transition and modestly improved growth for the ensuing decade. Here too, the population of democratic countries increased to include a wider variety of states with different income levels and resources. Several postconflict countries (including Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia) experienced rapid growth in the wake of civil wars, which certainly heightened overall performance among this segment.

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Authoritarian regimes in Africa have followed a volatile path of growth. Throughout the critical period of political contestation, these states reflected declining average incomes, reflecting about a decade of stagnation between 1985 and 1995. After 1995, per capita growth among authoritarian states surged from negative 3 percent to over 1 percent, and has remained at that level since 1998. The growth spike reflects a transitory rise in oil prices (since nearly all oil producers had authoritarian regimes in that period) as well as the end of conflicts in Eritrea, Rwanda, and Liberia. This fortuitous rise, however, was not sustained, and income growth in nondemocracies lagged all democracies by 2006. It is noteworthy, however, that weaker electoral democracies were largely aligned with authoritarian regimes in income growth during the past several years. As I discuss below, this suggests that the quality of democracy matters for economic outcomes. Descriptive statistics show a marked divergence in per capita growth among regimes. It may be questioned, however, whether there are special characteristics of regime groups (such as commodities or conflict) that drive these results. Indeed it is possible that betterperforming democracies tend to emerge in countries with limited conflict or with less resource-dependent economies, in which case the association of democracy and growth would be largely spurious. As many authoritarian states have been wracked by violence (notably Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) while many democracies have been comparatively peaceful (e.g., Ghana, Botswana, Benin, and South Africa), perhaps the differences in growth reflect security rather than the effects of regime type. Removing states in conflict from the sample allows me to trace comparisons in performance without the confounding effects of war or civil violence. The results are shown in Figure 3.2. The trends in performance are remarkably similar to the general sample presented in Figure 3.1, although growth clearly improves overall when the conflict cases are removed. As in the whole sample, well-performing democracies register the strongest growth, with consistent improvements over time. Less stable electoral regimes outperform autocracies in the longer term, though weaker democracies are similar to authoritarian regimes throughout much of the transitional arc. During the late 1980s and the turbulence of the early 1990s, electoral democracies and autocracies reflect similar trends. Contentious democracies suffer lingering stagnation, but then rebound several years after political transition, with accelerating

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Figure 3.2 Regime Transition and Economic Performance, Excluding Conflict States (percentage growth in real GDP per capita in constant 2000 US$) 3

Growth in real GDP per capita

2

1

Autocracies 0 Electoral Democracies -1 Democracies -2

-3

T–3 Trans-3

T+2 Trans+2

Years 3–5 Yr 3-5

Years 10–12 Yr 10-12 or orlatest latest

Source: Data from World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://databank.worldbank .org/ddp/home.do?Step=12&id=4&CNO=2, accessed January 26, 2012. Calculated by author. Notes: Angola, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan are excluded. “T” indicates transition year or default of 1992. Years 10–12 indicate 10 to 12 years after transition year or latest available data. Across all four periods, the number of observations per regime category are as follows: 10–11 democracies, 10 electoral democracies, and 18–19 autocracies.

growth a decade after political change. For the authoritarian regimes that do not undergo substantive transitions, the stagnation of incomes is somewhat deeper and the resumption of growth less robust than even in the weaker democratic cases. To summarize, the growth-suppressing effects of conflict are evident, but the general trends in performance, and the distinctions among regimes, are still evident when I remove states in conflict from the sample. This suggests that regime type has identifiable independent effects on economies over time. An alternative explanation for these trends is that the observed “democratic premium” is not only the result of a steady decline in the

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

performance of authoritarian regimes, but also a consequence of less impoverished regimes democratizing. However, the composition of democratic regimes remains relatively stable across all four periods20 and includes some of the poorest regimes on the continent (Mali, Benin, Ghana, and Senegal). This would imply that the performance of democratic regimes is a result of political choices rather than any fundamental economic advantage as compared to other regimes.

Poverty and Popular Welfare Another approach is to compare performance on key indicators of popular welfare, including poverty, health, and education. These can furnish a better measure of how governments respond to the provision of public goods and collective benefits. Figure 3.3 displays comparative degrees of poverty over time among different African regimes. This is broadly indicative because there are no comprehensive time series data for poverty in Africa. It is possible, however, to organize available figures into a periodization of poverty levels. For virtually all countries, measures are available for at least one year within the following periods: from 1991 to 1996, from 1997 to 2002, and from 2003 to 2007. This forms the basis for a broad comparison of levels and trends during a seventeen-year period. The contrast is even more striking than on the dimension of growth. From 1992 to 2007 Africa’s electoral regimes saw reductions in levels of poverty, sometimes to substantial degrees, while authoritarian regimes reflected moderate increases in poverty. Apart from the dramatic trends, the comparison of absolute measures is equally interesting. During the early period of political transition, poverty was as prevalent in African democracies as in authoritarian states. From 1997 to 2002, poverty rates in the region’s better-performing democracies had declined to a little over 40 percent; below the regional average of 50 percent and nearly one-third lower than in authoritarian states. Africa’s electoral democracies have consistently been much poorer on average than the more successful democratic states, pointing to the often cited link between income and democracy. These regimes have modestly reduced poverty, converging over time with the rising trend in the region’s autocracies to yield similar levels in recent years. Infant mortality provides a central indicator of performance in the health sector. Figure 3.4 displays comparative results for a twenty-year

57 Figure 3.3 Regimes and Poverty in Africa (poverty headcount ratio at $1.25 per day purchasing power parity) 65

Percentage of population

60

55

Autocracies

Autocracy Electoral Democracies

50

Electoral Dem Democracies Democracy

45

40 1991 to 1996

1997 to 2002

2003 to 2007

Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators; World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER), World Income Inequality Database V2.0, http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/Database/en_GB/wiid, accessed December 15, 2011. Averages calculated by author. Notes: Across all three periods, the number of observations per regime category (based on available data) are as follows: 4–5 democracies, 6–8 electoral democracies, and 8–12 autocracies. From 1991 to 1996: democracies include Cape Verde, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, and South Africa (5 total); electoral regimes include Central African Republic, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Niger, Senegal, Zambia (6 total); and autocracies include Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Mauritania, Rwanda, Swaziland, and Uganda (12 total). From 1997 to 2002: democracies include Cape Verde, Ghana, Mali, and South Africa (4 total); electoral regimes include Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, and Tanzania (7 total); and autocracies include Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Mauritania, Rwanda, Swaziland, and Uganda (12 total). From 2003 to 2007: democracies include Benin, Ghana, Lesotho, Mali, and Senegal (5 total); electoral democracies include Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, and Zambia (8 total); and autocracies include Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo Republic, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Togo, and Uganda (8 total).

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Figure 3.4 Regimes and Infant Mortality (infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births) 120

Infant mortality rate

100

80

Autocracies

60

Autocracy Electoral Democracies Electoral Dem Democracy Democracies

40

20

0

1985 1985

1990 1990

1995 1995

2000 2000

2005 2005

2006– 06 to 08 2008

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp /home.do?Step=12&id=4&CNO=2, accessed January 23, 2012. Averages calculated by author. Notes: For selected periods, the number of observations per regime category (based on available data) are as follows: 1985 and 1990: 2–3 democracies, 1–2 electoral democracies, and 22 autocracies. For 1995 and later: 9–11 democracies, 9–12 electoral democracies, and 20–22 autocracies.

period. Even during the years prior to widespread democratic reform, autocracies as a group performed worse than regimes with electoral participation. After 1990, African democracies display rising infant mortality averages, once again reflecting the inclusion of such poor states as Mali and Benin in the ranks of democratic regimes. In the wake of political transitions, democratic governments continue to make headway in reducing levels of infant mortality. Electoral democracies, which started from much higher levels of infant mortality (in tandem with higher rates of poverty), initially reflect increases in mortality, as countries such as Sierra Leone, Niger, and Malawi shift toward electoral rule. From the mid-1990s, these governments bring down mortality rates, though electoral democracies are now indistinguishable as a group from autocratic governments. The region’s authoritarian regimes had high infant mortality in the 1980s that has diminished moderately, in line with regional trends.

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Figure 3.5 Regimes and Education (primary school enrollment as a percentage of the population) 95 90

Percentage of population

85 80 75

Autocracies Autocracy

70 65

Electoral Democracies Electoral Democracies Dem

60

Democracy Democracies

55 50

91 19

98 19

99 19

00 20

01 20

02 20

03 20

04 20

05 20

06 20

07 20

08 20

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp /home.do?Step=12&id=4&CNO=2, accessed January 23, 2012. Note: For different periods, the number of observations per regime category (based on available data) are as follows: 6–10 democracies, 3–9 electoral democracies, and 8–18 autocracies.

Finally, I consider provisions in education, measured in primary enrollment levels, in Figure 3.5. In general, African countries have converged during the past decade in levels of primary school enrollment, though democracies continue to perform moderately better than authoritarian regimes. Among the region’s more effective democracies, educational provisions improved during the 1990s, but diminished and then plateaued in recent years. Electoral democracies, which included a number of poor and postconflict states, initially had declining enrollments, but have registered substantial progress during the past decade, with average primary enrollments rising from 55 percent in 2000 to 84 percent in 2008. In authoritarian states, there has also been progress in the provision of education, but this group of countries had the worst relative performance in 1991 and continues to lag democracies in 2009. In absolute terms, the gap has narrowed and the overall democratic advantage is narrow.

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

To summarize, a broad comparison of performance among regime groups in Africa suggests a democratic advantage in macroeconomic performance, service provision, and the reduction of poverty. The region’s well-performing democracies clearly lead other regimes in economic performance among these dimensions, both in absolute terms and in general trends. Electoral democracies in Africa have reflected more promising trends than authoritarian states, but performance in these countries is often indistinguishable from nondemocratic neighbors and counterparts. For citizens in a large body of hybrid or ambiguous regimes with electoral systems but limited rights and accountability, economic outcomes have not visibly improved.

Individual Perceptions and Measures of Welfare The experience of average citizens provides a further window into comparative economic performance. Survey data from African democracies reflect a restrained assessment of economic conditions and prospects. The Afrobarometer network has completed three rounds of surveys in twelve countries (mostly democracies) between 1999 and 2006. Table 3.1 reflects trends in Africans’ assessments of general economic conditions, their own personal circumstances, and one indicator of poverty: periodic (or chronic) shortages of food. These measures suggest that difficult economic conditions have not changed significantly in recent years. Citizens express low assessments of the general macroeconomy and their personal circumstances, with scant movement over time. They also report a slight increase in food shortages, with more than half claiming some deficit within the previous year.21 Africans in new democracies do not perceive substantial improvements in their economies and report few advances in living conditions. While broad measures of macroeconomic performance and welfare show that democracies perform comparatively well, citizens’ perceptions in these countries reflect a more sober reality. A more recent measure provided by Robert Mattes is an index of “lived poverty” based on self-reported shortages of water, income, and medical treatment.22 Overall, the index reflects a modest rise (increasing deprivation) between 2000 and 2005, with mixed results among countries. South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, and Zambia displayed notable decreases in poverty; Ghana and Mali were virtually unchanged;

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Democracy and Economic Performance

Table 3.1 Personal Assessments of Economic Conditions (twelve-country mean)

Present macroeconomic conditions (% fairly good/very good) Personal economic conditions (% fairly good/very good) Had enough food (% who did not go without food at least once in past year)

2000

2005

Change

29

29

0

31

27

–4

47

44

–3

Source: Afrobarometer Network, “Where Is Africa Going? Views from Below,” Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 60 (Afrobarometer Network, May 2006), www.afrobarometer.org. Notes: Samples: ca. 2000, n = 21,531; ca. 2005, n = 17,917. Countries include Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

and Botswana, Malawi, and Tanzania reported increased levels of deprivation. The sole autocracy in the sample, Zimbabwe, reflected a marked increase in “lived poverty” during the early 2000s, as would be expected from the economic collapse that occurred over the period. In a regression analysis, Mattes finds that political freedom accounts for the greatest variance in lived poverty, followed closely by education and public infrastructure.23 These factors are much more significant than background conditions such as national wealth or social class. In sum, survey data shows the mixed picture of poverty reduction as experienced by citizens in African democracies while also reinforcing our impression that political freedom is linked to economic outcomes.

The Political Hazards of Economic Failure As a further reflection, it is important to revisit the earlier questions regarding democratic legitimacy and citizen support. If Africans are discouraged by their economic circumstances, does this create political disillusionment or possible attraction to nondemocratic alternatives? Turning again to survey data from the twelve-country Afrobarometer sample, Table 3.2 shows Africans’ assessments of democratic perform-

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

Table 3.2 Personal Assessments of Economic Conditions (twelve-country mean)

Satisfaction with democracy (% fairly/very satisfied) Support for democracy (% agree: “Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”) Patience with democracy (% agree: “Our present system of elected government should be given more time to deal with inherited problems”) Economic patience (% agree/agree very strongly: “In order for the economy to get better in the future, it is necessary for us to accept some hardships now”)

2000

2005

Change

58

45

–13

69

61

–8

46

56

+10

46

57

+11

Source: Afrobarometer Network, “Where Is Africa Going? Views from Below,” Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 60 (Afrobarometer Network, May 2006), www.afrobarometer .org. Notes: Samples: ca. 2000, n = 21,531; ca. 2005, n = 17,917. Countries include Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

ance as well as their overall commitment to democracy and their patience with the economy. African citizens are clearly disappointed by the performance of democracy, yet they are more resilient in their general commitment to democracy as a political regime. While average satisfaction with democracy has declined markedly, support for democracy has subsided only modestly. Without more sophisticated regression analysis, it is difficult to say how much of this declining confidence arises from economic concerns and how much from other factors (e.g., corruption, insecurity, opposition grievances). Yet this measure does not show a regional crisis of democratic legitimacy, notwithstanding obvious widespread dissatisfaction with economic conditions. The sense of resilience is stronger when we consider citizens’ patience with current conditions. Increasing numbers of African citizens are inclined to wait for democracies to deliver better results and to accept present economic difficulties in the hopes of future improve-

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ments. In African democracies, about six of ten citizens support the system over all others and nearly the same proportion are prepared to show forbearance with current problems. The shortcomings of economic performance in democratizing Africa do not yet appear to pose a critical challenge to the sustainability of democracy.

Explanations of Performance Although democracy appears to yield economic benefits over time, regime change has not fostered dynamic economies or substantial improvements in welfare throughout much of Africa. We can find explanations for these patterns in both domestic and international factors. Political reform in Africa has produced important changes in actors and institutions, yet resilient structures of politics limit the depth and extent of change. African politics have long been characterized by strong presidential regimes, dominance by a single party or elite cohort, control through extended patron-client networks, and the dispensation of patronage for political support. These factors are summarized in the concept of neopatrimonialism, which captures the tensions between institutional rule and clientelist management shaping most African political systems. Neopatrimonialism is largely incompatible with democracy and economic growth.24 As discussed earlier, clientelist politics tend to reinforce inequality, undermine accountability, and hamper the provision of public goods. Moreover, weak formal institutions, unregulated elite discretion over resources, and a bias toward consumption rather than investment all erode the possibilities for capital formation. Neopatrimonialism in authoritarian regimes has been closely associated with personal rule, oligarchic control, and pervasive corruption. The transition to electoral democracy, however, does not necessarily eclipse neopatrimonial structures and practices. In many African countries undergoing political reform, neopatrimonialism has been reconfigured rather than displaced by the new democratic arrangements.25 Presidents continue to exercise broad discretionary powers, even if they must now contend with constitutional restraints and countervailing institutions. The relative weakness of opposition groups and civil society often creates latitude for executive control, prompting leaders to extend their power through both formal and informal means. Many

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Governing Africa’s Changing Societies

elected presidents have adapted patronage structures, cultivating crony relationships with key notables and marginalizing political rivals or opponents.26 Leaders often attempt to manipulate or alter democratic institutions to bolster their control. The extension of term limits, seen for instance in Namibia and (unsuccessfully) in Nigeria, is a further reflection of executive ambition. In weak institutional settings, presidential control fosters many of the problems of government accountability and transparency that characterized earlier systems of personal rule. The dominance of strong parties throughout the region reinforces the strength of political clientelism. In Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia, for example, ruling parties have held substantial majorities through several elections, consequently marginalizing the opposition. Parties from the old regime govern in Mozambique and Tanzania while new parties that took power during the political transition have become entrenched in Nigeria and Zambia. The dominance of ruling parties is mirrored by the circulation of political elites who may reconstitute networks of control even as institutions change. Elite groups in transitional democracies often sustain traditional networks or, where the old regime has been eclipsed, they constitute new ones. In Tanzania incumbent party cohorts still govern, while in Zambia and Senegal the posttransition ruling parties embody veteran leaders from the trade union movement or the traditional opposition. In Nigeria, retired military officers permeate the political parties. Previous executives may also return to power, as did Mathieu Kerekou in Benin and Didier Ratsiraka in Madagascar. Resilient elites tend to reproduce clientelist systems and outlets for patronage. They inherently limit competition, and thus accountability, in the political domain. Clientelism also fosters crony networks among politicians and the private sector. Among these networks, the volatility of electoral politics and elite rivalries tend to shorten the time horizons for politicians. These patterns encourage corruption, weak oversight, and politically driven fiscal cycles. The deficits of civil society also hinder accountability and improved government performance. Political reform has undoubtedly opened new outlets for civic expression in much of the region, reflected in the proliferation of associations, independent media, and a wider public sphere. Few countries, however, have developed an

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autonomous domain of civil society that can effectively press politicians for better policies or economic performance. In such countries as Mali, Senegal, Mozambique, Malawi, Benin, Ghana, or even Nigeria, it is common to find that many associations are small, focused in urban areas, reliant on donor funding, or fragmented regionally and ethnically. Most African democracies have yet to develop habits of effective advocacy and critical citizenship. Even in South Africa, with the strongest tradition of dissent and civic mobilization in Africa, the hegemony of the ruling party limits the efficacy of popular protest. In consequence there are few coherent lobbies for public goods, or coalitions for reform, in most of Africa’s new democracies. With limited countervailing pressures from below, politicians find little inducement to focus their efforts on general improvements for constituents. Instead, elected leaders seek to preserve their standing among ruling networks while dispensing piecemeal benefits to supporters. This generally reinforces distribution through clientelist links rather than programmatic or policy-driven agendas. A further problem arises from the long-standing institutional deficiencies of Africa’s weak states. Democratic rule cannot easily turn back the legacy of state degeneration found in most countries in the region. Elected leaders must contend with feeble bureaucracies; cumbersome government enterprises; sparse public services; deteriorating infrastructure; and, in more than a few cases, depleted treasuries. Regime change offers few panaceas for the resource constraints and institutional weaknesses that have accumulated since the 1970s. Countries such as South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Mauritius provide exceptions to this generalization, but most new democracies in Africa operate under severe limitations of resources and capacity. Weak systems of finance, regulation, information, and law hamper investment and undermine the credibility of incentives offered by policy reform. These political legacies have implications for the extent of reform and the distributional effects of policy change. Politicians in new democracies are reluctant to forgo patronage resources by relinquishing influence over the economy. The slow pace of change in institutions and market structures hampers investment in key sectors such as manufacturing, commercial agriculture, or value-added services that could generate employment and disperse wealth. Political elites have often captured rents from privatization, financial liberalization, the

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removal of subsidies, or trade reform, which limits the dissemination of wider economic benefits.

The International Dimension Disappointing economic outcomes in new democracies are not only a consequence of domestic political dynamics. Several aspects of the international environment also influence the possibilities for redistribution and poverty reduction. First, policy choices for African regimes remain limited. The overarching influence of external donors, led by the multilateral financial institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—has reinforced policy orthodoxy across the region. This framework emphasizes balanced budgets, low inflation, reduced subsidies, trade liberalization, smaller government, and less intrusive state economic activities. African governments under continuing fiscal pressure are subject to donor leverage and find it difficult to break from orthodox prescriptions. In terms of resources and political opportunities, African democrats are not drawn to the types of resurgent populism that has recently spread across Latin America. Put simply, they cannot afford it, and they gain little electoral advantage from a populist stance. More by circumstance than by design, orthodox adjustment policies have had adverse distributional effects in many African countries. In theory, structural adjustment calls for both reductions in government spending and a shift of resources away from less efficient uses toward productive sectors and social services. In practice, governments have recognized that compliance with core macroeconomic indicators— notably fiscal balance, low inflation, and market-determined exchange rates—is often sufficient to sustain a flow of needed resources from the donors. Fiscal balance is often achieved by limiting expenditures and levying user fees on services such as health or education.27 For African leaders, penalizing rural groups or the urban poor is less hazardous politically than cutting the military budget or divesting state enterprises, which may create large job losses among urban constituencies. While donors do not necessarily encourage the contraction of social provisions, they find it difficult to measure short-term performance in these sectors, yet they clearly emphasize budget discipline as a condition for assistance. Governments economize in the areas that

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are least risky, though this often creates hardship among politically vulnerable groups. Redistributive or populist policies are largely precluded by the need for fiscal and monetary restraint. Donor-sponsored efforts to directly address poverty and redistribution have also yielded modest results. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, launched by the World Bank and the IMF in 1996, is an effort to substantially reduce debt loads in countries following prudent economic policies, with the intention of freeing resources for investment and social provisions. The poverty alleviation goals of HIPC have been accentuated through requirements for Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) on the part of debtor countries. The PRSP process calls for plans to channel the resources earned from debt cancellation toward services and programs for deprived segments of society. Another initiative, the US-sponsored Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), provides significant amounts of supplementary aid to countries that meet benchmarks of economic responsibility and good governance. These policies appear to support desirable priorities, but the results have not been unambiguously positive. Many of these programs are excessively bureaucratic and cumbersome, resulting in the slow delivery of resources and indefinite outcomes for target groups. Moreover, the PRSP and MCA processes are often criticized for absorbing energies and resources from weak African bureaucracies that are already overextended, thereby straining rather than building institutional capacity. While some of the region’s new democracies have reaped benefits from debt relief and aid premiums, it is not clear that these resources have broadly reduced poverty or improved welfare in recipient countries. Finally, it should be noted that African countries, regardless of regime, continue to face hindrances in trade and investment that limit their potential for growth. Democratizing states in the region have few advantages in gaining access to overseas markets, offsetting the effects of agricultural subsidies in industrialized countries, buffering the consequences of rising energy and food costs, or soliciting investment in crucial productive sectors. The US African Growth and Opportunity Act has opened export windows for several African countries, many of which are democratizing states undergoing economic reform. Yet the intractability of subsidy issues in the Doha Round of trade negotiations shows that African exporters of agriculture commodities still

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face substantial obstacles to improving their performance. Soaring fuel and grain prices afflict African countries without regard to political regime. Beyond the observable barriers to expansion, the handicaps of poor reputation and weak credibility in global markets can be seen in lagging investment responses, even in stable democracies such as Ghana, Benin, Mali, Mozambique, or Namibia.

Prospects for Change? In this overview, I suggest that Africa’s new democracies have reflected an ambiguous record in revitalizing economies and alleviating poverty. Democratic governance provides counterweights to predatory rule, blatant neglect of public welfare, and purely self-regarding behavior by leaders. Democracy fosters institutions to reign in the arbitrary power of the executive. More stable and transparent legal settings, even if flawed, strengthen the potential for investment and exchange. Further, political liberalization affords space for civic mobilization, public interest lobbying, and independent media outlets that can disseminate information and hold leaders accountable. Electoral democracy may not be sufficient to transform African economies, but it appears necessary for economic advancement. A growing body of data and analysis affirms a democratic advantage, though often modest, in economic performance throughout the region. The next stage of reform, however, is likely to be predicated on more extensive accountability of African governments to their constituents. If electoral incentives are more strongly linked to programs and performance, it will be increasingly likely that politicians will focus on the provision of public goods rather than discretionary benefits to clients. In order for these changes to be effected, several factors must come into play. 28 The first is the selection and orientation of leadership. In several African democracies, including Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, and South Africa, a newer generation of technocratic, reform-minded leaders has made a mark in the political scene. Institutionalized electoral systems and more active opposition in several countries help to shift incentives for political aspirants while creating opportunities for the entry of newcomers into the political sphere. Some of these elements can serve to drive change beyond the limits of current political and institutional arrangements.

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Forward-looking politicians need allies among constituencies and civic groups, pointing to a second important factor, the formation of broader coalitions for change in democratizing states. In much of Africa, reform elements in the civic sphere currently lack cohesion and focus. Yet the possibilities for more capable and better-coordinated movements for change can be glimpsed in several countries. In South Africa, civic organizations are demanding better public services and welfare provisions. In Ghana, business groups lobby for improved economic policies. Nigerian activists successfully resisted efforts to extend term limits for the president. Zambians have protested government corruption and advocated greater transparency. These initiatives do not necessarily constitute movements for economic reform, but they do represent new demands and pressures on incumbent elites. A third factor is the continued need for institutional development in democratizing states. This is an incremental and uneven process, but there is evidence from many countries that governments are making headway in stemming corruption, improving the legal environment, building workable financial systems, and regulating key sectors such as banking and telecommunications. Institutional development in democratizing states is a crucial requisite for sustainable economic expansion and the prospect of poverty reduction.

Conclusion Almost twenty years after the African wave of democratization crested in 1994, political reform has produced a mixed record in managing the region’s economies. Democratization can offer intrinsic benefits for rights, liberties, and accountability, yet it furnishes no panacea for accelerating growth or reducing poverty. Many of Africa’s new democracies have significantly improved in economic growth, but they have not achieved broad-based prosperity. The resulting tensions between popular expectations and political realities create impediments for the consolidation of democracy. Poor economic performance restricts government resources, fosters social conflict, and undermines the legitimacy of electoral regimes. Despite these challenges, there is evidence that most citizens in Africa’s fledgling democracies are willing to allow time for economic improvements. Further, there are political trends—including

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generational changes in leadership, increasingly assertive civic engagement, and incremental changes in institutions—that suggest openings for longer-term reform. Africa’s quest for democratic development remains a vibrant, if unfinished, agenda.

Notes 1. A compelling argument about the link between governance and economic performance in Africa is presented in Benno Ndulu, Stephen O’Connell, Robert Bates, Paul Collier, and Charles Soludo, eds., The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). This linkage is not universally emphasized. For instance, the international economist Jeffrey Sachs discounts the importance of governance as a determinant of economic performance, stressing instead the region’s unfavorable geography, capital shortages, and limited access to global markets. See Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies,” Journal of African Economies 6, 3 (1997): 361. 2. Ndulu et al., The Political Economy. 3. Steven Radelet, Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2010). 4. Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World’s PoliticalEconomic Systems (New York: Basic Book, 1977), pp. 164–165. 5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999). 6. Claude Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996). 7. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. Michael Bratton, “Are You Being Served? Popular Satisfaction with Health and Education Services in Africa,” Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 65 (Afrobarometer Network, January 2007), www.afrobarometer.org, accessed December 15, 2011. 9. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 188. 10. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See also Michael Bratton and Peter Lewis, “The Durability of Political Goods: Evidence from Nigeria’s New Democracy,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 45, 1 (2007): 1–33.

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11. Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 12. Democracies also registered substantially higher investment spending than nondemocracies, which over time could compensate for the growthhampering effects of inflation and fiscal deficits. See ibid., p. 255. 13. Brian Levy, “Are Africa’s Economic Reforms Sustainable? Bringing Governance Back In,” in Democratic Reform in Africa: Its Impact on Governance and Poverty Alleviation, ed. Muna Ndulo (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 126–149. 14. In Levy’s classification, “strong adjustors” include Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia; all but two were electoral democracies by 2000. “Late adjustors” include Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Tanzania, three of which were democratic by 2000. The “polarized governance” countries include Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Zimbabwe, all of which were essentially authoritarian regimes during the 1990s. Ibid., p. 137. 15. Ndulu et al., The Political Economy. 16. David Stasavage, “Democracy and Education Spending in Africa,” American Journal of Political Science 49, 2 (2005): 343–358. 17. See Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2011 (Washington, DC: Freedom House), www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=505, accessed December 15, 2011; and Polity IV Project, Monty Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2009 (College Park, MD: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2009), www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm, accessed December 15, 2011. 18. The determination for categorizing countries was guided by Freedom House measures. Freedom House rates countries on two dimensions of political rights and civil liberties, assigning a score of 1 for most open societies and 7 for most repressive. Overall, comparison with Polity IV shows the latter to be more permissive in rating the openness of political systems. I have adopted the more restrictive Freedom House metric using the following categories: countries with Freedom House scores of 1–2 are considered fully democratic systems, countries with scores of 3–5 comprise electoral regimes, and countries with scores of 6–7 are autocracies. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2011. 19. For the most recent period (ca. 2010), the categories are as follows. Democracies: Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, and South Africa. Electoral democracies: Burundi, Central African Republic, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zambia.

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Autocracies: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. 20. The four periods include the following: (1) T–3: three years preceding political transition or default year of 1992 for countries that have not experienced transition; (2) T+2: two years following political transition; (3) 3 to 5: three to five years after transition; (4) 10 to 12: ten to twelve years after transition or latest available data. 21. Although the situation in Zimbabwe is especially acute, reported deficits of food also have significantly increased in Malawi and Nigeria, with more modest increases in Tanzania and Uganda. The food shortage measure is not driven by a single case. 22. Robert Mattes, “The Material and Political Bases of Lived Poverty in Africa: Insights from the Afrobarometer,” Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 98 (Afrobarmeter Network, May 2008), www.afrobarometer.org, accessed December 15, 2011. 23. Ibid., p. 22. 24. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa. See also Peter M. Lewis, “Economic Reform and Political Transition in Africa: The Quest for a Politics of Development,” World Politics 49 (October 1996): 92–129. 25. Ake, Democracy and Development, p. 139. 26. Nicolas van de Walle, “Presidentialism and Clientelism in Africa’s Emerging Party Systems,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, 2 (2003): 297–321. 27. Survey data suggest that many Africans are willing to accept user fees if the quality of service improves. Unfortunately, user fees often limit access to services while education and health remain underprovided. 28. Peter Lewis, “A Virtuous Circle? Democratization and Economic Reform in Africa,” in Pathways to Democracy, ed. Calvin Jillson and James Hollifield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 259–271. See also Henry Bienen and Jeffrey Herbst, “The Relationship Between Political and Economic Reform in Africa,” Comparative Politics 29, 1 (1996): 23–42.

4 Contested Land Rights in Rural Africa Catherine Boone

Land law reform has figured prominently in the push toward

second-generation structural adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa. Steady movement toward the growth-promoting individualization and transferability of property rights in land is considered to be fundamental to the larger quest to promote investment and technological upgrading in agriculture. Much of the recent discussion has centered on how to best formalize existing land rights into systems that can be operated through a market economy, rather than revolutionizing the status quo with radical top-down interventions. This gradualist approach is supposed to avoid many of the distributive conflicts, impediments embedded in local land practices, risk averse choices and strategies on the part of farmers, and challenges to local administrative capacity that have slowed or thwarted past attempts at land law modernization in sub-Saharan Africa. This turns out to be far more than a matter of simply getting the institutions right. In this chapter, I show that these debates can engage a complex bundle of political and constitutional issues that complicate efforts to promote the individualization and formalization of land rights in many rural zones. In theory, democratization and decentralization should complement these land law reform initiatives. More open political arenas will facilitate information flows and negotiation, help promote transparency, and create conditions that allow lawmakers and implementers to

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make credible commitments to stakeholders. Decentralization should off-load some of the administrative burden—including challenges of information gathering, adjudication, monitoring, and enforcement—by passing some of these functions from the central state to local-level officials and local-level representative political bodies. And perhaps most fundamentally, the creation of more exclusive and secure land rights is presumed to be a process that will gain momentum from the main beneficiaries of such a transformation—that is, from the masses that are found at the grassroots level of both the economy and the political system. Rural populations, still the large majority in most African countries, will embrace land law reform because they will gain both political and economic autonomy as their dead assets are converted into living capital that is protected from arbitrary seizure by the state or its cronies. Yet, as Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa point out in Chapter 1, standard assumptions about players and their interests sometimes fail to match reality. In this chapter, I argue that in fact land law reform is and will remain much more difficult, politically, than much of the policy literature would predict. Today’s discussions of land law reform are taking place in the context of intensifying conflict over land rights in many African countries. Across much of the continent, demographic increase, environmental stress, and the mounting (although uneven) pressures of commercialization of land, labor, and output all add momentum to processes that can promote the growing exclusivity of land rights. Pressures or movement in the direction of more exclusive land rights— including the land law reforms now on the table in many countries— can provoke contestation and conflict because of the distributional implications of such changes. In countries with weak political institutions for managing distributional conflict (other than allocation by ethnic arithmetic and clientelism), this means that land law reform may be stifled or paralyzed by distributional tensions, or may itself be generative of political conflict. Formalization of land law, a process that is promoted today by both external actors like the World Bank as well as domestic political actors seeking more secure or expanded rights to property, cannot always be viewed as a gradual, incremental assist to endogenous processes of individualization and marketization that are simply occurring anyway. Rather, these endogenous processes of private property formation often provoke objection or even resistance on the part of those who do not gain from the growing exclusivity of land rights or

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from those who seek to redirect these processes to limit their losses or secure some new advantage. This chapter concentrates on the politicization of land rights that occurs in these contexts. I seek to explain how and why patterns of land rights politicization can vary across space and time. My focus is on two dimensions of variation in these outcomes. The first is differences in the extent to which land debates implicate structures, processes, and agents of the central state. The second is the nature of the political discourse that emerges around land conflicts and the forms of contentious politics that emerge. My main argument is that the nature of the underlying land regime is a fundamental variable shaping forms of land politics and contention. Some of the recent changes in the macropolitical context that are associated with governance reforms can have implications for the land tenure regime (e.g., decentralization) and, thus, impact land politics directly. Returns to multipartism can have an indirect effect on land matters by shaping the ways in which tension or conflict over land finds expression in contentious politics. Using examples from Ghana and Kenya, I show how ongoing political contestation over land tenure rules can be wrapped around questions about citizenship rights, the accountability of local authority, and the legitimacy of processes of class formation. These cases focus attention on the three dimensions of sub-Saharan African land tenure situations that prove to be particularly salient in shaping land debates and conflicts: (1) the intensity of demographic and environmental stress (DES) or the extent of commercialization of agriculture; (2) how land regimes define the locus of authority over the allocation of land rights (central vs. local); and (3) how the land regime defines the property or usufruct rights and political rights of in-migrants. Levels of commercialization of agriculture are high in both southern Ghana and the Rift Valley of Kenya and in both regions the experience of land scarcity is widespread among smallholders. Yet the cases vary starkly along the two other dimensions, allowing us to provide some empirical support for the claim that variations in underlying land tenure regimes produce differences in the forms of land politics visible in rural Africa today. In both Ghana and Kenya, moves toward land law reform are fueling land-related tensions. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part conceptualizes African land regimes as a political and economic solution to governance and development challenges as they were understood—for

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better or for worse—in early-to-mid-twentieth-century Africa. The land regimes specified relations of property, authority, and citizenship within the decentralized political frameworks of the colonial and postcolonial state. Changing macroeconomic, demographic, environmental, and political conditions have destabilized existing land systems and, hence, the property, authority, and citizenship rules that were specified therein. Under these conditions, the two basic variants of the existing smallholder land tenure regimes—the neocustomary model and the statist model—produce different political effects. The second part of the chapter takes southern Ghana as an example of the neocustomary model. Here, the growing exclusivity of land rights is, by many accounts, empowering and enriching chiefs at the expense of stool citizens. This process has provoked localized forms of contentious politics over the lack of accountability of local authority. The land law reforms currently under discussion seem likely to raise tensions around the already high-stakes issue of how to restrain the power of chiefs. Part three examines the farming districts of Kenya’s Rift Valley as an example of the statist variant of the smallholder land regime. Farming regions of the Rift are places of enclosure and commercial development. Smallholders and livestock raisers experience rising land values and land scarcity. The growing exclusivity of rights, which is both a consequence and a driver of these processes, distributes property rights and political clout in favor of settlers at the expense of indigenes of the Rift Valley. In this process of redistribution, those who lose out are mobilized into violent and nonviolent politics of contention over the political and economic meaning of citizenship in Kenya. Land law reform, rather than smoothing the way for gradual formalization and privatization of property rights in land, has become swept up in conflicts over the construction of the national state.

Land Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa Land tenure regimes that prevail across most of rural sub-Saharan Africa were designed under colonial rule. In many parts of the continent, they are not working well today. As Liz Alden Wily and Daniel Hammond put it in a 2001 study on Ghana, “Tenure problems are reaching a crisis point more or less all over Africa and for similar historical reasons.”1 These historical reasons have to do with rising land

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values, demographic increase, environmental stress, rising input prices, and the shifting winds of markets for agricultural commodities, all of which are working to fuel social and political tensions that are difficult to contain within the old land regimes. Existing land tenure regimes were designed under colonial rule in an era of land abundance and low population densities. Shallow and conservative central governments wanted to keep African populations on the land, living within their assigned ethnic territories and out of the political arena. In general, colonial regimes wanted to promote some export crop production in specific, geographically constrained zones of each colony (e.g., in what became the groundnut basin in Senegal, but not elsewhere in Senegal). They wanted this job done by African peasants who used family labor, on land that they did not have to buy or rent, and with few purchased inputs. Under these arrangements, farming families living within their designated ethnic territories usually met a large share of their own subsistence needs.2 The use of family land and labor to produce subsistence crops and, in some places, cash crops, restrained the commercialization of land, labor, and food crops; this approach kept the monetary costs of producing commercial crops lower than they would otherwise be. It also helped shore up the material bases of a form of rural governance that rested in critical ways on the power of neotraditional authorities (chiefs, etc.) to regulate access to land within their ethnically defined and territorially circumscribed domains. Population increase could be absorbed into extensive farming systems as long as there was an open land frontier so that new families could establish their own farms. Colonial states and most of their postcolonial successors claimed ultimate ownership of almost all land under their sovereign jurisdictions. This eminent domain could be used to define or redefine the territorial jurisdictions of neotraditional authorities—for example, by adding land to a chiefdom, dividing a chiefdom in two, or extracting land from a “tribal homeland” in order to create a game park. The power of the central state trumped the neotraditional system and neocustomary land rights when it served central rulers’ purposes.

Two Basic Variants of the Smallholder Land Regime There are two basic variants of the land regime in smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa. They differ in how they define the

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locus of authority over land rights allocation and adjudication (as vested in the local vs. the central state) and in how they define citizenship and its entitlements (as derived from indigeneity vs. derived from membership in the national state). Whether to describe these in the past tense or the present tense is a difficult call. Land systems are changing everywhere, in some places more than in others. I opt here for the past tense in order to underscore the more general argument that the old systems or existing systems no longer appear as stable and flexible—in the sense of accommodating incremental changes while managing social tensions—as many did, say, from the 1960s through the 1980s. The Neocustomary Model

The first is the neocustomary model. Under neocustomary systems recognized by colonial and postcolonial rulers, land within the territorial jurisdiction (defined by the state) of a given community was vested in this collectivity. Power to administer land was vested in the community head, usually a chief. Families deemed to be indigenous or autochthonous to these jurisdictions or collectivities—that is, to be natural citizens of the local polity—had lineage land rights in the locality. Although lineage rights are not formally registered or titled, they were generally secure from arbitrary expropriation by other members of the community or local-level authorities. Yet the scope and arbitrariness of chiefly power varied a great deal by context. The range of local authorities’ prerogatives also varied according to the type of land in question. In general, chiefs under the neocustomary systems had most latitude in the dispensation of lands that were not in use or that made up the commons. Farming systems so organized could accommodate in-migration when the core social group had sufficient land to offer strangers, and the indigenous group had some incentive to do so. In the twentieth century, the rapid expansion of a cash crop farming in some areas created demand for labor that was often met through in-migration. In some places, indigenous landholders paid for labor directly. But in many places where in-migrants supplied part of the labor that fueled cash crop production (e.g., in southern Ghana’s cocoa economy), chiefs or lineage heads granted in-migrants access to new land in exchange for rent or a share of the harvest. The migrants often remained noncitizens in their new homes (acceptees without local

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political rights or entitlements) for a couple of generations, and sometimes longer. This is consistent with a model of local government in which legitimacy of political community, legitimacy of local political authority, and users’ ability to access land on the basis of a land entitlement all rested on the principle of indigeneity or autochthony. Flows of migrant laborers, and the in-migration of sharecroppers, played a central role in the expansion of export crop production in the smallholder or peasant-based economies of West Africa. The Statist Model

There is a second basic variant of the smallholder model in subSaharan Africa, which can be referred to as the state-as-landlord or statist model. In some parts of some colonies or countries, central rulers organized in-flows of migrants to colonize zones in which the central state recognized no traditional authority, could push existing African authorities aside, or could pressure local populations to allow outsiders to clear and farm what the state viewed as underutilized or unused land. In such areas, the central state itself was the locus of authority over land access and allocation—the state was a hands-on broker, allocator, and enforcer of land rights. Neotraditional authorities could be nonexistent, driven out, or just marginalized: in this state-centered variant of a smallholder land tenure regime, the central state itself did not recognize (or gives short shrift to) ancestral- or indigeneity- based land rights. Land rights were derived from the central state itself. These rights could be legitimated in terms of benefit to the national collectivity (i.e., the users of the land are contributing to national development) or the national citizenship rights of the users (as in “Kenya belongs to all Kenyans”). In these situations, the constitution of local political authority and the definition of local citizenship, entitlements, and political rights were very different from the constitutional makeup of the local polity in the neocustomary model described above. Where smallholders settled in new lands under the aegis of the government itself, the granting of private property rights to settlers was a political option open to the state. 3 African states declined or were slow to grant title to farmers in the postcolonial settlement programs or schemes, however. Part of the reason was that settlers whose land rights were directly dependent on the discretion of the central authorities were good political clients for rulers.

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Some examples of this state-centered land tenure model are the Office du Niger in Mali and the smallholding schemes in the Senegal River Delta, where “new lands” were opened up by the central state through irrigation schemes or dams for land reclamation. Other examples are the settlement of almost half of Rwanda’s national territory under the authority of the central state after 1962, when Tutsi were killed or expelled, and the government built dams to turn swamps into arable land. In Kivu Province of the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, the colonial rulers settled “surplus populations” of Rwandans. The Ivoirian government used its muscle to pressure indigenous groups in the sparsely populated southwest of their country to allocate farmland to in-migrants. The example featured in the case study section below is that of the farming districts of Kenya’s Rift Valley, where the central government purchased land from departing European settlers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and organized schemes to settle African smallholders on government land.

Destabilization of Existing Land Regimes These land tenure regimes proved politically sustainable, in the main, until recent decades. Important in explaining the political resilience of neocustomary tenure systems is that they did provide most farming households with access to at least some land within their home areas. The statist land regime rested more squarely on the authority, coercive capacity, and in some cases the repressive capacity of the central state since enforcement of the user rights granted to settlers or in-migrants often required displacement or overriding of preexisting claims (i.e., the preexisting claims that the modern state itself recognized elsewhere in its territorial jurisdiction as autochthonous rights). Across most of colonial and postcolonial Africa until today, access to farmland for subsistence and perhaps cash cropping has been a kind of entitlement under the neocustomary land regimes or, in the case of statist regimes, a gift or grant to smallholders. This access to land, backed indirectly or directly by central rulers, can be understood as the core of a social contract, limited as it was (and not always honored), between most of rural Africa and the state. The land regime was the core structural support of the system of rule by which postcolonial leaders governed much, perhaps most, of rural Africa.

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Under the neocustomary model, chiefs and other rural intermediaries brokered access not only to land, but also to the national political system, to credit and purchased agricultural inputs, and to social services. Under the statist model, this role was played by direct agents of the state. Given the dependence of rural families on the good graces of these local intermediaries, the chiefs and their secular counterparts were in a good position to deliver the vote to national politicians at election time. These smallholder land regimes evolved under macropolitical, sociodemographic, environmental, and economic conditions that, in many places, no longer hold. The closing of the land frontier, rising land values, increasing populations, environmental change, and the changing structure of agricultural commodity markets all destabilize the existing institutions and political relationships. In some places, structural adjustment reforms and the return to multipartism have also had destabilizing effects, as intended. Land regimes are changing along with the models of rural governance that they anchored. Widely accepted theories of land rights change in sub-Saharan Africa predicted that rising land values and population densities would produce gradual and incremental shifts toward more exclusive and more commercialized land rights. This “endogenous evolution of land rights“ is understood to be the organic, or bottom-up, development of private property rights in land. From the vantage point of the present, what is clear is that these theories of land rights evolution did not pay enough attention to the politics that would or could attend this process. Growing exclusivity of rights is a redistributive process that can produce contention. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa today, growing exclusivity of rights, or the push-and-pull generated by incentives to secure more exclusive rights, play into the larger processes that are destabilizing existing land regimes. Most analysts of land tenure issues in Africa today agree that these changes are intensifying social and political tensions, and even conflict, around land tenure norms and rules.4 In these settings, variation in tenure regimes is reflected in differences in the ways in which land rights are politicized. Tenure regimes are built on rules about how authority and citizenship entitlements structure access to productive resources. The next two sections show how land pressure and rising land values have produced localized conflict over the nature of legitimate authority in southern Ghana and

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nationalized conflict over citizenship rights in the Rift Valley of Kenya. Donor-endorsed or -supported land law reform processes in both countries have been swept up in these larger political and constitutional debates.

Land Tenure and Land Politics in Southern Ghana Much of southern Ghana is roiling with localized disputes, chronic tensions, and periodic conflicts over land rights. Although the temperature is hottest in periurban zones, the geographic extent appears to be wide and profound tensions over land rights exist throughout the highly commercialized rural areas of the forest zone.5 In most of southern Ghana, the power to allocate and authorize the sale of land is vested in the hands of chiefs, whose territorial jurisdictions and authority over land were consolidated under a British colonial system of indirect rule. From the 1920s to the present day, a great deal of the conflict over land rights in southern Ghana has centered on the rights and prerogatives of these chiefs. The rise of a peasant-based export economy in Ghana dates to the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1911, the territory was the world’s leading cocoa supplier. Production spread from the original cocoa areas of Akwampin and the chieftaincy of Akim Abuakwa to the southern Asante region. In-migration provided much of the labor that fueled the development of this cash crop system. Before the 1930s, the system of land pioneering was led by in-migrants who purchased land from chiefs in Akwampin (the “company land” system6). Land purchases chipped away at chiefly power by alienating land from their domains. Around the 1930s, this system gave way to an abusa sharecropping system, under which migrant farmers asked local chiefs for permission to cultivate stool lands (Akan “crown lands”) and in exchange paid tribute to the stool or chieftaincy.7 This turned land pioneering into a social and economic process that fueled chiefly power. Stool lands in the Akan polities were and still are defined as communal lands that lie under the jurisdiction of the paramount chiefs who are supposed to administer these assets in trusteeship for the nation. Early in the twentieth century, the British codified the Asante chiefs’ power “to allocate, control, and dispose of land” within their territorial jurisdictions8 and the institution of stool land developed as the linch-

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pin of British indirect rule in Ghana. The British saw stool lands and chiefly prerogatives over land as arrangements that would restrain the development of land markets and, thus, help reinforce chiefs’ control over their subjects. As things worked out, these arrangements have proven to be the cornerstone of a legal framework that has allowed chiefs to extract tribute, rents, revenue, and profits from land—and also to accumulate properties on their own account—sometimes at the expense of their subjects and the communities they are supposed to represent. The status quo creates wide possibilities for primitive accumulation on the part of chiefs, and this is the source of a great deal of land-related conflict in this region.

The Land Regime In 2003, the World Bank estimated that more than 80 percent of Ghana’s total land area was held under some form of customary authority. In the cocoa belt, this authority is institutionalized in the Akan stools. Stools are the centerpiece of what Kojo Sebastian Amanor describes as a four-part system of land administration.9 This tenure regime distributes rights between chiefs, lineages, in-migrants and other outsiders, and the central state, allocating land rights in ways that are the subject of contention when rising land values, demographic increases, or land law reform give momentum to processes that contribute to the growing exclusivity of land rights. Lineage Lands

While residual or allodial land rights are recognized by Ghana’s courts and constitution as belonging to the stools, families that are considered to be full members of the political community represented by a given stool have lineage-based usufruct rights (i.e., family rights) to land in territory under the stool’s jurisdiction (i.e., their home area). Lineage lands are supposed to be secure from arbitrary intervention, and users do not pay tribute to chiefs.10 (By contrast, lands used by migrants for farming, fishing, grazing, and so forth, are subject to tribute.) Lineage lands can be mortgaged, leased, or sold with the permission of the chief, upon payment of a transaction tax to the stool. If the stool takes over lineage lands by asserting eminent domain, the local family “has

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a right to expect compensation.”11 These lands are considered to be held under customary freehold, which Liz Alden Wily and Daniel Hammond describe as being similar to common-law freehold.12 Stool Lands Purchased by Individuals or Families from Chiefs

Amanor notes that stool lands purchased by individuals or families from chiefs “tend to become lineage lands over time” or assimilated into the category of customary freehold. 13 As a de facto matter, the transferability of such landholdings is often encumbered by claims made by extended families.14 Virgin Land Under the Authority of the Chief

Virgin land under the chief’s authority would include frontier land lying within the territorial jurisdiction of a particular stool. The chief has the right to use this land; to lease it to migrants, foreigners, or other noncommunity members, or to revoke such leases (as in the termination of abusa sharecropping arrangements); or to sell it to community members (as in the previous subsection). Given that the land itself is supposed to be communal land, proceeds from such use, leasing and the payment of tribute, or sale are supposed to be used on behalf of or shared by the community.15 In practice, stool lands that have been claimed and are used directly by chiefs for the creation of their own estates have been conceded to them as private property. Ghanaian courts now widely recognize chiefs’ private rights as “landlords” (with individual ownership) over stool lands that they had appropriated.16 The principle of chiefly trusteeship over stools lands creates the widest possibilities for the unrestrained exercise of chiefly prerogative in the case of unoccupied stool lands or frontier lands claimed by stools.17 Settling strangers or noncitizens of the stool on such lands is very much in the interests of the chief; this kind of occupancy allows the stool to assert or enforce its jurisdiction over territory so occupied and also allows chiefs to collect tribute from migrants.18 Tribute-paying migrant farmers constituted a large proportion of the population in the Ashanti and Ahafo regions circa 1960—perhaps 20 percent to 40 percent of all cocoa farmers19—so this source of income has been important indeed for chiefs and stool treasuries. Sales are also lucrative and the source of much debate over chiefly versus communal versus lineage rights.20

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Concessions Under the Authority of the Stool or Chiefs

Examples of concessions under the authority of the stool or chiefs include timber and mining concessions. In the case of timber concessions, de jure regulatory authority over forestland has been vested in the central government since 1962, with about 30 percent of the proceeds from forest concessions reverting to the stool, paramount chief, and local district assembly.21

This four-part land tenure regime concentrated powers of land rights allocation, enforcement, and adjudication in hierarchies of Akan chiefs and the councils of elders with whom they are supposed to consult. The Ghanaian court system served as a venue of appeal for cases not resolved through the neotraditional system. This constitutes the “Asante model of dispute adjudication” that is often mentioned by land policy analysts as a positive example of how local actors can resolve property disputes without resorting to costly formal procedures. 22 Systematic biases are inherent in the system, however. The neotraditional character of adjudication of chiefs by elders, which by definition is supposed to defend community interests and cultural integrity against outsiders and threats, tends to bias this part of the adjudication system against noncitizens of the stool (migrants, foreigners, etc.), women, and youth. And external checks and balances on the power of local elites are limited and often ineffective. Notorious backlogs of land cases in the court system, and the high costs of formal adjudication in these venues, mean that only high-profile cases end up in the courts. High barriers to entry into the courts reinforce the weight of chiefs as arbiters of land disputes and make it difficult for citizens to bring cases against the chiefs themselves. Conflict over land has been a pervasive feature of life in the rural and periurban parts of southern Ghana for many decades.23 Today, the stakes and tensions are heightened by rising land values, demographic increase and urban sprawl, and broader changes in the national economy that conspire to place many rural families in situations of land shortage.24 Here as everywhere, the drive on the part of many users and rights holders to secure more exclusive land rights, along with commercialization in general, are processes that produce winners and losers. In southern Ghana, the character of the land tenure regime goes very far in defining the socioeconomic contours of this process. The

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most obvious tendency is the accumulation of land powers and landed property on the part of the chiefly elite at the expense of lineage rights holders.

Politicization of Land Issues in Southern Ghana Those at the losing end of the growing competition over land and land rights have three options: exit, loyalty, and voice.25 Exit in this context could mean exit from farming, from the rural areas, or even from the country. Loyalty could mean taking losses and making the best of it, appealing for some considerate dispensation from decisionmakers, or employing weapons of the weak.26 Voice could refer to the contestation over land rights in the public or political arena. In southern Ghana, where the authority to allocate and enforce land rights is concentrated in the hands of the chiefs, exit and loyalty are certainly the modal or everyday responses to processes by which the chiefly elite and their associates consolidate more exclusive land rights. Yet there is a great deal of voiced contestation over the processes that are transforming the allocation of land rights. The explicit politicization of land-related conflict focuses on (1) the procedural matter of whether chiefly prerogative is wielded according to agreed-on rules and (2) to a lesser extent, the substantive problem of concentration of control over land in the hands of the wealthy elite. Chiefly Prerogative and the Struggle to Restrain the Local State

At the center of land rights discourse are attempts to activate or invoke procedural restraints on the use of chiefly authority to convert communal rights in land (or proceeds from the sale of stool land) into the private possession or private property of the chiefs themselves. At one level, this is a discourse that tries to call chiefs to account for the abuse of office for personal enrichment. Yet as Sara Berry argues, it feeds into, and can be interpreted as, a broader discourse about the constitution of the “local state”—that is, on how to institutionalize legitimate and accountable authority, structure taxation, define property, and delimit the boundaries between public and private.27 It seems that in recent years, the most flagrant violations of the local constitutional order have occurred when chiefs sell off stool lands (e.g., to private developers) without consulting elders, and they

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pocket the money themselves. Some chiefs sell off stool lands and spend some portion of the proceeds on the community as would be considered proper (e.g., to build a road), but keep too much of the money themselves. Sales of lineage lands without proper consultations with the affected clan or the payment of compensation seem downright illegal, but in the periurban areas of Kumasi, for example, such sales appear to be a frequent occurrence.28 Not surprisingly, this problem is rampant around Accra. 29 When it comes to settling migrants or strangers on stool land or the use of other commons (e.g., forests), the scope and proper limits of chiefly prerogative are often more ambiguous. This opens the door to serious and frequent contestation over the discretionary powers of chiefs. Ghana’s newspapers are full of stories of chiefs being caught red-handed in corrupt, exploitative, and opportunistic deals that violate the letter and spirit of laws that give chiefs trusteeship of community lands. Janine Ubink finds that some chiefs argue explicitly that, in today’s circumstances, the old norms of trusteeship have become outdated and should be revised in their favor. Some contend that as land values rise “communal lands that can be used in a more productive way should be brought back under chiefly administration.”30 Protest and resistance that takes place in the public or political arena seems to take two main forms. The first is the contentious politics of scandal making: denunciations, petitioning, public protests and demonstrations, highly public attacks on chiefs’ palaces or other property of theirs (e.g., cars and plantations), or attacks on the chiefs themselves (e.g., assaults and chasing them away). Ubink recounts an extreme case in periurban Kumasi in 2003: In some villages there have even been large-scale violent uprisings of commoners against the chief. For instance in Pekyi No. 2, where the chief sold a large part of the village land to the Deeper Life Christian Ministry and then pocketed the money, the commoners chased both the chief and the church representatives out of the village, killing one of the latter in the process.31

A second recourse open to angry citizens of the Akan stools is to invoke the authority and adjudication processes of the central state. Taking chiefs to court is the most obvious of these, but this is a slow, costly, and complicated option. 32 Often, aggrieved citizens make appeals to agents of the provincial administration, ask agents of the district administration to use the police to apprehend or expel those

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exercising economic rights improperly granted by chiefs or traditional councils, write or otherwise appeal to the head of state or minister of the interior, or demonstrate in front of government offices. For example, in December 2005, there was conflict between local farmers and Fulani herdsmen on Kumawu stool lands (in the Sekyere East District in Ashanti). The herdsmen had been granted permits to graze cattle on stool lands by the chief, the Kumawuhene, and the Kumawu Traditional Council. The farmers accused Fulani herders of “causing wanton destruction,” disrupting farming activities in the area, contaminating sources of drinking water with cattle dung, destroying vegetation and water bodies without restraint, destroying 10 hectares of maize, harassing women, and causing children not to go to school for fear of an encounter with the herdsmen. The Ghanaian Chronicle reported that “the affected communities have lodged a complaint with the District Assembly and the local police, hoping that the District Chief Executive would direct some energy into bringing the situation under control.”33 This appears to be a case of local residents invoking the authority of the central state to counterbalance or even override that of the neotraditional institutions of local government. According to Ubink, the central administration generally tries to stay out of these cases, but this may not stop citizens from trying to bring the administration in on their side.34 Ubink argues explicitly that, so far, no Ghanaian political party has attempted to take up the issue of land rights, land law reform, or abuse of chiefly authority. She writes that the entire Ghanaian central administration adheres to a “policy of non-interference” in chiefly affairs in an attempt to stay on the good side of those who broker land and votes at the local level.35 Landlordism and Class-like Conflict

Many analysts of the political economy of southern Ghana have focused on the existence and dynamics of class-like tensions between commoners and chiefs, which have simmered across the cocoa belt since the early twentieth century.36 The existence of class-like tensions should be expected: the previous century witnessed a dramatic concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a chieftaincy-centered elite class in southern Ghana. The rise of landlordism has been as stark in this region as it has been anywhere in West Africa.

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Yet important, structural features of the cocoa economy work to deflect both class formation and the expression of class tensions in the forest zone. These include: the existence a land frontier during the twentieth century; the existence of a large peasantry in this region; the ability of the landlord elite to extract surpluses from independent producers via the chiefs’ control over commercial circuits, rather than via the exploitation of labor; and the centrality of sharecropping as the relation of production by which landlords have extracted a large share of the surplus from agriculture. Also important is the political salience of cross-cutting ethnic cleavages in Ghana (a phenomenon that is itself related to a land regime that privileges lineage rights over immigrants’ land rights). These cleavages can deflect social tensions away from class-like relations and focus political debates on questions about region and ethnicity. Amanor argued that around midcentury, when land allocations to migrations created situations of increasing land scarcity for stool citizens, commoners sometimes mobilized against chiefs, rather than blaming the migrants. 37 Jean Allman tracked these dynamics in Ashanti region in the 1940s and 1950s. 38 One question for further research is whether this pattern is observable today.

Land Law Reform in Ghana Moves toward land law reform in Ghana take place against the backdrop of a political discourse about land rights that is largely centered on the problem of chiefs’ appropriation of les biens publics. The 1999 National Land Policy, which provides the policy framework within which a Land Administration Project (LAP) supported by the World Bank now operates, aims at formalizing more coherent, efficient, and transparent land administration processes. Goals of the LAP are to harmonize statutory and customary laws, create and maintain capable institutions at all levels of government, promote communal and participatory land management, minimize protracted land disputes and litigation, and formalize land markets, thereby decreasing the incidence of encroachment, unapproved development schemes, multiple or illegal land sales, and undue land speculation and racketeering.39 The 1999 Land Policy aimed to accomplish these goals by further decentralizing administrative authority over land and by enhancing the

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information gathering, record keeping, and administrative capabilities of customary land secretariats, starting with the Kumasi Traditional Council and Gbawe family lands in Accra. Eventually, the government envisions the creation of more modern and transparent (more bureaucratized) land administration processes in at least fifty customary land secretariats. The difficulty is that traditional land authorities are likely to resist the restructuring and accountability measures that would constrain their prerogatives. This is precisely the problem identified by Alden Wily and Hammond in a 2001 review funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).40 They see the 1999 National Land Policy as streamlining and accelerating these processes of “elite capture” of community interests, and thus exacerbating inequality in landholding and in access to official machinery of land administration. Other analysts nevertheless remained optimistic that chiefly prerogative could be disciplined. State pressure could be put on the relevant agencies to work together and reorganize. In this optimistic view, popular pressure, rallied by information campaigns, could be leveraged against chiefs to pressure them to move toward greater transparency, fairness, and accountability in their land dealings. In her study of the administration of land in periurban Kumasi, Ubink sides with the skeptics. She notes that “despite the fact that the chiefs are [already] customarily and constitutionally obliged to administer the land in the interests of the whole community, they generally display little accountability for any money generated, and most indigenous community members are seeing little or no benefit from the leases.” Many chiefs are unwilling to explicitly account for stool land revenues, including chiefs who spend the money as they should on community development projects.41 Ubink argues that few fora exist for communities to speak out against chiefs and leverage popular pressure against them. Chiefs can ignore village-level oversight committees. 42 Traditional checks to chiefly power—namely, councils of elders and subchiefs, and the possibility of destoolment—are also largely ineffective, as these have eroded over time. 43 This leaves commoners without effective local representation. Those most vulnerable to the loss of land rights are also unlikely to find advocates at the national level, given central authorities’ commitment to devolving power over land administration to traditional institutions, the central government’s general unwillingness to interfere in chiefly affairs, and state officials’ unwillingness to enforce state law against traditional authorities.44

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Ghana’s 1999 land policy framework, which defines the policy direction of the LAP, aims to confirm the land adjudication powers of local-level authorities. This is an effort to clear the backlog of an estimated 35,000 land dispute cases tied up in the courts circa 2005 and to increase efficiency in future land litigation. But as Ubink points out, it is a highly political choice because it leaves local authorities in the position of legislator, administrator, and jury. Since these authorities are themselves the target of politicized conflict over land rights, the reform initiative therefore seems likely to heighten the stakes of larger struggles and debates over how to create and maintain legitimate authority at the local level in a context of rising community tensions over land rights and access to livelihoods.45

Land Tenure and Land Politics in the Farming Districts of the Rift Valley, Kenya The farming districts of Kenya’s Rift Valley Province (Nakuru, Uasin Gishu, Tranz-Nzoia, and Nandi) have been ravaged by waves of landrelated violence that have swept the region at election time since the return to multipartism in 1992. Approximately 1,500 were killed and 300,000 were displaced in the 1991–1993 election period. In the most recent episodes in 2007–2008, the government recognized death and displacement of the same magnitude while some observers argue that up to 5,000 people were killed. Much of the world press reported these episodes as outbursts of ethnic violence that involved the militant supporters of rival political parties. A deeper look confirms that land politics in the Rift have been deeply ethnicized by all of Kenya’s governments, both colonial and postcolonial, which have used their control over land allocation to engineer ethnically defined political constituencies that would bolster them against their rivals. Since the 1980s at least, geographic extent and duration of land-related conflict has been largely managed through the intervention of state agents who have served as both conflict instigators and as conflict squelchers. One Kikuyu farmer who was swept up in the 2007–2008 landrelated violence in Kenya said that “the government owns the Rift,” and so it does.46 In direct contrast to the rules prevailing in Ghana, the government of Kenya does not recognize customary rights over land in the farming districts of the Rift. This is a clear example of a statist land tenure regime in a farming region of sub-Saharan Africa. The political consequence is that in these parts of the Rift, conflict over

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land rights centers on the history of state-sponsored land allocations, the legitimacy of central state authority over land tenure in the Rift, and the battle over whether national citizenship trumps ethnic citizenship (and indigeneity-based claims to land) in these zones.

Land Regimes in the Farming Districts of the Rift Much of the Rift was expropriated by the colonial state from the Maasai and other peoples indigenous to this region and allocated or sold to European settlers in the early decades of the twentieth century. European settlers, including some white South Africans, created mixed farms, ranches, large plantations, and commercial estates, relying on labor recruited from the African reserves—land units designed for African peasant farming or pastoralism. By the 1940s, thousands of “squatters“ and laborers were living and working in the so-called White Highlands. A large majority of these were Kikuyu. Attempts by the colonial state and white farmers to expel some of these farmers from the Rift farming districts and to roll back the workers’ rights to use land for farming on their own account, fueled the rise of the Mau Mau movement, which in turn propelled Kenya’s nationalist struggle.47 Dealing with land questions in the Rift Valley was absolutely central to economic and political deals by which the radical nationalist movement was defused and Kenya gained independence from Great Britain. Between 1962 and 1966, approximately 20 percent of the land in the White Highlands was purchased through state-financed and state-run programs, parceled up to create settlement schemes, and transferred to Kenyan smallholders.48 In the 1970s, more colonial-era settler farms were acquired by the government through financing provided by parastatals or by leading politicians who gained access to government financing for this purpose. Some of these lands were also divided up and distributed to create small-scale farms for in-migrants to the Rift. High population densities in the former African reserves created land hunger that the colonial and postcolonial administrations clearly understood as a political problem that, if left unaddressed, threatened political stability. For smallholders, there have been three basic modes of statemediated access to farmland in the Rift.

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Settlement Schemes

All together, land transfer programs created a total of 123 state-run settlement schemes, which generally ranged in size from 5,000 to 10,000 acres.49 Most were designed as either “low density schemes,” which were divided up into parcels of 8–16 hectares that were designed for commercial farming, or “high density schemes,” which were subdivided into parcels of 4–6 hectares (in most places) and were designed for subsistence farming. 50 The 20 percent of the former White Highlands so transferred to African farmers totaled about 1.5 million acres, or about 65 percent of what had been considered to be the “European mixed farm area” (about 4 percent of the total area of the country). Through this process, the government had established about 500,000 people on the land by 1970, out of a population of 11.2 million.51 State officials were in direct control of the allocation of plots to individual household heads, who were selected on a case-by-case basis by the official settlement authority.52 Settlers on the schemes accepted thirty-year mortgages, payable to the government. John Harbeson explained that “the actual titles to the lands are held by the Central Land Board and are to become the possession of the settlers only when they meet their financial and developmental obligations [to pay for their plots, financed on a 30-year government loan at 6 percent rate of interest, and farm according to conditions laid out in a Letter of Allotment]. The settlers . . . have no legal recourse in case the settlement administration tries to recall loans or repossess plots.” Harbeson describes the settlers as “in reality tenants on sufferance of the settlement administration.”53 Rates of loan repayment on the schemes were low, and evictions of defaulters were rare. 54 Often, no individual titles were issued to members of cooperative societies who received state financing to purchase shares in group farms.55 Transferability of rights was restricted: sale of land on the settlement areas had to be approved by the Land Control Board. 56 These features of land rights on the schemes kept alive the direct, political tie between the rights holders and the state.57 Land Buying Companies

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Kenyatta government also encouraged the formation of semiprivate land buying companies (LBCs). LBCs

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purchased or leased farms or estates in the former White Highlands from the government, often from the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT), and then subdivided these holdings among individual (family) shareholders. Many ordinary Kenyan citizens, mostly Kikuyu and Luo, acquired land in the Rift by purchasing shares in the LBCs. 58 Ato Kwamena Onoma explains that this process was often very politicized. Around Nakuru, for example, the SFT acquired estates and then sold them to LBCs headed by high-ranking members of the Kenyatta regime who had often received state financing for this purpose.59 The Akiwumi Report cited the case of a member of parliament who represented Laikipia West Constituency and later, Molo Constituency, both in Nakuru District, who owned private finance companies that provided loans for settlers to obtain plots on properties that he had acquired from the government and that lay in his own electoral constituencies.60 Those who settled the land in this way often became the political clients of those who controlled the LBCs.61 Forests

A third category of government land that has been allocated to smallholders—often informally or illegally—is forestland. Approximately 2 percent of Kenya’s total land area was classified as forest reserve in 2000. The vast Mau Forests Complex in Rift Valley Province, made up of twenty-two forest blocks totaling about 452,000 hectares in 2000, covered a land area approximately equivalent to 34 percent of the total area of Nakuru, Uasin-Gishu, and Trans-Nzoia Districts combined (i.e., 13,057 square kilometers).62 Forestland can be formally redesignated for alternative use through the process of declassification. Sometimes through this legal process and sometimes completely informally, governments since Kenya’s colonial era have used these lands opportunistically as a state-owned resource that is available, virtually without cost or restriction, for arbitrary allocation to private users. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, when the colonial government decided that there were too many African squatters on the whiteowned farms in the Rift, this surplus population was forcibly resettled in the Olunguruone area of the Narok Forest. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, it seems that politicians, district officers, and the forestry service looked the other way as parts of the Mau Forest in Nakuru District—around Londiani, Njoro, and Elburgon in Molo Division—were settled by Kikuyu squatters. Given that settlement

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schemes were often bordered by forest reserves, this process could well have happened incrementally as families on the settlement schemes expanded and sought more land. From 1986 on, under President Daniel arap Moi, government forest lands became a caisse noire (slush fund) patronage resource that was used to reward rulers’ friends and to build political support. Once settled on government forestland, farming communities became constituencies that were completely dependent on the discretion of the regime. 63 The Moi regime settled thousands of families in the Mau Forest starting in about 1986. In the 1990s, the government also allowed large numbers of Kalinjin squatters to settle in the Anabkoi and Singalo Forests of Uasin-Gushu District, in forest reserve areas that were often adjacent to settlement schemes and LBC farms in the district. In the last year of the Moi regime (2001), vast tracks of the Mau Forest Reserve were cleared for settlement.64 Agents of the central state were directly implicated in the allocation of land rights in the settlement areas, including both the settlement schemes and the LBCs, as well as in the forests. The ongoing role of these authorities in the maintenance of such rights (which surely appeared more or less arbitrary, depending on location and circumstance) was a lived reality for smallholders in the farming districts of the Rift.65 The settlement schemes, LBCs, and squatter settlements in the forests created a prevailing land allocation was an explicitly political artifact. By the logic of the situation, land grievances that arose from this status quo would be focused on the central state.

Politicization of Land Issues in the Rift The settlement schemes, LBCs, and squatter settlements in the forests created a prevailing land allocation that not only was a political artifact, but also a partisan outcome. There were clear winners and losers. Under Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency, there was a clear bias in the allocation of farmland in favor of the core constituencies of the ruling party, even though the pattern of allocation also reflected larger historical currents, the force of circumstance, and disparities rooted deeply in the socioeconomic history of modern Kenya. The ethnopolitical groups that formed the backbone of support for the Kenyatta regime were nonindigenous to the Rift. There is no doubt that settlement policies and practices in the core farming districts of the Rift ignored cus-

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tomary rights to land, which were viewed by the Kenyatta state as having been extinguished by the British land expropriations of the early 1900s. Those at the losing end of this process were those who claimed these ancestral rights. The option of opening the Rift to settlement by all Kenyans—that is, to those that could not claim ancestral or precolonial rights to these lands—had been bitterly resisted by politicians representing the indigenes of the Rift in the early 1960s, who had argued for restitution of rights that had been taken away by the British. These voices were silenced in 1964 when Moi, then leader of the Rift Valley coalition, was brought into the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) by Kenyatta and rewarded for toeing his line on land issues in the Rift. Kenyatta ran Kenya as a one-party dictatorship from 1964 until his death in 1978, closing down debate and dissent on the land question.66 In these circumstances, those who regarded themselves as land rights losers could have been placated through the allocation of other patronage benefits from above (e.g., access to schools or water for communities). Moi inherited the presidency in 1978. From the mid-1980s onward, his regime became progressively more interested in using land allocation as a tool to forge a cohesive political constituency out of the various Rift Valley groups claiming to be native to the Rift. 67 (As Jacqueline Klopp explains, Moi also gave huge landed estates in the Rift to key members of a tight circle of regime operatives and insiders.68) Efforts to weld the various ethnicities of the central Rift into a cohesive Kalenjin ethnic group were a critical part of this process.69 The government shifted the bias in land allocation to these Kalenjin constituencies, plundering the forest reserves for new land that could be used as a patronage resource. The Moi regime also encouraged the airing of the land grievances of those who resented or had lost out in the land allocation politics of the 1960s and 1970s, calling into question the legitimacy of settlement schemes and LBCs created under the patronage of Kenyatta. These realities underscored and heightened the political contingency of smallholders’ land rights in the Rift Valley. According to Colin Kahl, demographic and environmental stress heightened tensions and the stakes in conflicts over land allocation.70 Closing of land frontiers in smallholder farming areas throughout Kenya gave many poor families few options for creating viable livelihoods in agriculture for their children. Drought, sedentarization, and

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moves into agriculture on the part of once largely pastoral people increased demands for farmland. Domestic legal challenges to the razing of forests, and international pressure to curb corruption and lawlessness at the pinnacles of the Moi regime, raised the costs of using the forest reserves as a new land frontier to settle Kalenjin farmers. These pressures made it harder for Moi to feed his own constituencies without directly attacking the acquired rights of those who had received land under Kenyatta. As Klopp emphasizes, it was also convenient to scapegoat Kikuyu and Luo smallholders in order to deflect the wrath of land-hungry Kalenjin away from the vast properties of Moi’s own cronies.71 The return to multipartism in 1991–1992 brought land allocation politics to a crisis point. If those who had lost out under the land allocation politics of the 1960s and 1970s had been silenced by Kenyatta, these aggrieved constituencies gained full voice—in Albert Hirschman’s full sense of the term—in the era of political liberalization. In 1991–1992, Moi regime operatives campaigned openly on a platform of chasing settlers out of the Rift and reallocating land to its own supporters. Pogroms targeted at settlers on settlement schemes killed hundreds and drove thousands off their land.72 Moi regime supporters moved into vacated farms and homes, with the assistance and protection of the government, in a process that started in 1991 and continued well after the election. These conflicts were replayed in 1997 and 2007–2008. If the Kenyan government owns the Rift, then the battle lines were clearly drawn in electoral struggles that would decide who would gain control of the central state and, with it, control over the allocation of access to farmland in this region of Kenya.73 This explicit politicization of land conflict focuses on (1) the moral legitimacy of land rights allocated by a central state seen as corrupt, overly partisan, and willing to manipulate or disregard the law (and the market) to serve the regime and its leaders, and (2) a debate over the scope, limits, and primacy of citizenship rights in the Kenya state (relative to those associated with rights invested in indigenous communities). Legitimacy of State Action

If the central state is unfair, lawless, and systematically partisan (in the sense of representing the political supporters of the regime rather than all Kenyans), then there is room to question the legitimacy of any of

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its actions. So it is that even title deeds formally and legally issued by the Kenyatta government were called “worthless pieces of paper” by high-ranking officials of the Moi regime.74 Reciprocally, title deeds to lands in former forest reserves that were acquired in the late 1980s and 1990s have been declared illegal by the post-2002 Mwai Kibaki government. Citizenship

In April 2005, an article entitled “Kenyans are ‘Free to Live Anywhere’” appeared in The Nation (Nairobi). It opens with: “Kenyans have the right to live anywhere in the country, the Government has reaffirmed. . . . Kenyans have a right to buy property, reside, conduct business, live and die anywhere in Kenya. Kenya belongs to all Kenyans.” 75 This position is an explicit repudiation of the so-called majimboist (or regional autonomy) political platform that was embraced by the Moi coalition before 1964, and that it has promoted with a vengeance since 1991. The majimbo position is that regions of Kenya belong to the ethnic groups that are indigenous to those areas. Therefore, regions should be administered by members of “their own communities”; 76 political representatives in the central government should represent their own territorially and ethnically defined communities; and land ownership in the regions should be reserved for individuals and groups indigenous to those places. In this view, ethnic citizenship trumps national citizenship when it comes to political representation and land rights. This debate over citizenship in Kenya is raging at this very moment.

Land Law Reform in Kenya Since the 1950s, the World Bank has endorsed and supported moves toward land registration and titling in Kenya, with the long-term goal of creating formal markets for private property in farmland and ranchland. Policy interventions aimed at this end have been launched against the backdrop of debates over whose rights are to be registered and titled, and which rights are to be secured. In Kenya as in Ghana, these deeply political questions are logically prior to, and engulf and subsume, the narrower land administration questions. This dynamic is captured graphically in David Throup and Charles Hornsby’s observa-

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tion that land registration heightened tensions around the time of the 1991–1992 violence in the Rift: In several settlement areas, the process of land registration was underway [as provided for in precedent and existing national land policy in Kenya]. Individual titles were being issued to local residents, replacing earlier communal [i.e., cooperative or company] title deeds. If Kikuyu, Abaluhya, Gusii and Luo settlers could be driven out of the Rift Valley borderlands before the process was completed, small-holdings could be appropriated by their Kalenjin former neighbors and they would forfeit all claims to the land.77

Government action to formalize land rights forced the logically prior question of whose land rights these are. This is a question that must be decided in the political arena. This political process is well under way, in fact. It has played out through the issuing of the Ndungu Report of 2004, and in the National Land Policy (NLP) drafting process of 2004 to 2010. Provisions of the draft NLP were included in the draft of the national constitution that was rejected by voters in 2005. The opposition campaigned for a no vote, in part by focusing voters’ attention on land provisions that would have (1) given women equal rights to inherit land and (2) added momentum to the implementation of the recommendations of the Ndungu Report which, among other things, called for a revocation of land rights that had been allocated illegally by the Moi regime. A main thrust of the NLP that was approved by the Ministry of Lands in May 2007 was a call for a complete overhaul of the land administration machinery of the Kenya state and a review of virtually all land rights, deeded or not, that have been issued or confirmed by the state since 1963. Its stated purposes were to make it possible to redress historical land grievances and safeguard minority rights. The Kenya Landowners Association and the Machakos and Makueni Ranchers Association claimed that core provisions of the 2007 NLP threatened to undermine the sanctity of private property rights in rural Kenya.78 Provisions of NLP were included in the new Kenya constitution that was approved by voters in 2010.79 The NLP opened up a Pandora’s box of land issues that have to do with the nature and legitimacy of the central state and the nation that it is supposed to represent. These issues are playing out on the national stage and are intimately intertwined with partisan politics and electoral competition at the national level. The central state is implicated so

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directly because it is the allocator of land rights in the farming districts of the Rift, which are the epicenter of land conflict in Kenya.80

Conclusion Since 2000, more than twenty African countries have undertaken overhauls of existing land tenure legislation. In Ghana and Kenya—as well as in Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa—land policy has been a high-visibility public issue.81 Returns to multipartism have played a role in these processes. As Patrick McAuslan writes, “In all, the pressure to act [on land law] is, at least in part, the result of contested democratic politics and the perceived need to meet the concerns of rural voters. This is most obvious in South Africa but also applies in Namibia and Tanzania.” 82 Governments in many African countries have sought to use land law reform to address questions of poverty, equity, restitution for past expropriations, investment and innovation in agriculture, or sustainability. The World Bank and other international lenders and donors have been major players in these processes. By making land law reform part of second-generation structural adjustment processes, the Bank played a key role pushing governments to acknowledge the need for workable legal frameworks for handling the backlogged, long-deferred, and divisive land problems that bedeviled many African countries. The Bank itself points to a “tremendous expansion” in its lending portfolio for land-related projects since the mid-1990s: While in FY 1990–94 only 3 stand-alone land projects were approved, the number increased to 19 ($0.7B commitment) and 25 ($1B commitment) in the 1995–99 and 2000–04 periods, respectively. This trend is expected to continue: FY04 projects and land-related projects . . . alone amount to $1B and, following the lead of the Bank, other donors are now addressing land issues much more vigorously in their programs as well.83

Since the 1990s, DFID and a host of NGOs, most prominently Oxfam, have invested in a wave of initiatives aimed at promoting wide-ranging overviews of national land law and dialogue among stakeholders. For the World Bank, individualization and transferability of title are the goal. Private property in land is still the economic and institu-

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tional gold standard, although Bank advocates of land tenure reform are now less confident about advocating land privatization across all of rural Africa than they were in earlier decades.84 Recognition of user rights and measures to make them more secure are seen as more modest, interim priorities. These goals have been promoted by land rights advocates who have come to see smallholders’ vulnerability to arbitrary expropriation as an important constraint on investment and innovation in agriculture, as well as a threat to livelihood security. Some land rights advocates, especially those with agendas honed in the UN’s Latin America–focused campaigns for indigenous rights, are focused on securing state protection for original rights, minority rights, or communal rights.85 The political and administrative decentralizations of the 1990s have been seen by nearly all of the foreign donors and advocates as aiding and abetting the land reform process. One of the express purposes of decentralization was to strengthen local prerogatives in land management (including the registration of existing rights) and dispute resolution. 86 This is widely considered to be a change that complements efforts to promote the formalization and securitization of land rights.87 This chapter has taken a cross-cutting view that emphasizes the intensely politicized nature of land administration in many African countries, using Kenya and Ghana as case studies. In zones of highly commercialized farming in Kenya and Ghana, tensions around distributional issues run high. The prospect of land law reform, rather than being seen as an incremental assist to the gradual processes of land rights privatization, hits raw political nerves, raising the stakes of what are highly divisive political questions about authority, inequality, and citizenship rights. Contrasts across the two cases provide support for the argument advanced here: existing land regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, which vary considerably across space, structure the political conflicts that are set in motion by the closing of the land frontier and the growing exclusivity of land rights and, by extension, by the specter of land law reform. The neotraditional land regimes, of which the Asante region of southern Ghana is one variant, focus tensions around distributional issues on the structure, legitimacy, and accountability of the local state and on power struggles within the community. Statist land regimes in the farming districts of Kenya’s Rift Valley, by contrast, focus conflict on how the central state itself exercises land prerogatives, thus bringing land conflict directly into the national politi-

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cal arena with the potential to force de facto referenda on questions of property and citizenship.88 Conflicts around land rights are coming to a head in many parts of Africa. Political liberalization has amplified the voices of land rights losers: those who were dispossessed in the past as well as those who are not on the winning side of processes that are producing more exclusive (more individualized, transferable) land rights today. Land questions raise tangled knots of state formation issues that many African countries have been able to duck or defer until now, when demographic stress, environmental stress, and intensified pressures associated with neoliberalism and the commercialization of agriculture all work to raise the stakes.

Notes 1. Liz Alden Wily and Daniel Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana—Is There a Way Forward? A Land Sector Scoping Study” (UK Department for International Development Ghana Rural Livelihoods Programme, 2001). 2. Alex Duncan and John Howell wrote that “in Ghana, . . . a 1986 estimate suggested that 20 percent of producers marketed the bulk of their produce, while 54 percent were marginal sellers, marketing only the residual after family needs were met, and 24 percent produced solely for family needs.” Alex Duncan and John Howell, “Introduction: Assessing the Impact of Structural Adjustment,” in Structural Adjustment and the African Farmer, ed. Alex Duncan and John Howell (London: Overseas Development Council, in association with James Currey and Heinemann, 1992), p. 9. 3. For example, the British Crown granted European settlers in Kenya 999-year leases, which were as good as freehold. 4. See Sara Berry, “Debating the Land Question in Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, 4 (2002): 638–668. 5. See Janine Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law: Land Management in Per-urban Kumasi, Ghana,” paper prepared for the conference of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies, Leiden, July 2007, http://ecas2007.aegis-eu.org/commence/user/view_file_forall.php?fileid=815, accessed December 19, 2008; Ato Kwamena Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ato Kwamena Onoma, “The Contradictory Potential of Institutions: The Rise and Decline of Land Documentation in Kenya,” paper presented at the Workshop on Institutional Change, Northwestern University, October 2007.

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6. Polly Hill, as reported in Roger J. Southall, “Farmers, Traders, and Brokers in the Gold Coast Cocoa Economy,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 12, 2 (1978): 193. See also Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 107, 111; and Gwendolyn Mikell, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 71. 7. See Jean Marie Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 37; and Gareth Austin, “The Emergence of Capitalist Relations in South Asante Cocoa-farming, c. 1916–1933,” Journal of African History 28, 2 (1987): 259–279. See Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London: James Currey, 1989); and Geoffrey Kay, The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972); both attribute the shift to the political needs of the colonial state. All or part of the land tribute collected by local chiefs was claimed by the paramount stool treasuries. In Ashanti region, the paramount chief received all revenues and then remitted a share to subordinate chiefs. 8. Raymond Noronha states that “in the Gold Coast, land sales had commenced at the turn of the century and had been given judicial recognition [by the colonial state]. The West African Lands Committee, however, in 1912 took the view that the sales of land were inconsistent with African customs which should be enforced. . . . After 1917 neither the administration nor the judiciary would enforce sales by Africans.” Raymond Noronha, A Review of the Literature on Land Tenure Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, Report No. ARU43, Research Unit of the World Bank Agriculture and Rural Development Department (Washington, DC: World Bank, July 19, 1985), pp. 27, 31. See also Beverly Grier, “Contradiction, Crisis, and Class Conflict: The State and Capitalist Development in Ghana Prior to 1948,” in Studies in Class and Power in Africa, ed. Irving Leonard Markovitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 27–49; Richard C. Crook, “Decolonization, the Colonial State, and Chieftancy in the Gold Coast,” African Affairs 85/338 (1986): 87–89; and Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism. In postcolonial Ghana, chiefs have wide powers to collect land tribute, or rents, from migrant or tenant farmers and to authorize or prohibit the sale of land in their domains. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent, pp. 107, 111. 9. Kojo Sebastian Amanor, Global Restructuring and Land Rights in Ghana: Forest Food Chains, Timber, and Rural Livelihoods, Research Report No. 108 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikaininstitutet, 1999), p. 138. 10. Sara Berry describes family rights in land “as not to be lightly overridden.” Sara Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), p. 179.

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11. Ibid. 12. Alden Wily and Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana,” para. 3.2.1. 13. Amanor, Global Restructuring and Land Rights, p. 138. 14. Amanor tracks the progressive commodification of the social relations of production on land held under these arrangements. Ibid., pp. 138–141. 15. As Alden-Wily and Hammond put it, in principle “unallocated land is considered as co-owned.” Alden Wily and Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana,” para. 3.1.3. 16. See Gareth Austin, Land, Labor, and Capital in Ghana: From Slave to Free Labor in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), pp. 351, 533 note 94. Note also that Mikell writes that in the Brong-Ashanti area, where the political elite began producing cocoa in the 1910s and 1920s, the chiefs “had a head start. They were able to select extensive and contiguous tracts of well-situated, fertile land.” Mikell, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana, pp. 93–94. They invested capital not only in landholdings, but also in transport and trade. Many rich planters became cocoa merchants in the 1920s, and a powerful stratum of chiefly planter-traders and absentee landholders developed in the south. 17. Frontier lands may also be claimed by neighboring jurisdictions and can thus become the object of conflict between chieftaincies. 18. Berry recounts deep resentment in the Afram Plains in the Ashanti region where in the 1980s and 1990s chiefs in Kumawu pursued a “campaign to colonize the Afram Plains” by allowing migrants from “the North” to settle and farm lands over which the Kumawu stool (Kumuwuhene) was trying to asset a claim (against Kumase). Those who had been farming the land when the migrants arrived “were sacked.” Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries, pp. 154, 180–183. 19. See Enid Schildkrout “The Ideology of Regionalism in Ghana,” in Strangers in African Societies, ed. W. A. Shack and E. P. Skinner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 187–188; David E. Apter, Ghana in Transition, 2nd rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 163. (Orig. pub. as Gold Coast Transition by Princeton University Press in 1955.) 20. Alden Wily and Hammond argue that the 1986 Land Titles Registration Law confirmed and abetted these processes by moving the definition of allodial title, which is supposed to be vested in stools on behalf of the community, closer to individualized freehold, thus strengthening chiefs’ personal (private) hold over stool land. Alden Wily and Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana,” para. 3.2.7. 21. Ibid., paras. 3.3.5–3.37. 22. Liz Alden Wily, Governance and Land Relations: A Review of Decentralization of Land Administration and Management in Africa (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, June 2003), p. 66; Bakary Camara with Bakary F. Traoré, Elie Dicko, and Moro Sidibé,

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“Migration et tensions sociales dans le sud-Mali” (Bamako, Mali: Point Sud Centre for Research on Local Knowledge, June 2007), p. 14. 23. The system was rife with abuse and corruption. Chiefs were known to privatize stool resources, exploit tenants, abuse debtors, and forsake material and spiritual obligations to their subjects. From the 1920s onward, popular protests and anger against chiefly abuses led to an ever rising number of destoolments of chiefs. 24. On land shortage and rising land values, see Amanor, Global Restructuring and Land Rights, pp. 138; Alden Wily and Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana.” 25. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 26. “Weapons of the weak” include threats, rumors, and grumbling. An example is found in the Ghanaian Chronicle, where Gabby Asumin reported that the president of the Ga-Dangme Council, K. B. Asante, “warned of a possible uprising against chiefs and elders of the Ga State by the youth who feel marginalized . . . by the reckless sale of lands without accountability. [The youth] lack places to lay their heads [while] their lands have been sold out.” “Asante Warns Ga Chiefs of Possible Youth Uprising,” Ghanaian Chronicle, August 11, 2005. 27. There are also complex problems having to do with real versus fake or self-styled chiefs, rival chiefs, and boundary disputes between chieftaincies. Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries, pp. 115, 196–197. 28. Ubink finds that “despite the fact that the chiefs are customarily and constitutionally obliged to administer the land in the interests of the whole community, they generally display little accountability for any money generated and most indigenous community members are seeing little or no benefit from the leases. The customary land users are only rarely—and then very inadequately—compensated for the loss of their farmland, and in most villages only a meagre part of the money is used for community development.” Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” pp. 2–3. Ubink also reports the results of one study of land sales in periurban Kumasi (i.e., 40-kilometer radius): “[In one] research project it was found that of the 364 farms in periurban Kumasi taken away from community members for housing development, only 7 percent of farmers had received compensation, and most of those were related to the royal family in the village, as described in Kotey and Yeboah 2003: 21.” Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” p. 3 note 4. See also Janine Ubink, “Struggles for Land in Peri-Urban Kumasi and Their Effect on Popular Perceptions of Chiefs and Chieftancy,” in Contesting Land and Custom in Ghana: State, Chief, and Citizen, ed. Janine Ubink and Kojo S. Amanor (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008), pp. 155–182. 29. See Onoma, “The Contradictory Potential of Institutions”; Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa; and Kathryn Firmin-

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Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights in the Gold Coast: An Empirical Analysis Applying Rational Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 30. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” p. 4. See also Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 31. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” p. 6. See also Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 32. Many such cases are reported in the Ghanaian press. In one protracted dispute, for example, the Supreme Court “ruled in favor of the Okpelor Sowah Din family, the rightful owners of Nmai Dzorn lands against the chief of Ashalley Botwe”; Dominic Jale, “Tension Mounting at Nmai Dzorn [a suburb of Accra],” Ghanaian Chronicle, September 1, 2005. 33. This incident was reported in Sebastian R. Freiku, “Fulani Herdsmen, Cattle Invade Kumawu Lands,” Ghanaian Chronicle, December 5, 2005. Sara Berry focuses on land politics in this area, Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries, chaps. 5–6. 34. In periurban Kumasi, according to Ubink, the district assemblies rarely get involved in land disputes. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” p. 6; Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 35. See Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law”; Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” However, both Nkrumah and Rawlings, at various times in their respective tenures in office, did seek to mobilize popular support by giving voice to ordinary people’s frustration with chiefs. 36. See, for example, Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine; Austin, Land, Labor, and Capital; and Austin, “The Emergence of Capitalist Relations; Richard Rathbone, Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Bjorn Beckman, Organizing the Farmers: Cocoa Politics and National Development in Ghana (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1976); Mikell, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana; Kojo Sebastian Amanor, The New Frontier: Farmers’ Response to Land Degradation (A West African Study) (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development; London: Zed Books, 1994). 37. However, a few of the thirty-eight newspaper reports of land conflict in 2005 describe direct attacks on migrants rather than on the chiefs who gave migrants permission to use the land for grazing (based on a Factiva search done by Amanda Pinkston, in “Land Conflict in Ghana and Kenya,” Department of Government, Honors Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2007). See also Kojo Sebastian Amanor, “Night Harvesters, Forest Hoods, and Saboteurs: Struggles over Land Expropriation in Ghana,” in Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (London: Zed Books, 2005), pp. 102–117. 38. Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine.

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39. See Ghana Land Administration Project, “General Information about LAP,” www.ghanalap.gov.gh/index1.php?linkid=48, accessed January 14, 2008. 40. Alden Wily and Hammond, “Land Security and the Poor in Ghana.” 41. Ubink cites the Jachiehene, “who was enthusiastically developing his village . . . [he] not only abolished the local Plot Allocation Committee but stated outright that ‘land in Jachie belongs solely to the royal family’ and ‘a chief does not need to account to anyone, only if things go wrong.’” Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” p. 11; see Ubink 2008. 42. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” pp. 6–7; Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 43. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” pp. 8–10; Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 44. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” pp. 12–13; Ubink, “Struggles for Land.” 45. Ubink, “Between Customs and State Law,” pp. 12–13 note 58. 46. Kikuyu farmer, interviewed by the author, Eldoret, Kenya, November 19, 2008. 47. See Tabitha Kanongo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963 (Athens: Ohio University Press; London: James Currey, 1987). 48. Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). 49. Hans-Wilhelm Von Haugwitz, Some Experiences with Smallholder Settlement in Kenya, 1963/4 to 1966/7 (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1972), p. 12; John Harbeson, Nation-building in Kenya: The Role of Land Reform (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 266–267. 50. R. S. Odingo, The Kenya Highlands: Land Use and Agricultural Development (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1971). 51. Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p. 75. 52. Harbeson, Nation-building in Kenya, pp. 154–155, 253. See David Anderson, “‘Yours in the Struggle for Majimbo’: Nationalism and the Party Politics of Decolonisation in Kenya, 1955–1964,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, 3 (2005): 547–564; and Robert H. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). (Orig. pub. in 1989.) 53. Harbeson, Nation-building in Kenya, goes on to explain that “[their] security of tenure is substantially less than that of the Africans involved in the land-consolidation programs [in Central Province] and even of those who have access to land according to traditional rules of tenure” (pp. 282–285). 54. On repayment rates, see ibid., p. 300; and Shem E. Migot-Adholla, Frank Place, and W. Oluoch-Kosura, “Security of Tenure and Land Productivity in Kenya,” in Searching for Land Tenure Security in Kenya, ed.

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John Bruce and Shem Migot-Adholla (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1993). On the low incidence of eviction of defaulters, see Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya, p. 79. On repayment relief, see Harbeson, Nation-building in Kenya, pp. 300–301. 55. On the lack of title deeds on Trans-Nzoia schemes see, for example, A. K. Akiwumi, chairman, Report of the Judicial Commission Appointed to Inquire into Tribal Clashes in Kenya (Nairobi: Judicial Commission Appointed to Inquire into Tribal Clashes in Kenya, July 31, 1999), pp. 62–63, 210 (released to the public in October 2002; hereafter Akiwumi Report). 56. Migot-Adholla, Place, and Oluoch-Kosura, “Security of Tenure and Land Productivity in Kenya,” p. 127. 57. In two settlement areas surveyed in the 1980s, 34 percent and 58 percent of parcels (and the vast majority of land as measured by area) were still held by those who had received the allocation directly from the government. In each area, rates for this mode of acquisition were higher than rates for other modes of acquisition. In the reserve areas surveyed, by contrast, the major mode of land acquisition “continues to be inheritance.” Migot-Adholla, Place, and Oluoch-Kosura, “Security of Tenure and Land Productivity in Kenya,” p. 125. 58. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), p. 460, see pp. 460–463; Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya, pp. 74–75. 59. Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions. 60. This MP, Dixon Kihika Kimani, wields “a lot of influence in the two areas, largely because of his past role in assisting the majority of the residents to get land there.” Akiwumi Report, p. 160. See also Akiwumi Report, pp. 138, 147. 61. Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions. 62. Government of Kenya, Office of the Prime Minister, “Rehabilitation of the Mau Forest Ecosystem” (Nairobi: September 2009), p. 5. 63. Interviewees said that that expulsion of Kenyatta-era Kikuyu settlers from the Mau forest began in 1986. The forest evictions of 1986 “were the start of all these problems” (interview, Eldoret, November 18, 2008). 64. In 2001, 27.3 percent of the SW Mau Forest Reserve (22,797 hectares) was degazetted. “This excision was challenged in court and orders were given by the high court to stop it, but settlement went ahead and the area is now settled.” Also in 2001, 54.3 percent of the E Mau Forest (35,301 hectares) was degazetted. “This excision was challenged in court and orders were given to stop it, but settlement went ahead and most of the area is now settled, although with varying densities.” Ermis Africa Leadership Development, “Facts about Mau Forest Complex,” www.ermisafrica.org, accessed January 14, 2009. See UNDP/KWS, “Mau Under Siege,” May 2008.

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65. Farmers who are allowed by the provincial administration to live in semilegality in the forest reserves are even more vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of government power. 66. J. M. Kariuki, former Mau Mau fighter, Kenyatta’s personal secretary from 1963 to 1969, and populist member of parliament from Nyandarua Constituency (1974–1975), gave voice to land grievances. He was assassinated in 1975. 67. See Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions, for how the Moi pushed titling of plots that had been acquired through the LBCs. This weakened the link between settlers and their patrons, and thus weakened the Kenyatta-era political machine in Nakuru. Settlers’ rights became less contingent on the goodwill of Kenyatta-era patrons. 68. Jacqueline Klopp, “Pilfering the Public: The Problem of Land Grabbing in Kenya,” Africa Today 47, 1 (2000): 7–26. 69. See Gabrielle Lynch, “Courting the Kalenjin: The Failure of Dynastisicm and the Strength of the ODM Wave in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province,” African Affairs 107 (2008): 541–568. 70. Colin Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 4. 71. Klopp, “Pilfering the Public.” 72. Catherine Boone, “Politically-allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 2008; Catherine Boone, “Politically-Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence in Kenya,” Comparative Political Studies 44, 10 (October 2011): 1311–1342. 73. Under Kibaki (2004–), hundreds of thousands of farmers settled in the forests under Moi were evicted. 74. Jacqueline Klopp, “Can Moral Ethnicity Trump Political Tribalism? The Struggle for Land and Nation in Kenya,” African Studies 61, 2 (2002): 269–294; Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife, p. 145. 75. “Kenyans Are ‘Free to Live Anywhere,’” The Nation (Nairobi), April 1, 2005. 76. Decentralization raises the stakes by further empowering these agents. 77. David Throup and Charles Hornsby, Multiparty Politics in Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), pp. 198–199. 78. Mike Norton-Griffiths, Tom Wolf, and Raul Figueroa, “EvidenceBased Policy: How Does the Draft National Land Policy Measure Up?” in Governance, Institutions, and the Human Condition, ed. E. W. Gachenga et al. (Nairobi: Law Africa Publishing, 2009), pp. 305–329. See also Machakos and Makueni Ranchers Association, “Memorandum to the National Land Policy Secretariat [of the DNLP],” www.mng5.com, accessed December 1, 2011.

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79. Catherine Boone, “Land Conflict and Distributive Politics in Kenya,” African Studies Review, 55, 1 (April 2012): 75–103. 80. See Boone, “Politically-Allocated Land Rights”; and Boone, “Land Conflict and Distributive Politics in Kenya.” 81. Catherine Boone, “Property and Constitutional Order: Land Tenure Reform and the Future of the African State,” African Affairs 106 (October 2007): 557–586. 82. Patrick McAuslan, “Making Law Work: Restructuring Land Relations in Africa,” Development and Change 29, 3 (1998): 525–552, 527. 83. World Bank, “Land Policy and Administration Homepage,” http://Inweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/ardext.nsf/24ByDocName/LandPolicy andAdministration, accessed October 23, 2005. For an overview of land law reform, 1990–2003, see Liz Alden Wily, Governance and Land Relations: A Review of Decentralization of Land Administration and Management in Africa (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2003). 84. See, for example, Klaus Deininger and Hans Binswanger, “The Evolution of the World Bank’s Land Policy,” The World Bank Research Observer 14, 2 (1999): 247–276; and Ambreena Manji, “Land Reform in the Shadow of the State: The Implementation of New Land Laws in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Third World Quarterly 22, 3 (2001): 327–342. 85. Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Becoming Indigenous in Africa,” African Studies Review 52, 3 (December) 2009: 1–33. 86. See Richard C. Crook and James Manor, Democracy and Decentralization in South Asia and West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Jesse C. Ribot, Waiting for Democracy: The Politics of Choice in Natural Resource Decentralization (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2004). 87. See Ribot, Waiting for Democracy. 88. Catherine Boone and Norma Kriger, “Multiparty Elections and Land Patronage: Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 48, 2 (April 2010): 173–202.

5 Property Rights: Preferences and Reform Ato Kwamena Onoma

Why do political leaders in areas with relatively weak property

rights institutions handle those governing land in divergent ways in the face of rising land values? Some seek to reinforce existing institutions and create new ones that enhance the security of property rights in land. They clarify rules on how to transact in land, invest in records, and create adjudication systems to govern land rights.1 Others further undermine existing institutions that govern property rights in land.2 I explore this broad theoretical question through an explanation of the divergence in the ways traditional leaders in the Ga and Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Areas of Ghana have responded to rising land values. Ga traditional leaders have a long history of subverting institutions that govern land rights and creating a land market shrouded in uncertainty, insecurity, and violence.3 Akyem traditional leaders in the late 1800s handled property rights institutions in similar ways. But unlike Ga leaders who continued on this path, Akyem leaders since the 1930s have used their limited capacity to strengthen institutions that govern property rights in land, promoting a more predictable and secure environment.4 In this chapter, I contribute toward the understanding of the origins of property rights institutions by exposing and explaining the divergent preferences toward property rights that rising land values

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can create. In doing so, I provide insights into the likely trajectory and consequences of one of the most important reform efforts going on in African countries today. A central plank in the second-stage administrative and institutional reforms advocated by the World Bank to help states consolidate and benefit from first-stage macroeconomic reforms is property rights reform. 5 Such reforms are currently under way in many African countries. Among other things, reforms seek to help leaders create clear and simple rules on how to acquire land and how to set up and strengthen institutions that document land rights, adjudicate land disputes, and enforce land rights. An interesting aspect of these reforms is that they assume leaders are generally interested in managing land markets in more predictable ways and in fashioning institutions that will ensure greater security of property rights. What agencies like the UN Development Programme and the World Bank do is help them create this institutional environment. In this chapter, I do two things. By examining how traditional leaders in two areas of Ghana have dealt with property rights to land over time, I raise questions about the assumption that pervades many reform programs that political leaders prefer more stable land markets that guarantee security of rights. Second, by explaining why traditional leaders handled property rights in different ways, I provide insights into how we should expect these property rights reforms to play out across different places on the African continent. In the first section, I lay out a theory of land use. Next, I briefly discuss case selection and study design. I then present empirical evidence for the argument. After that, I consider two alternative explanations of chiefs’ divergent attitudes toward property rights institutions. In the conclusion, I locate my analysis within wider literatures.

A Theory of Resource Exploitation Why have traditional leaders in these two areas dealt with property rights institutions in such different ways? The theory of resource use that I develop to answer this question assumes that people find land important primarily because of the political and economic benefits that it offers. Divergent modes of exploiting land tell us about the institutional preferences of actors because institutions that facilitate one mode of exploiting land might hinder another. 6 How people exploit

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land will thus influence the institutions that they create to govern property rights in land. I distinguish between two ways in which people can exploit land— through indirect and direct means. An actor exploits a piece of land indirectly when the gains he or she obtains from it accrue over time through its productive use for agriculture, real estate development, tourism, and so forth. Many chiefs in Akyem Abuakwa benefit economically from land by taxing the seasonal cocoa produce of farmers. They then transform some of these revenues into political resources to pay for chiefly functions and contest chieftaincy disputes. An actor exploits land directly when their benefits accrue up front and are not drawn from the productive use of that land. In the Ga Traditional Area, many chiefs gain from land through the issuance of capitalized leases where buyers pay the amount of the whole lease up front. It must be noted that even though these transactions in the Ga Traditional Area are popularly referred to as “sales,” and do take that form, Section 267(5) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, following in the footsteps of earlier colonial and postcolonial policies, prohibits the granting of freehold in customary or stool land under the control of all chiefs. In line with popular parlance, I refer to these as sales.7 The chief’s revenues are not drawn from the use that the buyer will eventually put the land to. There is also the common case of the exchange of land for political support in places like Kenya and Zimbabwe. The distinction here is about how particular actors benefit from land. It is not about the characteristics of a piece of land. This means that the same piece of land can be exploited in different ways by different actors. Actor A might sell Plot 123 to Actor B, collecting their fee up front. Actor B could then build a block of apartments on Plot 123 and benefit from the monthly rentals. The focus should be on the relations of Actors A and B to Plot 123 instead of the characteristics of Plot 123. Here, Actor A would be characterized as an unproductive land user and Actor B as a productive land user. As land values increase in an environment of weak property rights, the strengthening of property rights will facilitate the indirect use of land as standard approaches lead one to expect.8 Farmers will want enough security to hold on to their farms long enough to harvest. Greater security will allow them to invest capital in cultivation instead of hiring private security. Similarly, credible institutions that govern land rights might allow them to use their land as collateral to get loans

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to invest in cultivation.9 Those involved in exploiting land indirectly therefore have a natural preference for an environment of secure property rights and will desire the reinforcement of property rights institutions as land values increase.10 The opposite is often true for those that exploit land directly. As land values increase, the maximization of gains from unproductive land use is often facilitated by the persistence of weak property rights institutions. Such an environment allows sellers to sell not only real property rights, but also severely compromised and even nonexistent rights. Cases of people selling the same piece of land to many people simultaneously, selling lands belonging to others, or selling nonexistent parcels are common in the Ga Traditional Area.11 Employees of real estate agencies, residential land users, and private enforcers all attested to the prevalence of multiple and fake land sales in the Ga Traditional Area.12 Plots of land are sold a few times before they are eventually developed by a lucky buyer. But even after these plots are developed, it is common for people to appear years down the road claiming rights to the land and asking land users to pay again for the land. In Kenya, state bureaucrats and politicians as well as private individuals have been involved in the sale of the same land to multiple people, the sale of nonexistent parcels, and the sale of land parcels in which they had no rights. 13 In Mogoditshane, a periurban area of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, some cunning people sold land parcels to which they had no rights in the late 1980s and early 1990s.14 In Brazil, con artists have been able to sell huge swathes of the Amazon forest that they had no rights over to unsuspecting buyers. 15 JeanLaurent Rosenthal notes that kings in Old Regime France routinely sold land that they had earlier sold to other parties, thus creating conflicting land interests there.16 Importantly, some of the funds from this kind of sales are used to reinforce the political power of leaders. Some of these grants are made explicitly in exchange for political support. On the surface, it seems doubtful that some of these predatory activities can be sustainable over time. Why would sellers want to sell encumbered rights? Why would rational buyers keep buying? These practices could eventually lead buyers to reduce their bids in accordance with how many times they expect to pay for the land and how many other people they think might be sold the same land. But given that some of these leaders have short-term horizons and are preoccupied first with their immediate political survival, the long-term eco-

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nomic costs of these activities are unlikely to dissuade them. Even in cases where economic considerations weigh more, some of these leaders are in a situation where the collection of the one premium price associated with a credible sale of secure rights is not an option available to them. Having no unallocated land left, all they can do if they want to sell land is to sell parcels that have already been allocated to people. The actors who exploit land through direct means often prefer the perpetuation of weak property rights institutions because it facilitates their maximization of benefits from land. The ability to sell nonexistent land and parcels over which one has no rights depends on the absence of an easily accessible and credible information system where buyers can check existing interests in land.17 A poor information system also hampers efforts by those duped to recoup their monies through courts. Secure property rights will drastically raise the transaction costs faced by these con artists. Good and easily accessible records will make it difficult for con artists to convince people to buy fake and encumbered rights as well as make it easier for them to be brought to justice after they sell such fake rights. Good judicial systems will further raise the costs of their benefiting from these sales. Actors involved in these activities thus have an incentive to keep property rights institutions weak as land values increase. Where property rights institutions are strong, those involved in the direct exploitation of land will have to avoid these ways of maximizing their gains because the strength of the institutions makes them too costly. They will have to abide by the law and recognize one strong property right in each parcel and not sell property that has already been allocated to others. These land users are not inherently fraudulent. The temptation and ability to engage in fraud exists only where a weak property rights system permits it. Similarly, the ability to sell land for votes often depends on the absence of mechanisms to enforce the rights of grantees. This is particularly true in cases where grantees lack other significant interests that can be jeopardized by grantors. Where property rights institutions are strong, grantees will lack an incentive to vote for a politician once they are given land because they know that those rights cannot be rescinded. With this knowledge, politicians will refrain from such grants. Here, strong property rights can lead to market failure for such an exchange.

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Holding capacity constant as land values increase in an environment of weak property rights, productive land users would be expected to seek to reinforce property rights institutions while unproductive land users seek to perpetuate and further undermine existing weak property rights institutions.

Revising a Revisionist Literature This theory builds on, but amends, a revisionist reaction to market efficiency theories of property rights. Efficiency theory argues that rising land values create potential gains that cannot be realized because of high transaction costs imposed by insecure property rights. It thus concludes that because secure rights lower transaction costs, and the gains from more valuable land can offset the costs of institutions, rising land values will lead rational market participants to strengthen property rights.18 The persistence of insecure property rights in many places experiencing rising land values casts doubt on market efficiency theory. A revisionist account points out that efficiency theory overlooks the fact that supply side preferences for security do not automatically translate into the provision of greater security.19 Its important message is that demanded institutions are not always supplied and we need to pay attention to supply side factors such as distributive conflicts, collective action problems, weak capacity, and short-term political calculations.20 Regrettably, much of this revisionist literature adopts wholesale the demand-side claims of efficiency theory that rising land values will create a universal preference for more secure rights.21 This prevents revisionists from investigating in a more serious way the possible existence of a preference for insecurity among certain actors without treating such a preference as the effect of an inability to achieve a prior preference for security. It also prevents these accounts from paying serious enough attention to the political and economic benefits of weak institutions for some actors. Contrary to the belief in a universal preference for security that pervades existing influential explanations, some scholars point out political and economic reasons for actors to prefer insecure property rights institutions in the face of rising land values. 22 As mentioned above, processes in Ghana23 and also in Kenya24 among others reveal

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actors exploiting land in ways that seem to depend on the existence of an environment of insecure property rights. The fact that many of these actors were actively subverting existing institutions that secure property rights in land also increased the possibility of a preference for an environment of insecure property rights among these actors. It is important to note that this preference for insecurity is not another African peculiarity. Konstantin Sonin25 and Edward Glaeser, Jose Scheinkman, and Andrei Shleifer26 look at why Russian oligarchs in the former Soviet Union oppose efforts at establishing strong public institutions that secure property rights. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal’s study examines the deliberate subversion of property rights by kings in Old Regime France.27 Joel Hellman similarly examines why early winners from political economic reforms in former communist countries blocked later reforms ensuring an environment of partial reform.28 The theory of land exploitation that I presented above provides a theoretical framework that integrates these activities and preferences into an explanation that accounts for how elites handle property rights institutions.

Study Design and Data Collection In the empirical analysis below, I employ a dynamic comparison design that blends temporal and spatial frames of comparison to maximize the internal validity of causal analysis.29 As explicated by John Gerring and Rose McDermott,30 dynamic comparison closely mirrors the natural scientific experimental method in exploiting both a control group (Ga Traditional Area), where the key independent variable is held constant over time, and a treatment group (Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Area), where the key independent variable changes over time. I then compare and account for outcomes before and after the change. This design and these two cases allow me to control for various alternative explanations, including the causal effects of a rural versus an urban environment. The rural character of Akyem Abuakwa has been constant over time but how elites exploit land and handle property rights institutions has varied over time, which eliminates the rural character of the area as an explanatory variable. Both traditional areas have been inserted into the global political economy for a long time, ensuring similar rising land values, commercialization of land, and

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proliferation of distributive conflicts over land.31 Also, at least 70 percent of the land in both areas is customary land legally controlled by traditional chiefs and lineage heads who by law are supposed to be only custodians that grant rights to use such lands. 32 Further, the capacity of chiefs in both areas has been similarly curtailed by the creation of the Ghanaian state.33 This allows me to control for various alternative explanations by holding rising land values, distributive conflicts, types of formal land tenure arrangements, and the capacity of political leaders constant across cases. I collected data for this work during seven months of field research in Ghana between 2002 and 2005. My methods included eighty semistructured in-depth interviews, participant observation, group discussions, and archival research at the National Archive in Accra and the Akyem Abuakwa State Archive in Kyebi. The names of all interviewees are excluded for privacy reasons.

In the Shadow of a Permissive State The Ga occupy the Accra Plains along Ghana’s Atlantic coast. After the defeat of their centralized state by the Akwamu in 1677,34 leaders of seven Ga communities agreed to create an overlord (mantse) that would serve the ceremonial function of uniting different communities ruled by divisional chiefs and their underlings.35 Akyem Abuakwa was fashioned out of many wars. 36 The Okyenhene—king of Akyem Abuakwa—held substantive power over lesser chiefs and headmen before the advent of colonialism.37 In both areas, the Ghanaian state up to 2004, when it started to implement its ambitious Land Administration Project, had officially adopted the mixed approach of trying to secure rights in various enclaves earmarked for the location of important state installations, private enterprises, and mineral concessions while leaving the rest of the land to traditional chiefs and lineage heads to manage and control.38 Article 267(1) of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution vests all customary land in stools on “behalf of and in trust for the subjects of the stool in accordance with customary law and usage.”39 This provision is only the latest rendering of a policy that allows chiefs to control and dispose of land, which stretches back past the failed effort by the British colonial government to transform land in the country into

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Crown Lands in 1897.40 Since then, state leaders have used land to facilitate accommodation arrangements between colonial and postcolonial state officials on one hand and traditional chiefs on the other. Traditional chiefs help control their subjects and refrain from opposing governments in exchange for continued and autonomous control over land.41 Laws usurping the rights of chiefs have been aimed at only chiefs that break these accommodation arrangements and oppose governments.42 Thus, while the colonial government was willing to punish Asante resistance by taking over the management of Asante lands,43 senior colonial officials vehemently resisted suggestions of controlling chiefly exercise of land allocation powers. 44 In one such instance, Governor Hugh Clifford in 1914 reminded the West African Lands Committee that if the government followed their recommendations to curtail the power of chiefs over land allocation, “the loss of prestige which the government would suffer . . . would be fatal to the efficiency of our administration, and would destroy the at present growing confidence of the chiefs and people in the bona fides of the government.” 45 This dynamic even characterized the actions of Kwame Nkrumah, who is widely thought to have been against chiefs and to have expropriated the powers of chiefs to control land. The Administration of Lands Act (1962) gave the minister of lands the power to manage all stool lands. Interestingly, Nkrumah never moved to take over the management of all stool lands. In fact, as indicated in the wording of the act and the subsequent actions of Nkrumah’s government, this law was specifically aimed at usurping the land management powers of the Asantehene, who was bitterly opposed to Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party. It might even be argued that while the current Land Administration Project commenced by the administration of former President John Kuffour in 2004 seems unique, it does not represent a sharp break from this policy.46 With regard to customary land, like former laws, it seeks to encourage and put at the disposal of chiefs the instruments that will allow them to exercise their land management powers in more “responsible” ways by documenting their holdings, recording grants, and so forth.47 It remains to be seen the extent to which the government will go in forcing chiefs to embrace this project and the tools it seeks to put at their disposal. It is this leeway given to traditional chiefs in the management of land that permits the subnational causal analysis that I undertake here.

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Divergent Responses in Ga and Akyem Abuakwa The location of the Ga Traditional Area made it a vital trade site for Africans and Europeans from as far back as the fifteenth century.48 The movement of the nation’s capital to Accra in 1877 made it the leading industrial and service sector area and most valuable commercial and residential real estate land in the country.49 In Akyem Abuakwa, the pivotal event in the commercialization of land was the arrival of many mineral concessionaires, timber extractors, and Krobo and Akwapim farmers looking for virgin forestland to farm oil palm and cocoa in the late 1800s.50 One of the effects of the commercialization of land in both areas has been the proliferation of enduring distributive conflicts over landownership, land control, and land use. Parties in these conflicts have included the Ghanaian state, various layers of traditional chiefs, family heads, ordinary citizens, and strangers. In response to these similar events, chiefs in the two traditional areas first handled institutions that govern property rights in land in similar ways that aggravated confusion in the land market and made property rights insecure. But from around the 1940s, Akyem undertook institutional reforms that ensured greater stability and security of property rights while Ga traditional leaders continued down the same disruptive path. Rules on Allocations and Transactions

Ga traditional leaders have muddied and complicated previously established rules on how to allocate land, creating a level of confusion that makes it difficult even for resident Ghanaians to know the proper way to acquire land in the Ga Traditional Area.51 This is similar to what chiefs in Akyem Abuakwa did before the reign of Nana Ofori Atta I from 1912 to 1943.52 Since his reign, Akyem chiefs and elders have attempted to (re)establish and clarify laws regulating land allocation and transfer that reduce confusion and conflict.53 Information on the Locations of, Dimensions of, and Interests in Land

Most traditional leaders in the Ga Traditional Area have refrained from creating any record systems on the locations of, dimensions of, and interests in land parcels.54 Akyem chiefs before Ofori Atta behaved in similar ways. 55 But beginning with Ofori Atta’s creation of a lands

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office that issued “native leases” in Kyebi, 56 many lesser chiefs in Akyem Abuakwa created smaller entities in their palaces to make and keep records on land transactions beginning in the mid-1900s.57 Adjudication of Disputes

Like chiefs elsewhere in Ghana, traditional leaders in the Ga Traditional Area have courts that adjudicate a wide range of disputes. 58 Many of these courts lack integrity and credibility in land cases because traditional chiefs and elders who cause many land disputes also preside over them. Traditional chiefs in Akyem Abuakwa similarly have courts that seek to resolve, among other things, land disputes.59 The low involvement of chiefs and elders in Akyem Abuakwa in causing land disputes since around the 1940s lends their courts more credibility. Enforcement

Ga traditional leaders have employed their enforcement power in highly selective and disruptive ways through the cultivation and deployment of armed groups exacerbating violence and disruptions in the Ga Traditional Area. 60 Akyem chiefs similarly enforced arbitrary decisions against land market participants, including their citizens, in a disruptive and selective way before the reign of Ofori Atta. 61 Since around the 1940s, even though asafo exist in Akyem Abuakwa,62 chiefs have not used them to evict and settle or engage in extortion and protection rackets like Ga chiefs and elders use landguards in the Ga Traditional Area.

The Institutional Consequences of Land Sales As land values increased and land became commercialized in the late 1800s, traditional leaders in Ga and Akyem Abuakwa sought to extract potential gains from land through similar unproductive means by selling land in disregard of customary injunctions against the alienation of land. 63 The gains they obtained from these transactions accrued up front and were not drawn from the residential, commercial, agricultural, or extractive uses to which these lands were later put. Claire Robertson notes that “land sales became a large source of income for Ga lineages, mantsemei, priests, and other individuals, mainly men . . .

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land value per acre went from about 800 [pounds] in 1903 to 30,000 [pounds] in 1954 in Central Accra.” 64 In Akyem Abuakwa, diverse mineral concessionaires and Krobo and Akwapim farmers bought vast tracts of land from chiefs at Begoro, Apapam, and Asamankese that left Akyem citizens and colonial officials alarmed.65 Soon, traditional leaders and various con artists in the Ga and Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Areas realized that given the weak property rights institutions that existed, they could maximize gains from land sales by selling fake or watered-down rights. Ga chiefs and elders began to sell the same plots of land to more than one person simultaneously and to sell land that they knew belonged to others.66 Chiefs in Akyem Abuakwa also warmly embraced these practices.67 Apart from chiefs and lineage heads who had rights to allocate land, the permissive environment fostered by weak property rights attracted various con artists who eagerly entered into the business of selling lands that they had no right to sell.68 The victims of these sales included members of these ethnic groups as well as strangers coming from other parts of Ghana and abroad. These repeated and overlapping sales render plausible the assessment of the West African Land Committee Draft Report, as reported by Charles Ilegbune, that during this period “the chiefs of the Gold Coast alienated an area which actually exceeded the total area of the territory itself.”69 Individuals, chiefs, lineage heads, and other speculators made handsome gains from multiple and repeated sales as well as the sale of land in which they knew they had no rights. These activities had serious social costs. For one, they led to widespread litigation over land that diverted resources from productive activities.70 Chiefs externalized the costs of litigation by taxing citizens to pay for court costs.71 In some communities, the taxation was so severe that it drove many young people away from their communities in a bid to escape taxation or seek employment in mines to pay taxes.72 Thus, it led not only to the diversion of capital to nonproductive uses, but also to a flight of valuable labor from these communities. The conflicts and confusion that resulted hampered agricultural production. Some chiefs deliberately sold off land that was already being cultivated by their subjects, putting their farming activities in jeopardy.73 The outright alienation of land and monopolization of the gains from such sales by chiefs and their henchmen denied the rest of the populace and later generations of their birthright. Given the permissive environment and their control over land that was being publicized as far away as Europe for its min-

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eral wealth, timber resources, and fertility, the chiefs, lineage heads, and diverse speculators with myopic interests warmly embraced a system of selling lands often and repeatedly to eager farmers, timber extractors, and mineral concessionaires flowing in from other parts of Ghana and from abroad. Ga chiefs, lineage heads, and other wily speculators did the same for Ga lands. In doing this, they were following a personally profitable, but socially destructive path earlier trodden by the kings of Old Regime France as revealed by Rosenthal.74 But understanding will be incomplete if activities in the Ga traditional area and Akyem Abuakwa are regarded in a purely economic light. Chieftaincy and land disputes proliferated in the country.75 The revenues from land deals became important sources of money to pursue litigation over chieftaincy76 and to fund militias used in chieftaincy disputes. The peculiar political advantages of the direct exploitation of land endeared this mode of exploiting land to traditional chiefs in these areas. The multiple sale of land provided chiefs with recurrent streams of money from a stagnant resource—land. Further, these resources accrue up front and not over a long period of time. Chiefs could also reap all of these gains without prior investments in land as farming or real estate development would have required of them. These activities raise interesting questions. Why would sellers want to sell uncertain rights—the land equivalent of George Akerlof’s “lemons”?77 Why would buyers keep purchasing these rights of uncertain quality? How profitable would these rackets be over the long run? There is a temptation to attribute these activities to genuine mistakes by chiefs unsure of the extent of their territories and the location of grants they had already made.78 But the widespread, consistent, and long-lasting nature of these activities suggest that they are better understood as a deliberate style of dealing in land that deserves further clarification. Below, I present an explanation that exposes both the economic and political reasons underlying these activities. When land is first commercialized, these activities result from efforts by some chiefs to multiply gains through short-term exploitation of buyers’ trust. Afterward, it becomes an effort by later generations of land-hungry chiefs to benefit from lands that have already been sold. At the beginning, when most chiefs were honest, buyers offered a high price for each plot of land with the expectation that they were buying a secure right. Cunning chiefs were able to exploit the trust of buyers in the certainty of the rights being sold to multiply the amount

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they obtained for each plot by selling the same parcel multiple times. As long as these activities were on a small scale and most chiefs stayed honest, for a short time the few cheating chiefs were able to make more money than if they sold just one strong right to each parcel. This is because buyers, still believing that chiefs offered only a secure right in each sale, were willing to offer the prime price. The fact that many buyers were new migrants in the Ga and Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Areas—farmers, concessionaires sometimes coming from other African countries and Europe, and new city arrivals—might have prolonged this practice a little longer. It is presumable that migrants faced greater information problems than longterm inhabitants. The causal story here is similar to the occasional sale of overpriced and worthless stocks by companies. As long as most companies play within the rules and buyers have confidence in the workings of the market, the occasional con artist will be able to swindle some investors. But we can assume that word soon got out about the existence of these predatory practices of some sellers. Evidence of court cases concerning these issues does support this assumption.79 Buyers then faced two options. They could leave the area and buy land elsewhere or stay and offer a lower amount to compensate for the uncertain character of the good they were purchasing. The presence of minerals and the particularly rich soils in rural Akyem Abuakwa, as well as the allure of jobs, electricity, water, and other amenities that draw people toward urban areas like Ga in developing countries, ensured that people stayed and even more kept arriving in these two traditional areas. Once buyers had decided to stay and try to buy property, they would have tried to look for more reputable sellers from whom to buy. The workings of this dynamic are seen in the Ga Traditional Area today, in which some people who can afford the considerably higher prices try to buy land from the state or from burgeoning real estate development agencies. In the case of the latter it is assumed that, by the time these developers finish building houses, they will have dealt with most of the conflicting claims on the land. Because over 60 percent of land in both Ga and Akyem Abuakwa were held by chiefs, people had to approach them for land. But the uncertain nature of the rights that they were purchasing would have led buyers to lower the price to such an extent that land sellers who engaged in multiple sales of the same land might not have been able to make more than they would have from selling one strong right. Again in support of this view, writing about

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concessionaires in southern Ghana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anne Phillips notes that they paid “derisory prices” for land from chiefs.80 In some ways the purchase of land in such a situation becomes like a lottery in which buyers do not purchase land rights, but instead purchase a certain probability that they will actually acquire those land rights. Lowering bids reduces the amount of money that buyers lose, if they end up not getting the land. But, unlike in the lottery, the initial purchase is only the beginning of the game. Buyers might have to fight off other claimants and compensate later chiefs who seek to renegotiate the grant. So paying only a fraction of the price is also a strategy that leaves buyers with some money that they can use to fend off others and compensate later leaders who try to resell the land. Phillips notes that concessionaires in the colonial Gold Coast often “found themselves paying several times over for the same piece of land.”81 The struggle to gain and keep land parcels can sometimes be an expensive exercise that involves going to court, developing the land as fast as possible (one consequence of this is the lack of planning in many areas), and employing private enforcers to protect land. In some ways, such a land market redistributes wealth from the weak to the strong in that the weak who pay for, but do not end up receiving land, are subsidizing the powerful who pay a fraction of the price but acquire the land. The powerful can buy land at low prices and use their muscle to fend off weaker claimants. This might explain why many concessionaires opposed and contributed to the defeat of the Public Lands Bill of 1897, which promised them secure titles in exchange for higher land prices.82 If chiefs could not make as much from the repeated allocations of uncertain rights to the same parcel of land as they could by selling one strong claim, then why did they keep reselling already allocated lands and selling the lands of other chiefs? The answer lies in the natural workings of the outright sale of a constant amount of land by generations of chiefs who are almost totally dependent on land for revenues. Incumbent leaders and their allies tried to sell as much land as quickly as they could to maximize benefits. As noted earlier, the “concessions fever” of the early 1900s alone saw chiefs in the Gold Coast colony, an area including Ga and Akyem Abuakwa, concede “25,000 square miles—greater than its actual area.”83 Since each sale reduced the land available for later grants, unallocated lands were soon exhausted. It is important to note that this stage does not even require the exhaustion

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of all lands under the control of a chief, but only the exhaustion of those lands that people desire at any particular time. Land users can be extremely myopic in the lands they see as desirable. An example from the United States demonstrates this point. In the late 1930s, while the price of land in the heart of Chicago grew tenfold, land a mere eight to ten miles away received little attention with its price stagnant at the $1.25 an acre first assigned to it by government. Homer Hoyt notes that “apparently even the most vivid speculative imagination of that time could not conceive of a city that grew so far from the river and the lake that these acres would be needed for urban use.”84 And then, as now, there were without doubt many imaginative speculative minds in Chicago, as the accounts of both Hoyt and William Cronon indicate.85 Once desirable land shrank enough, new chiefs faced two choices. They could uphold rights already sold and not receive any resources from those lands, or they could resell the land already allocated at the reduced price that buyers were willing to offer for such encumbered lands. Reselling actually involved forcing the occupant to pay another fee for the land or having someone else buy the allocated but not yet fully developed land. The prime price attached to the reputable sale of one strong right was no longer an option. Revenue-maximizing chiefs dependent on land sales preferred reallocating land for the fractional price to not earning any money by upholding earlier grants. Over time, chiefs in a regime where land was sold had more and more of an incentive to abrogate former grants and reallocate rights. Further, chiefs facing land scarcity had an incentive not only to reallocate earlier grants in their realm, but also to sell the lands of other chiefs. Since buyers were suspicious and lowered bids anyway, chiefs had little to gain from cultivating a good reputation by not selling the lands of other chiefs. The political motivations of these sellers, who were after all political leaders, render their activities even more understandable. Sometimes the urge to resell came from the need to raise funds on short notice to litigate over chieftaincy and fund militias to pursue pervasive and recurring chieftaincy disputes.86 At other times, claimants of a stool sought to undermine incumbents by laying claim to, selling off, or granting to political allies lands of stool occupants. These political motivations render more plausible the explanation of the activities of traditional leaders since these calculations might even lead them to

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forgo the higher prices attached to single reputable sales for the political benefits attached to fraudulent sales.87 Chiefs, lineage heads, and con artists in the Ga and Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Areas during this earlier period thrived by raising transaction costs. This counterintuitive statement makes a lot of sense if it is understood that whether an institutional environment raises or lowers transaction costs depends on the sort of transaction in which one is engaged. A dysfunctional police force that might raise costs for store owners in a business district might lower costs for protection rackets in that area. Strengthening property rights institutions would have hindered the activities of Akyem and Ga chiefs. But an environment of insecure property rights where transaction costs were high for land buyers was convenient. With murky rules on how to transact in land, leaders could get away with multiple sales and the sale of lands to which they had no rights. Once fake rights were sold, the high information costs also made it harder for buyers to seek justice against chiefs because information that would aid the adjudication of such disputes was difficult to come by.

Paths Diverge Developments in the Ga and Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Areas diverged with the rise of Ofori Atta to the throne of Akyem Abuakwa in 1912. While Ga leaders continued in their unproductive use of land, Ofori Atta instituted reforms aimed at recentralizing power that encouraged chiefs bent on maintaining their autonomy to transition to productive land use. This switch toward productive land use by Akyem leaders was not the effect of the rural environment in which they existed. It was the result of the continuing political struggle between the Okyenhene and various cadres of lower chiefs and citizens over the distribution of land revenues. The formidable office of the Okyenhene had been badly eroded when Ofori Atta ascended the throne.88 Lesser chiefs in places like Begoro, Asamankese, and Tafo involved in land sales had augmented their power relative to their overlord, the Okyenhene. 89 Proceeds from land sales were one-off, up-front payments that were easy to mask,90 and this enabled lower chiefs to avoid paying the traditional abusa tribute that they owed the Okyenhene for all land transactions.91

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When Ofori Atta became Okyenhene in 1912, he moved to increase his share of land revenues, reduce the share of lower chiefs, and exert more control over how lower chiefs used their revenues.92 He tried to enforce the payment of abusa tribute to his office and made the legality of land alienations subject to his signature to keep track of transactions on which he was owed tribute.93 Further, he outlawed the outright sale of land with the Akyem Abuakwa State Council Stool Lands Declaration of 1932.94 These moves were partly motivated by the increasing land scarcity facing Akyem citizens. 95 But they were also political moves aimed at robbing his opponents of the peculiar benefits of the direct exploitation of land. Forcing chiefs to exploit land in indirect ways through farming gave them more visible assets that the Okyenhene could monitor and tax. The workings of this logic were seen in the aggressive campaign by Ofori Atta and his successor to investigate and tax stool farms, distinguish between stool and private farms, and to seize the farms of noncompliant chiefs.96 Like in James Scott’s account, the Okyenhene was aggressively trying to render legible to his administration assets that his underlings had sought to make invisible. 97 The widespread seizure of the farms of errant chiefs and citizens by the Okyenhene during this period cast doubt on an interpretation that explains the conversion of chiefs and citizens to farming as the effect of a credible commitment to the protection of property rights by the Okyenhene.98 As I detail below, the widespread conversion to agriculture that took place in the wake of Ofori Atta’s reforms was another strategy of subterranean resistance by lower chiefs and citizens in a perennial guerrilla-style conflict over the distribution of land revenues. A consequence of Ofori Atta’s policies was a gradual turn of chiefs, family heads, and citizens in Akyem Abuakwa to the use of land for farming and sharecropping arrangements.99 The new involvement of chiefs in cocoa production was so serious that people began to complain of chiefs neglecting their administrative duties to concentrate on farming.100 Finding it difficult to reconcile the two, at least one chief—Nifahene, Nana Kwaku Agyeman (1910–1919)—resigned his position to farm full time.101 The reorientation of chiefs on the surface suggests a victory for the Okyenhene in distributive conflicts, as argued by Kathryn FirminSellers.102 But it masked a new strategy by his underlings to evade taxation. Chiefs and citizens had seen wisdom in avoiding a direct and open confrontation with the Okyenhene and his British colonial allies

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by desisting from overt land alienation and adopting agricultural production. However, they embraced agriculture along with new social arrangements that undermined the drive of the Okyenhene to centralize power. Akyem custom allowed citizens to acquire user rights in land and establish personal farms as long as the labor for these farms was not acquired in exchange for land rights. This protected the chiefs’ monopoly over land allocation.103 Citizens had no obligation to pay tributes for these farms. These were different from stool farms established using stool land and capital as the property of a stool, instead of the present chief.104 Revenues from stool farms, under Ofori Atta’s reforms, would have to go to the stool treasury and an abusa tribute would have to be paid to the Okyenhene.105 There were also clandestine sharecropping arrangements, known as di bi ma me ndi bi, where citizens acquired lands from chiefs under the pretext of establishing personal farms using their own labor.106 They then entered into sharecropping arrangements with tenant farmers.107 This contravened the custom against private citizens granting land to strangers and deprived chiefs of the revenues they could have extracted from these strangers.108 Lower chiefs and citizens sought to evade tributes to the Okyenhene and his stool treasuries and the injunction against outright land sales. Many chiefs established farms through sharecropping arrangements using stool lands and capital, naming these personal farms to evade the Okyenhene’s taxation.109 Individuals also went into di bi ma me ndi bi arrangements.110 Some chiefs and individuals even adapted these new arrangements to alienate land outright against the laws of the Okyenhene.111 Earlier sharecropping arrangements demanded that the produce, not the land, be shared once crops bore fruit. Now people sometimes shared the land outright on maturation of the cocoa crop.112 The Okyenhene pushed agriculture to gain ascendancy in perennial distributive conflicts. Lower chiefs and citizens resorted to farming, but fabricated different social arrangements that reinforced their hand in these perennial distributive conflicts.113

Tying Changing Land Use to Changing Modes of Governance As chiefs, elders, citizens, and strangers turned toward agricultural production, they developed preferences for and sought to create stronger property rights institutions. The most important shift by Akyem leaders

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was their attention to accentuating and following clearer rules for allocating and transferring land that created predictability. 114 This shift made a lot of sense because the preexisting environment of insecurity would have undermined agricultural activity and the economic and political gains that chiefs and elders drew from it. This shift in Akyem Abuakwa was in stark contrast to Ga chiefs’ and elders’ persistent exploitation of land through the outright alienation of land and the issuance of capitalized leases.115 Ga chiefs and elders continue to invest little in reinforcing property rights institutions and are seen as responsible for much of the insecurity in the Ga Traditional Area land market.116 Apart from fraudulent sales, they arm and deploy landguards and protect them from the law by bribing police officers and covering them with the mantle of traditional legitimacy, which state officials often are unwilling to challenge.117 An employee of a real estate agency told me about how a chief sold them land that the same chief had already sold to someone else in 1998. After they clashed on the land, the chief nonchalantly admitted to the dual sale and asked them to negotiate over who will finally get the land, but they failed to reach an agreement and so went to court.118 The fraudulent activities of chiefs and landguards receive wide coverage in Ghanaian newspapers. 119 New periurban areas such as Nmai Dzorn, Oyibi, Ablekuma, Oblogo, Aplaku, Bortsianor, and Amasaman are often engulfed in violent disputes as land sellers race to defraud as many people as possible before lands are developed.120

Some Alternative Explanations Distributive Conflicts

This argument goes against a distributive conflict literature that explains the existence of property rights security in terms of the persistence or cessation of distributive conflicts.121 Firmin-Sellers’s distributive conflict account portrayed secure property rights in Akyem Abuakwa during the reign of Ofori Atta as the effect of his ability to settle distributive conflicts over land in his favor.122 None of the contending Ga factions is said to have been able to achieve similar victory; hence, the persistent insecurity in the Ga Traditional Area. On an empirical level, the claim that distributive conflicts were definitively settled in favor of the Okyenhene, even if only temporarily, is prob-

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lematic. Various moves by the Okyenhene did not stop people from selling land or from refusing to pay tributes; it only forced them to evolve new instruments of subversion to pursue these conflicts. 123 Further, relatively secure property rights in Akyem Abuakwa have persisted despite the weakening of the office of the paramount chief after the death of Ofori Atta. Theoretically, these conflicts over land are not critical to understanding peoples’ willingness to create an environment of secure property rights. The preference for security or insecurity should be related to how people extract utility from land instead of their ownership or control of land. This is especially critical for such fluid institutional environments where the ownership of a resource does not guarantee that one would draw any benefits from it. Just like in the Ga Traditional Area, distributive conflicts over land proliferated in Akyem Abuakwa between various layers of chiefs, the state, citizens, and tenants before, during, and after the reign of Ofori Atta, but disputants continuously sought to pursue them through means that did not promote insecurity.124 This is because disputants are enmeshed in a complex conflict-ridden web of relations that draws sustenance from the seasonal produce. This web ensures the persistence of distributive conflicts, but compels all to strive to pursue them in peaceful ways. A landlord might give land and capital to a tenant to cultivate cocoa. During the six years before the cocoa trees bear fruit, the tenant might be allowed to interplant the cocoa crop with food crops to which the landlord has no rights. The landlord will benefit once the cocoa bears fruit. The tenant invests up to seven years of labor and a little “drinks money.”125 Given these long-term investments by both, it is irrational for either to create insecurity that will prevent cocoa cultivation. But this relationship also dooms them to perennial distributive conflict as each tries to get more out of the relationship. A tenant might delay planting cocoa for a few years and cultivate only food crops to which he or she is solely entitled. The landlord will push for the immediate planting of cocoa to hasten the arrival of his or her benefits. Once the cocoa produces, the landlord might rig the sharing of the seasonal produce by using a longer rope to measure one part of the farm and a shorter rope to measure the other, knowing that landlords are entitled to choose which part to harvest first.126 In the Ga Traditional Area many chiefs, elders, and landguards seize on similar distributive conflicts to perpetuate insecurity that

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allows them to engage in fraud. In fact, as I demonstrate below, many chiefs, elders, and landguards deliberately invent and deploy distributive conflicts where none initially existed to facilitate their fraudulent activities. Here, distributive conflicts become instruments exploited by chiefs to aid their use of land instead of causal variables to explain how chiefs handle property rights institutions. For example, land in New Weija, a periurban area in the Ga Traditional Area that belongs to the Weija stool under the Ngleshie Alata divisional chief was claimed by the divisional chief of Sempe in the early 1990s. While the case was in court, Sempe leaders and their landguards sold off land in New Weija while New Weija leaders simultaneously sold the same pieces of lands.127 Violence flared in the area as rival landguard units clashed.128 Despite appearances, this was not a case of distributive conflicts leading to losses for all. A landguard who spearheaded the efforts of one of the factions informed me that his bosses knew they had no justifiable claims to New Weija lands and that their goal was not to win in court. They created the conflict and insecurity as a cover under which to sell off those lands and were happy to abide by the court ruling against them after they had finished selling the land.129 Such invention and exploitation of distributive conflicts was also present when chiefs were engaged in unproductive land use before the time of Ofori Atta in Akyem Abuakwa. In the Atta case of 1905, Justice Gilbert Purcell bemoaned the practice of chiefs deliberately claiming rights to land they could have “no possible earthly right” to as a cover for selling off the lands of others.130 In the Kufour case of 1909, Ilegbune quotes presiding Justice Purcell’s condemnation of the defendant chief for “concoct[ing] very foolish untruths” to justify his claims on the land of another chief.131 Since their conversion to productive land use around the 1940s, Akyem chiefs have ceased to instrumentalize distributive conflicts in Akyem Abuakwa. Further, they have sought to manage the multiplicity of existing and new disputes through arbitration systems in which the Okyenhene plays a central role. 132 The insecurity that results from such invention and exploitation of distributive conflicts will only reduce their gains from agriculture and sharecropping arrangements. The Rural-Urban Divide

It is tempting to regard the difference in how traditional leaders handle property rights in these two traditional areas as the effect of a rural/

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urban divide. One might argue that there is greater commercialization of urban land, leading chiefs to sell land against the dictates of customary law. Further, the need to invest large amounts in urban buildings and businesses may well have forced urban chiefs to sell land outright as buyers would be unwilling to invest large amounts if the land would revert back to the chiefs and their communities as dictated by customary law. It might be argued that rural land is subject to less commercialization allowing chiefs to adhere to the traditional norms of only granting user rights and entering into sharecropping arrangements. So maybe the rural/urban divide had an impact on the key independent variable here—how traditional leaders use land. In fact, a system of usufruct is compatible with urban development just as a freehold system of outright sale is compatible with rural agriculture. State land in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, is governed by such a usufruct system, where the state grants user rights only for specific periods of time, after which the land is supposed to revert to the state.133 This has not prevented the development of housing estates and shopping malls in the capital. Given that cocoa is a long-term crop that requires significant investment years before any gains can be reaped, if we follow the logic of the objection above, we could just as well argue that people would be unwilling to invest in it without freehold rights. Like in the capital of Botswana, many have invested in cocoa production even though they lack freehold interest in the lands they cultivate. In Kenya, large swathes of rural land are held freehold.134 The point that I wish to make here is that instead of focusing on the type of rights—usufruct or freehold—we should focus on the security of the rights. Freehold rights are not necessarily more secure than usufruct rights. Secure usufruct rights can aid rural as well as urban development just as insecure freehold rights can threaten both rural and urban development. The dynamic comparison design that I use here enables me to effectively eliminate this alternative explanation. If a rural environment has the effect ascribed to it in this objection, then the proliferation of land alienation should never have occurred in Akyem Abuakwa, which has been rural throughout time. As I indicate above, the sale of land to farmers, mineral concessionaires, and timber extractors proliferated in Akyem Abuakwa before the reign of Ofori Atta. In fact, it was so prevalent that the British sought (with little success) to stop it with legislation at the turn of the twentieth century.135 Given the coexistence of a rural environment and the commercialization and out-

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right alienation of land, as well as the subversion of property rights institutions in Akyem Abuakwa before Ofori Atta, I cannot attribute the variation in either the independent or dependent variable to the rural nature of Akyem Abuakwa as opposed to the urban nature of the Ga Traditional Area. A rural environment was compatible both with unproductive and productive land use as well as an environment of secure or insecure property rights. The same is true for an urban environment. Instead of selling land or issuing capitalized leases, chiefs in the Ga Traditional Area could have issued leases on which they collected monthly or annual rentals from the proceeds of real estate and business operations, making them productive land users and the urban equivalent of sharecroppers. Also, they could have used the land for real estate development and rentals, making them similar to farmer chiefs in the Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Area. I cannot explain either the independent or dependent variable under review here by reference to a rural/urban divide.

Conclusion Why do political leaders in areas with relatively weak property rights institutions seek to handle institutions that govern property rights in land in divergent ways in the face of rising land values? Diverging from the rich efficiency and revisionist literatures on this subject, I argue here that how elites exploit land determines the preferences that they develop in the face of rising land values in an environment of weak property rights. In environments characterized by weak property rights, rising land values will not always spawn preferences for more secure property rights as both the efficiency and revisionist literature maintain. In making this point, I follow in the footsteps of Sonin,136 and Glaeser, Scheinkman, and Shleifer.137 But I depart from the logic of ownership that influences these works like those of many other scholars of political economy.138 This logic, which holds that we can gauge whether or not people prefer strong public institutions that secure property rights to a resource by looking at the distribution of or struggles over the ownership and control of that resource, is problematic. Unfortunately, it has widespread currency and is one of those issues on which liberal and Marxist analyses coincide.139 The causal link is tenuous because the ownership and control of land does not necessarily confer any benefits and, given the right environment, one can benefit from land without owning or controlling it. By focusing on

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how actors exploit land, I better assess their preference for various levels of property rights security. This is an exercise at revisiting and clarifying the demand-side of property rights institutions without denying the importance of the supply-side analysis developed by the revisionist literature. The advantage of this comparison is that it allows me to hold the variable of capacity constant and so reflect deeply on the preferences of political leaders. By introducing and developing the variable of how elites exploit political and economic benefits from land, I provide a clear and simple way of understanding why rational, well-informed, and capable actors would prefer a system of weak property rights systems and how they would obtain resources to actualize their preference. This variable exposes a serious, but avoidable, flaw of the existing transaction cost literature. It has adopted the flawed view that weak property rights always raise transaction costs while strong property rights lower transaction costs.140 But as I demonstrate here, for opportunists involved in multiple land sales, weak property rights institutions render their predatory activities possible and profitable and also reduce their transaction costs. Through the development of the concept of unproductive land use, I show that weak property rights do not raise transaction costs for all, just as strong property rights do not lower transaction costs for all. When we make proclamations about whether certain events lower or raise transaction costs, we also have to ask: whose costs? After all, we do not assume that strong security arrangements that lower transaction costs for police intent on preventing the smuggling of people across a border also lowers transaction costs for smugglers intent on ferrying people across that border. My analysis sheds some light on the likely ways in which the widespread property rights reforms under way in countries on the African continent might play out. We should not expect these reform efforts to have similar levels of success in their implementation or results. This is because, as I point out, political leaders who have to play leading roles in the reform process have different attitudes toward a key goal of these reforms—creating institutions that render the land market predictable and transparent and that make property rights to land secure. While some leaders steeped in the indirect exploitation will embrace these reforms as a godsend and implement them with zeal, there are many other leaders at both the national and subnational level who will oppose these reforms outright, seek to undermine them in subtle ways, or just resist implementing them. If they are forced to

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adopt these reforms, they might creatively transform the institutions created into implements for rendering the land market more unstable and property rights less secure, instead of the other way around. As I demonstrate in an earlier work, title registries were key instruments that state officials in Kenya used to fundamentally undermine property rights by issuing multiple titles to the same land for electoral and economic reasons in the 1990s.141

Notes For funding my field research, I thank the Social Science Research Council, the Center for International and Comparative Studies, and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. The Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa helped me obtain feedback on my work at two workshops in Dakar. William Reno, Edward Gibson, Kathleen Thelen, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Atul Kohli, Jennifer Widner, Birol Baskan, Elizabeth Wood, James Scott, John Roemer, Chris Udry, Robert Keohane, Soo Yeon Kim, Tim Bartley, Vineeta Yadav, and Marie Therese Ndiaye commented on various drafts of this chapter. This chapter draws from information presented in Chapter 2, “Explaining Institutional Choice and Change,” and Chapter 4, “Traditional Leaders Take Charge in Akyam Abuakwa and Ga,” of Ato Kwamena Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 1. Polly Hill, The Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer: A Preliminary Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1956); Faustin Kalabamu and Siamsang Morolong, Informal Land Delivery Processes and Access to Land for the Poor in Greater Gaborone (Birmingham, UK: International Development Department, School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, 2004). 2. “Menace of Land Guards Evokes Fear in Capital,” Africanews, no. 40, July 20, 1999, http://lists.peacelink.it/afrinews/msg00022.html, accessed April 18, 2007; “Chiefs, Plots and Lands Department,” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), December 10, 2001; A. M. Akiwumi, chairman, Report of the Judicial Commission Appointed to Inquire into Tribal Clashes in Kenya (Nairobi: Commission Appointed to Inquire into Tribal Clashes in Kenya, July 31, 1999) (released to the public in October 2002). 3. “Chiefs, Plots and Lands Department”; chairman of a landlords and residents association, interviewed by the author, Ga Traditional Area, July 10, 2002; employee of a real estate development agency, interviewed by the author, Accra, July 3, 2002. 4. Robert Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa, c. 1874–1943: A Study of the Impact of Missionary Activities and Colonial Rule on a Traditional State” (PhD dissertation, University of Ghana, 1980), p. 431; Kathryn Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights in the Gold Coast: An Empirical Analysis

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Applying Rational Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 4; official of the customary land secretariat of Okyeman, interviewed by the author, Kyebi, December 13, 2004. 5. World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 152; World Bank, World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–7. 6. Douglas North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 47–48, 78. 7. In these “sales” in the Ga Traditional Area, people pay the total fee for a 99-year leasehold up front. As I discuss below, this drinks money, as it is called, runs into thousands of US dollars. This explains the popular resistance to efforts by the Office of the Administrator of Stools Lands set up by the state to collect annual rentals for chiefs. People complain that, if they pay annual rentals, they will be buying the land again since they have already paid the total fee to the chief at the initiation of the leasehold. Official in the Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands, interviewed by the author, Accra, September 24, 2004. 8. Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 19–23; Harold Demsetz, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights,” American Economic Review 57, 2 (1967): 350. 9. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 10. North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World, pp. 19–23; Demsetz, “Toward a Theory,” p. 350; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 8. 11. Callistus Mahama and Martin Dixon, “Acquisition and Affordability of Land for Housing in Urban Ghana: A Study in the Formal Land Market Dynamics,” Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Research Paper, Vol. 6., No. 10 (London: Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, October 2006), p. 23; “Chiefs, Plots and Lands Department”; “Menace of Land Guards.” 12. Chairman of a landlords and residents association interview; employee of a real estate development agency interview; senior employee of a real estate development agency, interviewed by the author in Accra, Ghana, October 6, 2004; landguard, interviewed by the author, Ga Traditional Area, October 4, 2004. 13. “Kihika Kimani to Face Uphill Battle,” Weekly Review (Nairobi), April 27, 1979; “Bogus Companies,” Weekly Review (Nairobi), May 23, 1980. 14. Botswana, Commission of Inquiry into Land Problems in Mogoditshane and Other Peri-urban Villages, Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Problems in Mogoditshane and Other Periurban Villages (Gaborone, Botswana: The Commission, 1991), pp. 15–16. 15. “Brazil Hunts Amazon Land Thief,” BBC News, January 9, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1107272.stm, accessed June 12, 2007.

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16. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights, Litigation, and French Agriculture, 1700–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 137–141. 17. Senior employee of a real estate development agency interview. 18. Demsetz, “Toward a Theory,” p. 350; North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World, pp. 19–23. 19. Revisionist scholars include Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights; William Riker and Itai Sened, “A Political Theory of the Origin of Property Rights: Airport Slots,” American Journal of Political Science 35, 4 (1991): 951–969; Robert Bates, “Contra Contractarianism: Some Reflections on the New Institutionalism,” Politics and Society 16, 2–3 (1988): 387–401; and Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 20. David Feeney, “The Development of Property Rights in Land: A Comparative Study,” in Toward a Political Economy of Development: A Rational Choice Perspective, ed. Robert Bates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 274; Riker and Sened, “A Political Theory,” p. 955; Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict, p. 42; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 9–14. 21. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 11–12; Riker and Sened, “A Political Theory,” p. 955; Bates, “Contra Contractarianism,” p. 394. The following works deviate from this belief in a universal preference for security: Konstantin Sonin, “Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, 4 (2003): 715–731; and Edward Glaeser, Jose Scheinkman, and Andrei Shleifer, “The Injustice of Inequality,” Journal of Monetary Economics 50, 1 (2003): 199–222. 22. Sonin, “Why the Rich,” p. 716; Glaeser, Scheinkman, and Shleifer, “The Injustice of Inequality,” p. 200. 23. Mahama and Dixon, “Acquisition and Affordability,” p. 23; “Chiefs, Plots and Lands Department”; “Menace of Land Guards.” 24. “Kihika Kimani to Face Uphill Battle”; “Bogus Companies”; Kenya, Commission of Inquiry into Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land (Nairobi: Republic of Kenya, 2004), p. 80. 25. Sonin, “Why the Rich.” 26. Glaeser, Sheinkman, and Schleifer, “The Injustice of Inequality.” 27. Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution, pp. 137–141. 28. Joel Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, 2 (1998): 203–234. 29. John Gerring and Rose McDermott, “Internal Validity: An Experimental Template,” in Case Study Research: Principles and Practice, ed. John Gerring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 30. Ibid.

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31. Claire Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 27, 49–50; Charles Kingsley Meek, Land, Law and Custom in the Colonies, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. v. 32. 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, p. 267. 33. Kwame Arhin, Traditional Rule in Ghana: Past and Present (Accra: Sedco, 1985), p. 108; Mahama and Dixon, “Acquisition and Affordability,” p. 10; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 31–32. 34. S. Quarcoopome, “The Decline of Traditional Authority: The Case of the Ga Mashie State of Accra,” paper presented at the conference “Chieftaincy in Africa,” Accra, January 2003. 35. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 37. 36. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 11–12. 37. Joseph Boakye Danquah, The Akim Abuakwa Handbook (London: F. Groom, 1928), p. 62. 38. Osman Alhassan and Takyiwaa Manuh, Land Registration in Eastern and Western Regions, Ghana, Research Report No. 5 (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2005), p. 1; R. Kasim Kasanga, Jeff Cochrane, Rudith King, and Michael Roth, “Land Markets and Legal Contradictions in the Peri-urban Area of Accra Ghana,” Land Tenure Center Research Paper No. 127 (Madison: Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin Madison, 1996), pp. 5–6. 39. A stool “refers firstly to a real stool or throne, upon which a chief sits. It also serves as a synonym for a chief’s office and the state or section of state over which he, and more occasionally she, ruled.” Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah & the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951–60 (Accra: F. Reimmer, 2000), p. 13. 40. This was to be achieved through the Public Lands Bill (1897). See Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill, Ghana Land Law: An Exposition, Analysis, and Critique (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1964), p. 20; and Christian Lund, Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 13. 41. Rathbone, Nkrumah & the Chiefs, p. 13; and Samuel K. B. Asante, Property Law and Social Goals in Ghana, 1844–1966 (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1975), pp. 40–47. 42. Bentsi-Enchill, Ghana Land Law, p. 19; Rathbone, Nkrumah & the Chiefs, pp. 41, 113–141; Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 4. Examples of these laws include the Stool Lands Act (1958) and the Administration of Lands Act (1962). 43. Bentsi-Enchill, Ghana Land Law, p. 19. 44. Charles Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble and Land Alienation in British Southern Ghana, 1885–1915,” African Studies Review 19, 3 (1976): 27; Sara Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the

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Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), pp. 10–20; Meek, Land, Law and Custom, pp. 172–177. 45. Cited in Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 27. 46. Visit the Land Administration Projects website at www.ghanalap .gov.gh to learn more about the project. 47. See “Land Administration Project (LAP), Component 1, Harmonizing Land Policy and Regulatory Framework for Sustainable Land Administration” (Land Administation Project document, n.d.), www.ghanalap.gov.gh, accessed August 14, 2007. 48. Claire Robertson, “Social and Economic Change in Twentieth Century Accra: Ga Women” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1974), p. 23. 49. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl, pp. 27–28; Mahama and Dixon, “Acquisition and Affordability,” pp. 15, 20. 50. Kojo Sebastian Amanor, “Family Values, Land Sales and Agricultural Commodification in South-eastern Ghana,” Africa 80, 1 (2010): 107–111; Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 17; and Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 332. 51. Mahama and Dixon, “Acquisition and Affordability,” p. 18; residential land user, interviewed by the author, Accra, October 6, 2004; employee of a real estate development agency interview. 52. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 333; Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 53. Official in the customary land secretariat of Okyeman interview; AddoFening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 431. 54. Officials in the Lands Commission, interviewed by the author, Accra, September 24, 2004. 55. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 56. Official in the customary land secretariat of Okyeman interview; AddoFening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 431. 57. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 431. 58. Senior subject and close ally of a divisional stool, interviewed by the author, Ga Traditional Area, October 10, 2004. 59. Official in the customary land secretariat of Okyeman interview; official in the Okyeman Traditional Council, interviewed by the author, Kyebi, December 16, 2004. 60. Long-term employee of a real estate development agency, interviewed by the author, Accra, July 13, 2002; chairman of a landlords and residents association interview. 61. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 333; Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 62. Asafo companies were youth that constituted the main fighting force of these communities. For more on the asafo, see Dominic Fortescue, “The Accra Crowd: The Asafo, and the Opposition to the Municipal Corporations Ordinance, 1924–25,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 24, 3 (1990).

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63. Amanor, “Family Values, Land Sales,” pp. 107–114; Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 329; Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl, p. 49; Kojo Sebastian Amanor and Maxwell Diderutuah, Share Contracts in the Oil Palm and Citrus Belt of Ghana (London: International Institute for Environment and Development Drylands Programme, 2001), pp. 1–2; Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 13; Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 17. 64. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl, p. 49. 65. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 329. 66. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 52. 67. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 68. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 332–333. 69. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 17. 70. Meek, Land, Law and Custom, p. 172; Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 71. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 24. 72. Ibid. 73. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 333. 74. Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution, pp. 137–141. 75. Rathbone, Nkrumah & the Chiefs, p. 2. 76. Meek, Land, Law and Custom, p. 172. 77. George Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, 3 (1970): 488–500. 78. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 79. Ibid., p. 23. 80. Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London: James Currey, 1989), pp. 64–65. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism, p. 70. For more on the magnitude pace of land grants, see also Jarle Simensen, “Rural Mass Action in the Context of Anti-colonial Protest: The Asafo Movement of Akyem Abuakwa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 8, 1 (1974): 29; Robert Addo-Fening, “Chieftaincy and Issues of Good Governance, Accountability and Development: A Case Study of Akyem Abuakwa Under Okyenhene Ofori Atta I, 1912–1943,” paper presented at the conference “Chieftaincy in Africa,” Accra, January 2003, p. 4; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 74. 84. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), p. 36. 85. Hoyt, One Hundred Years; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 86. Rathbone, Nkrumah & the Chiefs, p. 2; Meek, Land, Law and Custom, p. 172. 87. Robert Bates provides a reminder of leaders’ willingness to make such trade-offs between economic efficiency gains and political expediency. Robert

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Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 88. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 330. 89. Ibid., pp. 330–332, 433; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 63. 90. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 320–330, 433. 91. In its most basic sense, the abusa system required land users to give a third of their produce to the chief as tribute. Amanor and Diderutuah, Share Contracts, p. 1. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., pp. 334–336. 94. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 334; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 64. 95. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 333–334. 96. Baffour Yaw Akese, Odikro of Adubiase, wrote to the Okyenhene pleading for the return of a confiscated farm that he claimed was his personal property, not stool property, October 11, 1947, Akyem Abuakwa State Archive, AASA/3/106; a letter from Kofi Bado of Anyinassing to Nana Ofori Atta II on November 19, 1947, indicated that Ofori Atta I had converted farms belonging to Bado’s relative, Bafour Dowuona, Odikro of Anyinassing, into stool property, November 19, 1947, Akyem Abuakwa State Archive, AASA/3/106. Other letters bearing evidence of the ruthless campaign of Ofori Atta and his successors are present in that file. 97. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 2–3. 98. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 71–83. 99. Great Britain, Report of the Commission on the Marketing of West African Cocoa, (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1938), pp. 66–69; AddoFening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 388–390; Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 13. 100. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” pp. 388–390. 101. Ibid., p. 389. 102. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 67. 103. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 14. 104. Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 404. 105. Ibid., p. 436; Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, p. 75. 106. The Twi phrase Di bi ma me ndi bi roughly translates as “Eat some and let me also eat some.” 107. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 14. 108. Ibid. 109. Bafour Yaw Akese, Odikro of Adubiase, in a letter to Ofori Atta II pleading for the return of a farm transformed into a stool farm by Ofori Atta I, claimed he had established this farm in his private capacity using private resources, October 11, 1947, Akyem Abuakwa Stool Archive, AASA/3/106.

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Bafour Kwadjo Akai II, Odikro of Kyea, in a letter to Ofori Atta II took a different approach and argued for the return of one of his converted farms on humanitarian grounds, November 28, 1947, Akyem Abuakwa Stool Archive, AASA/3/106. Ofori Atta I and his successor Ofori Atta II cracked down on this tactic of lower chiefs by expropriating their personal farms and transforming them into stool properties. 110. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 14. 111. Amanor, “Family Values, Land Sales,” p. 113; Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 13; Amanor and Diderutuah, Share Contracts, pp. 1–2. 112. Ibid. 113. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 16; Amanor and Diderutuah, Share Contracts, p. 2. 114. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 11; Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” p. 431. 115. Kasanga et al., “Land Markets and Legal Contradictions,” p. 1. 116. Official in the Lands Commission, interviewed by the author, Accra, July 4, 2002; employee of a real estate development agency interview; “Chiefs, Plots and Lands Department.” 117. Landguard interview; landguard, interviewed by the author in Accra, October 6, 2004. 118. Interview with an employee of a real estate agency in Accra, October 6, 2004. 119. “Menace of Land Guards”; “Trouble Looms in Oblogo over Chieftaincy, Land Sales,” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), February 15, 2001; “Ablekuma Saga Continues, Landguards Still Terrorizing Bortianor Locals,” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), May 18, 2001; “Nmai Dzorn Land Developers Advised,” Newtimesonline.com, February 3, 2006, http://newtimesonline.com /index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1337&Itemid=245, accessed April 4, 2007. For more on landguards, see also Sandra Joireman, Where There Is No Government: Enforcing Property Rights in Common Law Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 115–124. 120. “Menace of Land Guards”; “Trouble Looms in Oblogo over Chieftaincy, Land Sales,” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), February 15, 2001; “Ablekuma Saga Continues, Landguards Still Terrorizing Bortianor Locals,” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), May 18, 2001; “Nmai Dzorn Land Developers Advised,” Newtimesonline.com, February 3, 2006; Joireman, Where There Is No Government, pp. 115–124. 121. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights; Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict. 122. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights. 123. Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 14; Amanor and Diderutuah, Share Contracts, p. 2; Amanor, “Family Values, Land Sales,” p. 112. 124. Polly Hill quotes the draft report of the West African Land Committee, which noted that “chiefs have willingly agreed that the stranger-farmer shall be

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immune from disturbance and shall enjoy the same perpetuity of tenure as the indigenous cultivator, provided the agreed-upon proportion is regularly paid to the native authorities.” Hill, Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, p. 12. 125. Drinks money is the amount of money a tenant gives to a landlord to consummate a land transaction. 126. This account of the constant subterfuge and contestation involved in arrangements of sharecropping in Akyem Abuakwa is drawn from my observations and interviews including: official of the OASL, interviewed by the author in Asamankese, Akyem Abuakwa, December 14, 2004; official in the Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus Disease (CSSVD) Control Unit, interviewed by the author in Asamankese, Akyem Abuakwa, December 14, 2004; and official in the customary land secretariat of Okyeman in Kyebi, Akyem Abuakwa, December 13, 2004. 127. Landguard interviews. 128. Landguard interviews. 129. Landguard interview. 130. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” p. 23. 131. Ibid., p. 29 note 27. 132. Official in the customary land secretariat of Okyeman interview. 133. Kalabamu and Morolong, Informal Land Delivery Processes. 134. Kenya: Commission of Inquiry into the Land Law System of Kenya, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Land Law System of Kenya on Principles of a National Land Policy Framework, Constitutional Position on Land and New Institutional Framework for Land Administration (Nairobi: Government Printer, 2002). 135. Ilegbune, “Concessions Scramble,” pp. 26–27. 136. Sonin, “Why the Rich.” 137. Glaeser, Sheinkman, and Schleifer, “The Injustice of Inequality.” 138. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 12–13; Glaeser, Scheinkman, and Shleifer, “The Injustice of Inequality,” p. 200; Sonin, “Why the Rich,” p. 716; Riker and Sened, “A Political Theory,” p. 951. 139. Firmin-Sellers, The Transformation of Property Rights, pp. 12–13; Sonin, “Why the Rich,” p. 716; Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx: The Selected Writings, ed. David Mclellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 229–230. 140. Demsetz, “Toward a Theory,” p. 350; North, Institutions, Institutional Change, p. 48; World Bank, World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 5–7; de Soto, The Mystery, p. 58. 141. Ato Kwamena Onoma, The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 160–166.

6 Women’s Rights and Family Law Reform in Francophone Africa Susanna D. Wing

The question of whether legal reforms concerning gender and

family issues are generated within states or imposed from without is frequently raised. Answers to this question are complicated because family law reform in Africa takes place in a contested arena of legal pluralism and is embedded in the legal legacies of colonialism. In many African societies, widows and divorced women are in a precarious position in which their access to property is restricted by customary law, thereby limiting their ability to support themselves and their children. 1 At the same time, religious and customary laws that are designed to protect families may be ignored or undermined through legal reform. This conundrum exemplifies the complexity of legal pluralism. On the one hand traditional laws challenge women’s rights, and on the other hand legal reform threatens the protections once envisioned by these customary laws. In order to better understand the process of family law reform, it is essential to consider both colonial legacy and legal pluralism, which is what I endeavor to do here through analysis of the cases of Senegal, Benin, and Mali. In each of these three cases, power and politics are at issue. The stakes are not simply about patriarchy and women’s rights, but also about the privileging of civil codes derived from colonial law that alter the status of customary or religious laws so that they are no longer officially recognized by the state. 2 This process inevitably sparks a

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debate over Western legal norms versus customary or religious norms and divides communities into proponents or opponents of family law reform. As the three cases that I examine in this chapter illustrate, alliances form based on how civil society actors situate themselves relative to legal pluralism and the ensuing debates concerning modern versus traditional laws. In addition, the reform process is influenced by the organizational strength and resource opportunities available to supporters and opponents of reform. Multiple actors contribute to the process of family law reform. In many African states, civil society was at the forefront of social movements rallying for political change and democratic transition. Today, these associations have taken on the role of interest groups and this is evident in the arena of legal reform. In sub-Saharan Africa, scholars have only just begun to analyze legal reform as it relates to associational life.3 In this chapter, I shed light on the new roles that associations are playing in society following the recent democratic transitions in Benin and Mali and the political opening in Senegal. With this analysis, I hope to contribute toward an understanding of the process of societal change in Africa and move away from debates centered on the West versus the rest by illustrating the shifting terrain of culture and tradition and emphasizing the role of politics and power in the ongoing negotiations over law. Elites in Africa often have Western education and training and frequently support Western models of democracy, thereby making the distinction between Western and diverse African perspectives amorphous. Syncretism is everywhere in postcolonial states where legal pluralism requires that institutions balance formal state law with traditional or religious law while individuals juggle multiple identities, including those based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, and gender. African ownership of legal reform nevertheless plays a critical part: initially, in the ability to change family laws, and, ultimately, in the successful implementation of those laws. Analysis of the process of family law reform in Benin, Senegal, and Mali reveals that a wide array of local, regional, and transnational organizations have been central to ongoing discussions concerning legal reform. Interest group mobilization and the relative power of groups (e.g., religious organizations or women’s associations) influence institutional change. Understanding the power dynamics between proponents and opponents of legal reform is indispensable for under-

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standing how postcolonial states seek to construct a functioning legal system that is considered legitimate by all citizens. This not only is an illustration of domestic power politics but, as I show, it incorporates international actors as well. While I focus on family law reform, it is important to recognize that personal law is different, but not separate, from other issues concerning judicial reform in Africa. Judicial institutions in sub-Saharan Africa frequently lack legitimacy—a problem that is only reinforced when negotiating matters that concern private law, precisely because private law incorporates personal matters dealing with familial relations such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Judicial reformers, particularly lawyers’ associations and organizations promoting the protection of human rights, are important allies for women’s organizations promoting changes to family law. Finally, the context of struggles—particularly in new democracies—has powerfully shaped the debate. Political liberalization often sparks a defense of traditional ways of life, making laws that many see as either natural or traditional more difficult to change. Thus, although Mali and Benin have served as democratic models in Africa, 4 and many citizens in these countries are strong supporters of democracy5 who consider family law reform as central to protecting citizen rights, still other individuals oppose family law reforms. Moreover, even when the struggles lead to increased state authority to protect women’s rights, states often lack the necessary authority to deliver security. I begin with an overview of the principal domestic and international actors implicated in family law reform, followed by an examination of the context of legal pluralism that prevails in postcolonial Africa. I consider perceptions of justice in Benin, Senegal, and Mali by analyzing public opinion data on levels of corruption and trust for judges, police, and traditional authorities. This provides a clearer picture of the extent to which individuals in each country view legal authorities as legitimate and therefore sheds light on the context of family law reform. In the final section, I explore the process of family law reform in each country. My principle findings are that, in each of these democracies with similar colonial legacies, organizational strength and access to resources are critical to determining whether or not reforms take place. State autonomy from religious or traditional leaders and public opinion about these leaders play an important role in the capacity of opponents or proponents of reform to mobilize for or against family law reform.

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Actors and Alliances for Family Law Reform Women’s associations, lawyers’ professional associations, and human rights groups have been the principal local, regional, and international proponents for family law reform in countries across Africa. International donors such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), European Union, and others have also played an important role in financing these actors. Just as colonialism strained gender relations and institutionalized patriarchy, transnational movements for women’s rights have continued to divide societies. Since the 1995 UN World Conference of Women in Beijing and the growing efforts to place women at the center of development (e.g., with the Women in Development agenda) and to recognize women’s rights as human rights, the power and status of conservative groups in society have been threatened. In Mali and Senegal, opposition to reforms has come primarily from organized religious groups. In Benin, traditional leaders expressed their resistance to family law reform, but were unable to organize effectively to prevent change. Traditional authorities in Benin operate predominantly in rural areas and do not have lobbying networks in the capital. This reduced their ability to rally against the reform of family law. In Benin, those opposed to reform lack the formal organizational structures that religious groups often have at their disposal which, in other countries, helped them to galvanize opposition and effectively challenge reform. In Mali, conservative religious organizations used extensive religious networks in their successful bid to undermine the reform process. Religious sermons are a central mechanism for imams to advertise what they perceive to be threats to a particular cultural way of life. In Senegal, the process of reform is bifurcated. On the one hand, family law reform is the reverse of the other two countries that I examine; that is, reform was intended to roll back laws that were already considered progressive. The principal proponent for reform in this case was the Islamic Committee for the Reform of the Family Code in Senegal (CIRCOFS), a group of conservative Muslims. At the same time, reforms were also being advocated by women’s rights groups in order to provide women with increased rights by altering the current language of paternal power (establishing the father as head of household and granting him the authority to determine the family’s place of residence, among other things) to parental authority that gives women and men equal authority over

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family affairs. Supporters of the change in language argue that change was required given the increasing numbers of female-headed households. Senegal, therefore, is rather unique in that actors on both sides of the debate sought to reform family law. Globalization has provided a forum for women from around the world to unite and discuss the protection of women’s rights in their own societies. Transnational organizations such as Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF) and the Fédération internationale des droits de l’homme as well as local organizations such as Association des jurists maliennes (AJM), Coordination des associations et ONGs féminines du Mali (CAFO), and Association des femmes juristes du Benin (AFJB) are central players both in negotiations over legal reform of personal law and during the critical phase of public awareness following reform. Western donors play a central role by providing necessary funding to these organizations. This leaves local organizations vulnerable to accusations of being too Western. It is important for women to overcome class divides, to include men in public awareness campaigns, and to create local and transnational networks to pursue their goals. Donors must gauge their contributions carefully in an effort to permit women to be at the forefront of their own struggle for legal protections that democracy affords them. There is no doubt that financial support of women’s associations is necessary and yet a danger lies in associations that compete for funds in order to merely exist and are left unable to achieve their goals. The recent democratic openings in the three countries that I include in this study provide an essential platform for community discussions concerning family law reform, culture, and citizenship. While the democratic context contributed to reform by providing a space for the mobilization of civil society and by the increased attention given to individual rights, reform in Benin took place in a top-down manner (although democratic institutions were used legitimately and effectively). Leonardo Villalón, in an analysis of family law reform in Niger, questions whether it is possible to reform family law using democratic methods.6 Today, Mali and Benin are examples of legal reform in a democratic setting; however, in both cases reforms were passed legitimately in the legislature, but the process itself appears to be less than ideal because no opposition votes were tallied in either case. In all postcolonial states, political elites continually evaluate and make difficult decisions as to which values and laws (customary, religious, and civil) will be respected and enforced within their societies.

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In democracies, political elites must consider public opinion concerning reform and gauge the capacity of opponents to mobilize against change. Political elites must also follow through on windows of opportunity that might arise. In Morocco, for instance, supporters of reform were able to take advantage of one such window of opportunity that briefly opened after the 2003 bombings in Casablanca spurred widespread resistance to fundamentalism in the country. Subsequently, this allowed proponents of reform to take a bold step to reinforce the notion of Morocco as a modern state and to adopt a new family law.

Legal Pluralism and the Context of Reform The formal legal arena garners the most attention from scholars, yet legal systems are inevitably the result of combinations of rules and procedures deriving from both formal and informal sources. The importance that people place on the relative value of these formal and informal sources of law is often at the bottom of debates over family law reform. Legal pluralism, a contested concept, exists where formal state law coexists with religious and customary legal codes.7 Issues concerning gender and development are influenced by legal pluralism because in many postcolonial states legal pluralism reinforces divides between male and female citizens, particularly with respect to personal law. There is an inevitable tension between state law, which is derived in part from inherited colonial laws (and therefore often viewed as imposed), and religious, traditional, or preexisting legal norms. This tension infiltrates gendered power relations and poses challenges for women’s rights and development. While legal pluralism often has significant economic ramifications for families, the reform of personal law can lead to a legal environment in which there exists a chasm between civil law and everyday social practices. In this instance, legal institutions diverge greatly from the actual implementation of such laws, and this may result in unexpected outcomes. In the case of Benin, polygamy is discouraged and the civil code recognizes only monogamous civil unions. Women who enter into polygamous marriages through traditional or religious ceremonies will find that they have no legal recourse should the union be dissolved. This is particularly dangerous for the many women who may not realize that their marriage is not legally recognized. Polyga-

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mous unions that dissolve in this environment can lead to little or no financial support for a woman and her children. In instances where levirate has been outlawed (Benin), this traditional method of providing familial support to a wife and her children is undermined without being replaced by adequate opportunities for women to be financially independent and to support themselves and their children. Throughout West Africa, and elsewhere, an Islamic law provision requires three months of support for a spouse (idda) following a divorce. However, in Niger a predominantly Muslim state, civil law requires a man who divorces his wife to support her until she remarries. Not only is this provision widely ignored, but idda is also generally never fulfilled.8 The problem is not customary or religious law per se, but rather the ambiguous and precarious position of individuals who might presume the continued protections of religious or customary norms only to find that these norms are not legally binding and, therefore, can easily be ignored. South Africa offers an interesting example of legal pluralism: it embraces customary law and at the same time promotes antidiscrimination. The 1994 South African Constitution has incorporated customary law principles (Section 31) and adopted the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act of November 2000. At the same time, the courts have made an effort to limit any discrimination against women that may result. For example, in December 2008, the Constitutional Court of South Africa effectively abolished aspects of the KwaZulu Code of Zulu Law (Section 20) and Natal Code of Zulu Law (Sections 20 and 22) which provide that a woman cannot be an owner of property and that men should be the sole owner of all property acquired in marriage. The Constitutional Court confirmed a Durban High Court ruling that stated that Elizabeth Gunmede, whose 1967 customary marriage was legitimate because of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, had been discriminated against on the basis of gender, race, and status when following a divorce she was denied access to immovable properties acquired during her marriage. The Women’s Legal Centre argues that the Constitutional Court’s judgment abolishes the rule of customary law that leaves the ownership of marital property with the husband and, thereby, provides women such as Gunmede with protections they previously were not afforded.9 This example of legal pluralism in practice illustrates the willingness of a state to recognize customary law, but only insofar as it does not unfairly discriminate

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against a particular group of citizens (i.e., women). As a result it is a model of legal reform that, it is hoped, will ultimately lead to social transformation. Colonialism established a dichotomy between public and private spheres, and this division has remained in postcolonial Africa, thereby allowing religious and traditional leaders to maintain their positions of power over personal law. In the most recent democratic transitions, personal law continued to be relegated to the private sphere where it remained under the jurisdiction of customary or religious norms. In all three cases, Benin, Mali, and Senegal, this was the result, in part due to the unwillingness of elites to engage in the complicated negotiations that would inevitably arise over personal law reform—a subject that was considered extremely inflammatory and divisive. During the transition periods (in Mali and Benin, in particular) no one wanted the process of democratic transition to be held hostage by conflicts over family law; however, twenty years later, this discussion can no longer be held at bay. Where customary law is privileged over state law, as is often the case in so-called private matters dealing with marriage and inheritance, individual rights are frequently denied in favor of “preserving tradition.” The divide between state and customary law became entrenched and reified through the mapping of colonial notions of public and private law onto it—a fact that has important implications for power relations between men and women in postcolonial societies. Colonial powers avoided conflict with local authorities in the realm of personal law while they focused on dominating areas deemed to be more important, such as public law, economics, and state administration. In Benin and Mali, family law reform was not on the agenda prior to democratic transitions in 1990 and 1991, respectively. Democratization presented an opening for the debate and, following the ratification of new constitutions, family law became a critical arena for the negotiation of power between the state and religious or traditional authorities as well as between men and women. It is not surprising that the ongoing categorization of personal law as private has hidden the political nature of conflicts over family law and that the public/private divide has left women’s rights unprotected and challenged by restricted notions of tradition. Every society must negotiate its own way through competing claims of divergent norms and this is likely to be a difficult process. As Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im argues with respect to sharia in Islamic

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countries, family law like all other law “derives its authority from the political will of the state,” not from God.10 He argues that family law has become the “‘last bastion of religion’ in the administration of justice.”11 As a result, it is fiercely protected by conservative religious groups because to undermine the role of religion in family law is to undermine their authority in such affairs. While An-Na’im is primarily concerned with Islamic law, a similar argument can be made with respect to customary law and the role of traditional leaders in many African societies. It can be argued that customary and religious law may be defended with respect to the laws’ relevance to everyday lives of people, the effectiveness of the laws, and a general sense of ownership of the laws themselves. Whereas these are important issues, it is also critical to recognize the gender hierarchy reinforced by these norms, with the result that raising concerns about this hierarchy is not simply a Western perspective. Furthermore, women’s organizations in numerous African countries have actively pursued the reform of family laws, reminding us that the relevance and value of customary and religious laws are not simply accepted by everyone. As I have argued, the complexities of legal pluralism challenge constitutionally protected rights of citizens in general and women in particular, and this has a broad array of ramifications for society as a whole. Establishing the rule of law requires that the judiciary is respected and that its authority guarantees the rights of all citizens. In Africa, navigating the channel between state law and customary and religious law is not only crucial to protecting women’s rights as citizens, but it also is directly related to development goals. The Millennium Development Goals not only address gender equality, but also child and maternal health and universal education, particularly the education of girls. Until women are assured freedom from violence and legal, economic, and social discrimination, their ability to escape the poverty trap and contribute to achieving these goals will be limited.12 Reforming family codes addresses legal discrimination against women and is a first step to reducing the pervasive discrimination that exists in practice. Analysis of the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reveals a strong relationship between social institutions and literacy ratio. In countries with low gender discrimination in social institutions, there is also a female to male literacy ratio close to 1. Those countries with a high rate of early marriage, for example, tend to have a lower ratio of female to male literacy. The

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prohibition of early marriage is often a key component to family law reform. The international agreements on women’s rights that Benin, Mali, and Senegal have ratified add an international dimension to legal pluralism. They are important in the context of family law reform because they convey a commitment to both international and domestic communities regarding the protection of women’s rights. All African states, with the exception of Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Western Sahara, have signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Yet in many countries the role (formal or informal) of customary law often negates the protections afforded by this convention. Importantly, Benin, Mali, and Senegal have ratified CEDAW without reservations. The African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa came into force in October 2005 and has currently been ratified by twenty-eight countries (including Benin, Mali, and Senegal).13 The protocol includes progressive protections for women in marriage and sets forth wide-ranging social and economic rights for women. Advocates hope that as an African instrument to promote and protect women, it will be an effective tool in reducing discrimination and, thereby, promote democracy and opportunities for development. To the best of my knowledge, despite its implications for power relations within societies, legal pluralism has not been widely investigated by political scientists.14 Legal anthropology, comparative law, and legal theory remain the primary areas of inquiry in which legal pluralism is debated. Scholars of comparative law, such as Jacques Vanderlinden, Gordon Woodman, and John Griffiths, are at the forefront of debates over how legal pluralism is defined and how it is integral to understanding legal systems.15 Legal anthropologists such as Sally Falk Moore and Etienne Le Roy articulate the many ways in which societies operate in an environment of multiple legal norms in Africa.16 Because legal pluralism often places women in a particular predicament (with specific ramifications for women and their children and thus society in general), it is important to analyze how social groups frame their positions on family law and how their actions affect institutional outcomes. 17 By focusing on how gendered power relations play out in the context of legal pluralism in postcolonial states, I hope to contribute to an understanding of the conditions under which women’s rights and concerns are addressed. The cases that I present

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illustrate the link between the reform process and legitimacy of legal change. Structural factors related to literacy and strong lobbying by associational groups are important to the successful passage of family law reforms. International pressure from donors and human rights advocates can have mixed results. In some cases, political leaders adopt the international discourse on human rights, linking family law reform to CEDAW, and embrace the idea of a modern and democratic state identity (Senegal and Benin). In others (Mali), an alliance with the international community and language of modernity sparked widespread backlash to reform.18

Perceptions of Justice and Rights While the constitutions of each country that I analyze protect the equal rights of men and women (Article 2, Constitution of the Republic of Mali; Article 26, Constitution of Benin; Article 7, Constitution of Senegal), the challenge of achieving such rights for women is monumental. Constitutions and civil codes may be altered, but societal norms are much slower to change. Table 6.1 presents data on public perceptions of equality for women as well as levels of trust in traditional authorities, police, judges, and courts. Each of these variables is significant to the context for legal reform. Mali has the most conservative population with respect to women’s equality, with only 39 percent of the Malian population supporting equal rights for women—significantly fewer than in Benin (71 percent) and Senegal (47 percent).19 With respect to women’s relation to customary law, 59 percent of Malians believe that “women have always been subject to traditional laws and customs, and should remain so” versus 48 percent in Senegal and a stunning 13 percent in Benin.20 This suggests that Malians’ conservative views on women’s rights are tied to the strength of traditional authorities.21 Popular support for and trust in judicial institutions is an important aspect of the process of legal reform. If people do not trust judges or police but do support traditional leaders, they are unlikely to want to reform the legal system in such a way that judges gain authority over personal law at the expense of those who adjudicate customary or religious law. Interestingly, of the three cases here, Malians are the most likely to suspect that judges and magistrates are involved in corruption. Senegalese are the most likely to view traditional authorities as

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Table 6.1 Development Indicators and Public Perceptions of Justice and Traditional Authority (as percentage of respondents)

Adult male population that can read and write Adult female population that can read and write Support equal rights for women Believe that women are and should remain subject to traditional laws and customs Believe that most or all judges and magistrates are involved in corruption Believe that most or all traditional leaders are involved in corruption Have a great deal of trust for the police Have a great deal of trust for the courts Have a great deal of trust for traditional leaders Democracy is preferable to any other form of government Would support a government in which all decisions are made by a council of chiefs or eldersa UN Multidimentional Poverty Index HDI rank

Benin

Senegal

Mali

53 28 71

52 33 47

35 18 39

13

48

59

48

38

54

20 53 49 60

35 78 70 76

14 50 43 82

81

70

72

39

54

.384 155/187

.558 175/187

.412 167/187

Sources: UN Human Development Report 2011; Afrobarometer Network, 2005, “Afrobarometer Round 3 Survey in Benin, 2005: Summary of Results,” www.afrobaromenter .org; Afrobarometer Network, 2009, Eric Little and Carolyn Logan compilers, “The Quality of Democracy and Governance in Africa: New Results from Afrobarometer Round 4: A Compendium of Public Opinion Findings from 19 African Countries,” Working Paper No. 108, www.afrobarometer.org. Notes: HDI: Human Development Index a. This question was not asked in Benin.

corrupt, whereas few Malians suspect traditional authorities of being complicit in corruption. Senegalese are also more likely to have a great deal of trust for the police and the courts, whereas Malians reserve this trust for their traditional leaders. Given this context, it is little surprise Mali has had such difficulty reforming family law. With respect to democracy, more Malians and Beninois than Senegalese believe that democracy is preferable to any other form of government. This may be attributed to the relatively recent arrival of

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democracy in Mali and Benin. Since independence Senegal was considered one of Africa’s most democratic states despite the lack of competition during the forty years that the Socialist Party of Senegal controlled the presidency. While Mali and Benin experienced transitions between governing parties within the first decade of democratic rule, it was not until 2000, four decades after independence, that such a transition took place in Senegal. Nevertheless, over one-half of the Malian population would support a form of government in which “all decisions are made by a council of chiefs or elders.”22 As these numbers reveal, Malians are conservative on women’s rights, but they still hold democracy dear. The overlap between 72 percent of Malians who prefer democracy and the 54 percent who would support government of council chiefs or elders reveals that these forms of government are not necessarily perceived as exclusive of one another—a further factor in the lack of success for legal reforms reducing the role of traditional and religious authorities. In both Benin and Mali, judicial institutions and their leaders are widely suspected of corruption whereas chiefs and elders are highly respected and trusted. Despite the fact that they are often chosen from among respected families and are often elders in the community, assessors—whose purpose is to represent customary law in the courtroom in Mali—are tainted by the distrust of the judiciary and are not highly respected.23 Therefore, the integration of customary law into the courtroom does not serve the legitimating function that was originally intended. The conservatism of Malian society may also be linked to lower levels of literacy, producing an environment in which religious leaders are more able to call on tradition in order to protect their positions of power. Benin appears to be much less conservative than either Mali or Senegal, and a greater percentage of respondents have had some access to a formal education. When literacy rates (using UN Children’s Fund [UNICEF] indicators for the percentage of the adult population literate in 2000)24 are compared across Africa to the percentage of the population believing that “women should have equal rights” (as surveyed by Afrobarometer in 2004),25 there is a correlation between higher literacy rates and increased support for women’s rights. Not surprisingly, those states with higher literacy rates have also adopted family law reforms that promote women’s equality (South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia). There is little question that “illiteracy restricts access of women to gainful employment, and limits their ability to enjoy equal access to health care and other services.”26

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This lack of access may also be extended to their children, thereby continuing the cycle of poverty and dependency.

Reforming Family Law Despite the inevitable controversy, several countries across the continent, including Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, have tackled legal reform of family laws. In this section, I explore the process of reform in Benin, Senegal, and Mali. I selected these cases because of their similar colonial legacy and status as recent democracies (while Senegal has a democratic past, only in 2000 did a transition occur from the historically dominant Socialist Party of Senegal to the opposition Senegalese Democratic Party). In each case, organizational strength and resource opportunities powerfully contribute to the path taken in the reform process. Women’s organizations are central proponents of reform, and their allies include human rights associations, lawyers’ associations, and international donors. The ability of opponents to frame reforms as threatening to culture and customary norms has also played a central role in the process of reform. The extent to which political leadership is insulated from opposition mobilization is also important in the process of family law reform in Benin, Mali, and Senegal. Mounira M. Charrad’s argument that state autonomy with respect to kinship groups is an important indicator of the state’s ability to adopt family laws that expand women’s rights is supported by my findings.27 Neither the presence of Islam, nor that of democracy, predetermines the attempt at or success of reforms. Table 6.2 provides a schematic overview of family law reforms in the cases of Benin, Mali, and Senegal.

Benin Taking the wife of a dead brother is not a crime. . . . It is tradition that demands it. Our parents practiced it . . . I say no to this law which wants to abolish this cherished practice. —Houssoue Houenivo, chef de village, Benin28

In 2004, the National Assembly of Benin voted in favor of a new family law. The law consecrates monogamy as the sole form of legal civil

159 Table 6.2 Family Laws

Benin Family Code of 1931: Coutumier du Dahomeya Legal minimum age for marriage: 14 women/18 men Polygamy: Permitted Rights to property during marriage: Based on customary law. Women are considered legal minors. Women’s rights to property are generally denied. Divorce: Based on customary law. Both women and men can initiate divorce. Repudiation is legal across the country. Inheritance/custody of children: Based on customary law. Women have rights to inheritance, but generally receive a smaller share than male relatives. Widow inheritance: Permitted Other: Women cannot retain their maiden name in marriage. 2004 Revised Family Code Legal minimum age for marriage: 18 women/18 men Polygamy: Discouraged. Wives married to a man after his first (official) wife have no legal rights. Rights to property during marriage: Equal Divorce: Equal right to divorce Inheritance/custody of children: Equal Widow inheritance: Prohibited Other: Women can add their maiden name to their husband’s name.

Mali 1962 Marriage Code Legal minimum age for marriage: 15 women/18 men. In 2004, 50 percent of girls between age 15 and 19 years were legally married. Girls are contracted into marriage as young as age 11 years. It is legal for girls under age 15 years to marry with parental consent or consent of a judge. Polygamy: Permitted. Groom selects marital regime prior to first marriage. Civil, traditional, and religious marriages are recognized. Rights to property during marriage: Husband is the head of the household and can forbid wife’s engagement in any commercial activity (although he cannot prevent her from professional pursuits). Correspondingly, women’s access to property other than land is limited. Over the past 20 years, however, women’s access to bank loans has improved with the increasing presence of microcredit programs. Divorce: Equal right to initiate divorce. Cost can be prohibitive for women. Inheritance/custody of children: Customary and religious law determines inheritance. In some cases, this means that women do not inherit property. In the case of sharia, females inherit less than males. Widow inheritance: Permitted Continues

160

Table 6.2 cont. 2009 Family Code signed by the National Assembly Legal minimum age for marriage: 18 women/18 men Polygamy: Permitted. Groom selects marital regime prior to first marriage. Customary and religious marriages are not recognized. Rights to property during marriage: Equal Divorce: Divorce can be initiated by woman if couple has not lived together for 3 years. Inheritance/custody of children: Recognizes inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock. 2012 Family Code Legal minimum age for marriage: 16 women/18 men Polygamy: Permitted. Groom selects marital regime prior to first marriage. Religious marriages are recognized. Rights to property during marriage: Equal Divorce: Divorce can be initiated by woman if couple has not lived together for 3 years. Inheritance/custody of children: Recognizes inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock.

Senegal Family Code of 1972 Legal minimum age for marriage: 16 women/20 men Polygamy: Permitted. Groom selects marital regime prior to first marriage. Rights to property during marriage: Equal Divorce: Unilateral divorce by husband (talaq) is illegal; women and men must go to civil court to obtain divorce. Inheritance/custody of children: Child custody in the case of divorce is contingent on the type of marriage. In judicial marriages the mother generally receives custody, while in religious marriages the father can apply for custody of children older than age 8 or 10 years. There are two types of inheritance: common law, which grants widows and daughters the same rights as sons; and Muslim law, which favors men. Widow inheritance: Permitted 2003 Family Code proposed by CIRCOFS Legal minimum age for marriage: 16 women/20 men Polygamy: Permitted Rights to property during marriage: Sharia Divorce: Talaq reinstituted in accordance with sharia. Inheritance/custody of children: Sharia Widow inheritance: Permitted Continues

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Table 6.2 cont. 2005 Family Code proposed by women’s organizations Legal minimum age for marriage: 16 women/20 men Polygamy: Permitted Rights to property during marriage: Equal Divorce: Equal Inheritance/custody of children: Parental authority versus paternal authority would acknowledge both father and mother are responsible for children. Widow inheritance: Permitted Other: Paternal authority to be replaced by parental authority giving women the ability to administer family affairs. Sources: UN Data, http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=marriage+age&d=GenderStat&f=inID percent3a19; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), www.oecd.org/document/39/0,3343,en_2649_33935_42274663 _1_1_1_1,00.html; Aili Mari Tripp et al., Africa Women’s Movements: Changing Political Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Note: a. The Coutumier du Dahomey is the codification of customary law. Therefore, for each aspect relating to marriage, inheritance, and divorce, there are vast differences between ethnic groups. The age of marriage given is an average age.

marriage while permitting polygamy only in traditional marriages. It outlaws levirate, does away with forced marriage, and allows for a woman to keep her maiden name after marriage (a practice not previously permitted by the law).29 Supporters of the law were backed by international institutions such as USAID as well as regional organizations such as WILDAF. Two women’s organizations, WILDAF-Benin and AFJB, lobbied for the new law; however, despite arguing that their traditional ways of life were being undermined by this “woman’s code” and that the intelligentsia were leading a coup against men, opponents to reform were not effectively organized.30 The passage of the law was a pivotal moment in Benin’s attempt to change social practices through legal reform despite widespread resistance. Polygamy is still widely practiced and as Deputy Rosine VieyraSoglo argued, “You can have forty wives if you like, but know that if you die it is only the wife married in a civil ceremony who will have the right to inheritance; all the others will have nothing.”31 The good intentions of the reform put women at risk. Many women are unaware of the new family law and could easily find themselves with few legal rights if their marriages come to an end or if they enter into a polygamous union

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unaware that it provides them no legal rights. The protection afforded women by customary law in which husbands must provide maintenance to their wives is undermined with the new civil law. If a woman is not legally married, then her husband is not required to provide monetary support to her. In most cases husbands are likely to fulfill these societal obligations, but they are not legally required to do so. Civil society organizations have played a key role in campaigns to promote civil marriages as a way to protect women’s rights. Reform of the family code in Benin took place in the halls of the National Assembly with a great deal of lobbying on the part of women’s associations. Indeed, members of WILDAF-Benin were present in the assembly when representatives voted on the law. International actors played an important role by applying continual pressure on democratic governments to live up to their own constitutions and to work to protect women’s rights. In addition, they provided critical resources to women’s associations and human rights groups. In Benin, USAID played an influential role through its Women’s Legal Rights Initiative (WLRI). WLRI is an important source of funding for organizations such as AFJB that are at the forefront of public awareness campaigns regarding the new family law. USAID is straightforward about the purpose of the project: “Women’s Legal Rights activities are aimed at overcoming resistance due to influence of traditions and customary practices. . . . This new law marks a watershed in the history of Benin’s legal environment that is constituted of retrograde customs and traditions.”32 Unfortunately, since the customs and traditions referred to are practiced by the majority of the population, language such as “retrograde” serves only to underscore the view that this is a conflict between acceptable modern laws and backward traditions. Such an approach deepens the divide between those in favor of reform and those who are suspect of outside influences on personal law. A revised code, passed in 2002, was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court because it permitted polygamy and not polyandry. The court then reworked the law that was subsequently presented to the National Assembly and passed in 2004. Some deputies claim that the court hijacked the law from the assembly. To be sure, the fact that a primary supporter of the reform (founder and former president of AFJB Judge Clotilde Médégan Nougbodé) was also the president of the High Court of Justice and a member of the Constitutional Court contributed to the court’s motivation to play an

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active role in revising the code. Judge Médégan Nougbodé’s association with USAID and AFJB made her the face of the new family law and a target of much criticism. However, it is clear that the court saw this not as a case of overstepping its legal boundaries, but rather as a critical step in establishing democracy in Benin by protecting women’s rights and closing the gap between the equality clause of the constitution and Benin’s Family Code. Of the three countries, Benin is the only one that does not have a majority Muslim population (43 percent are Christian and 25 percent Muslim). This is significant only to the extent that in Senegal and Mali, Muslim associations and religious leaders have a forum in which they can easily mobilize their followers in opposition to reforms. The fact that the president of the National Assembly was a principle advocate of the new family law, and that no legislator would vote against it, reveals the enormous amount of political pressure associated with the passage of the law and supports the notion that strong political leadership is critical to the passage of reform. In addition, there were no interest groups lobbying in opposition to the law. This allowed those in favor to move forward with relative autonomy from the disparate voices that opposed reform. The 57 to 0 vote (with 8 abstentions and 18 absent legislators) illustrates a rather suspect unwillingness to vote against the reform. Nevertheless, the law was passed and the challenge of implementation remains. Perhaps the most critical element for implementation is the importance of sensibilisation (public awareness campaigns) and the need for widespread discussion of women’s rights and the new Family Code. Without this, there will be little public awareness of the law and it is unlikely to be implemented across the country.

Senegal In 1972 Senegal passed a Family Code that outlawed the practices of forced marriage and repudiation and changed the marriageable age to at least sixteen years old for young women and twenty years old for young men. When first married, the groom specifies whether the marital regime will be monogamy, limited polygamy, or polygamy (up to four wives). The man’s choice is a lifelong choice; therefore, polygamy is the most common marital regime selected. Under this law, women do not need their husband’s consent to work outside the home. However, the

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chef de famille (head of the family) is always a man, and in Article 152 the term puissance paternelle (paternal power) is used to describe the person who holds power in the household. Women’s associations such as WILDAF and networks such as the Reseau Siggil Jegeen (RSJ) have lobbied for a new term, autorité parentelle (parental authority), that would incorporate the role of women in the family.33 Those who challenge the existing family law (“feminist code”) argue that it is too Western and ignores Muslim ways of life.34 The laws that were proposed in Mali and Benin were often labeled “women’s codes.” The Senegalese government defends the secular constitution and blames local cultural traditions (not Islam) for discrimination against women. The government has not confronted local Muslim authorities and women promoting reform depend on progressive religious leaders and the state for allies in this effort. As Nadine Sieveking argues: While the government officially promotes gender equality to assume its “progressive” position in the eyes of the international community, it refrains from adopting concrete policies that could lead to a direct confrontation with local Muslim authorities. This field is left for NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], who join in the strategy; thereby assisting the government in its efforts to avoid a politicization of religion, which was intended by CIRCOFS and other Islamic organizations who oppose the secular character of the national constitution and legislation.35

In Senegal, there are two separate reform projects. One is led by CIRCOFS and the other is led by women’s organizations and networks including RSJ. In 2003, CIRCOFS was created and it submitted a revised version of the family law to the government. Despite the fact that President Abdoulaye Wade announced that he would not permit personal family law to be based on the sharia and the National Assembly would not adopt such a code (his party held the legislative majority), CIRCOFS continued to push for its adoption. At the same time, RSJ worked with the Family Ministry to develop a strategy paper on women’s rights in which religious argumentation for gender equity was presented (both Christian and Muslim). When RSJ launched its campaign for reform of the Family Code, it worked closely with Muslim scholars. “The religious arguments elaborated by Kebe [corresponded] to global development discourses, but to be effectively communicated and used for the purpose of women’s organizations on a

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broader societal level they [were] ‘translated’ and connected to popular discourses within local Muslim communities.”36 President Wade prevented the passage of the reforms proposed by CIRCOFS. Those reforms would have undone the secular nature of the current Family Code and implemented sharia as the basis for personal law. The transnational organization Women Living Under Muslim Laws supported Wade’s decision to prevent sharia from becoming the dominant personal law regime for Senegalese Muslims (who make up 94 percent of the population). However, it feared that this position on the part of Wade made it possible for him to avoid the changes to the law promoted by RSJ while at the same time labeling himself as a defender of women’s rights. There are further concerns on the part of Senegalese NGOs that Wade will prevent progressive family law reform by arguing that pressure from CIRCOFS makes such changes impossible. From this perspective, Wade would expect RSJ and others who support reforms to be grateful for avoiding the adoption of sharia and, therefore, to cease promoting further changes to the existing law.37 The Senegalese case is interesting given the long-standing relationship between the Sufi brotherhoods and the state. In 1972 a balance was struck between President Leopold Senghor, who was committed to strengthening the secular nature of the government, and the Sufi religious leaders, who argued that the Family Code contradicted Islamic law. Whereas a progressive law was now in place, implementation was another issue. In rural areas the Family Code was virtually ignored, but was used in cases that made it to urban courts.38 From 1974 to 1985, 4,607 judgments were made on inheritance and only 452 of these were based on statutory law; the others were decided according to Islamic law.39 With respect to marriage, the Family Law of February 24, 1967, fixed dowries at small amounts not to exceed 3,000 CFA francs (approximately US$6 in 2012) and wedding ceremonies were not to exceed 15,000 CFA (approximately US$30 in 2012). This was quickly put aside as powerful families (including the very deputies who passed the law) celebrated marriages.40 These families continued to celebrate with ceremonies that they deemed appropriately grand for the occasion. There is widespread impunity to legislation as a result of cultural and religious resistance to change. In January 1999, a law was passed that made domestic violence punishable by a jail sentence and monetary fines but, as one judge noted, some families pressure judges to

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minimize penalties and the economic position of other families limits what they are able to pay in the first place. 41 Adji Fatou Ndiaye, a coordinator for the UN Development Fund for Women, argues that “it is not uncommon to see a mother proud to see her daughters [sic] suffer in her marriage, because people can say that she has learned to behave in the household.”42 In this case, cultural arguments are used to legitimate violence in marriage. Despite a law that prohibits girls under the age of sixteen to wed, Deiynaba Hamady Sow, age twelve, was forced to marry her cousin on May 31, 2003, and died from bleeding caused by sexual intercourse on her wedding night. These cases reinforce the notion that, even where formal legal protections exist, they are not always observed and educational campaigns concerning legal protections are essential. Fatou K. Camara criticizes the reforms, arguing that the aim of Senegalese Family Law was never to protect women’s rights but to enforce foreign laws that give men mastery over women. Making the judge a mandatory step on a woman’s path to freedom is a devious way of curtailing her indigenous right to defend herself against forced marriage and marital abuse. That is the true feat of Family Law. It has used the written law to erase indigenous rights of women while, at the same time, making people believe that it all was done in the name of protecting women’s rights.43

The laws that were established by President Senghor and revised over time do hold the possibility of protecting women, although more needs to be done in this regard. If courts do not uphold the law and women no longer have the ability to seek protection from customary law, then women are left with little protection indeed. It is this ambiguous situation, as well as the loss of social and legal protections, that make women’s status so precarious. President Wade used his political influence to preserve the status quo in which sharia is still widely practiced while personal law adheres to the secular nature of the state. CIRCOFS brought together a broad range of Islamic positions and yet it failed to make much headway in the face of Wade, who categorically refused to give in to its demands.44 The Senegalese case is interesting in that, while there is clearly an organized opposition to the current Family Code as well as a long-standing relationship between brotherhoods and political power in the country, women’s organizations and the state allied with pro-

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gressive religious leaders to protect women’s rights as they were established in the current family law and, consequently, CIRCOFS has been unable to bring about the reforms they advocated. President Wade supported women’s rights in Africa and was an advocate, alongside Thabo Mbeki, for the African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. He worked alongside women and lobbied his peers within the African Union to support women’s rights.45 His willingness to be at the forefront of protecting women’s rights is a critical factor in preventing the rollback of family law by CIRCOFS. But in the case of Mali, Islamic groups were successful in preventing family law reform in 2009 and imposing significant changes to the code passed in 2011, but their success is rooted in both the threat of violence and the political threat they pose to those in power. CIRCOFS lacked such widespread support.

Mali Until the promulgation of the Family Code in January 2012, marriage in Mali was regulated by the 1963 Code du mariage et de la tutelle.46 Inheritance law is determined by the traditional law or religious law regime with which the deceased identified prior to his or her death. There was an ongoing struggle between women’s associations that sought widespread reforms of marriage and inheritance laws and the Collectif des associations islamiques du Mali (hereafter Collectif), which strongly opposed reforms that would not legally recognize customary or religious marriages. Women’s associations such as AJM, Groupe-Pivot/droits des femmes, CAFO, and the Association pour le progrès et la défense des droits des femme Maliennes all lobbied for a new family code. Throughout the 1990s, the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children, and Family spearheaded the Projet de la réforme du code de la famille. International donors such as USAID, CIDA, and the European Union have all provided substantial resources for the project. After more than fifteen years of debate, a new law was proposed to the Conseil des ministres and was finally voted on in the National Assembly in August 2009, only to be sent back for further review by President Amadou Toumani Touré following massive protests in Bamako and throughout the country. On December 2, 2011, the National Assembly passed a new family law with not a single vote

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in opposition to the code. The 2011 Family Code is a disappointment to many supporters of women’s rights because it recognizes religious marriage and allows young women to marry at age sixteen (rather than at age eighteen when young men are eligible to marry).47 In 2002, during his last days in office, President Alpha Oumar Konaré attempted to reform the code by decree. The decree followed a series of concertations (public discussions) across the country that incorporated many representatives of civil society. The Collectif claimed that Konaré’s decree was a denial of concerns that they had expressed during the dialogue that had already taken place. They threatened violence in Bamako if Konaré signed the decree, and imams mobilized opposition to women leaders who pushed for reforms (as well as other culturally sensitive topics such as outlawing excision). It is unclear if violence at the time was ever likely; however, the possibility of creating a hollow law that was widely ignored was real and may have contributed to Konaré’s decision to back down. The opposition to reform can be linked in part to the fear of losing power among religious authorities, who currently play an important role in legitimating religious marriages and adjudicating inheritances. With Touré’s election, women’s associations became less vocal and stopped actively lobbying for reform of the law. This was partly the result of the state co-optation of many NGOs and the lack of continued pressure from the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family. Because of the change in the political climate, women leaders did not believe it was in their interest to continue to pressure the government for reform. To further complicate matters, during the 1990s there was an ongoing struggle between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family. The Ministry of Justice did not support the fact that the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family was in charge of reforming the family law during Konaré’s time in office, arguing that, because the law is about individual rights and justice, it should be handled by the Ministry of Justice. Interestingly, the project was indeed relocated to the Ministry of Justice, which established, on January 10, 2008, a nineteen-member commission to reevaluate the family law until April 2008. As one journalist noted, this commission had to reconcile modernism and tradition. In addition, their actions affected not only women, but family and society. Reform, he wrote, requires both good governance and democracy.48

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With President Touré’s reelection in April 2007, and the subsequent parliamentary elections during the summer of 2007, it is not surprising that debate on a volatile topic such as family law reform was postponed until January 2008—safely after the electoral season. Islamic associations successfully intimidated supporters of the new code, and women’s associations became less vocal on the subject than they had been during the Konaré regime. Despite the fact that politicians from rural areas surely recognized the lack of support for family law reform within their constituencies, in August 2009 the National Assembly voted 117 to 5 for the new Family Code.49 The reaction was immediate and imams mobilized their followers across the country. Fifty thousand people rallied at the main stadium in Bamako. Thousands more took to the streets in towns across Mali. Religious leaders issued a statement insisting that mosques should continue to perform religious marriage, rejecting state-sponsored civil marriage. They argued for legal recognition of religious marriages, a demand that was not met by the new code.50 They threatened to boycott the legislators who voted for reform, announcing: “We will no longer do baptism ceremonies or prayers for the dead for them or their families. They have betrayed Allah!”51 President Touré refused to sign the law, arguing for the preservation of peace and calm across the country, and sent it back to the National Assembly for further review. The High Islamic Council in Mali viewed the new law as an “insult to Islam.”52 In order for the reform to become law, the government had to directly engage religious leaders in the process. President Touré encouraged yet another review of the family law, but with active involvement of the High Islamic Council. In the case of Morocco, each aspect of the reform was legitimated by a passage from the Qu’ran. It is important to note that in Morocco inheritance was not addressed by the new code, precisely because the Qu’ran outlines detailed inheritance laws. Polygamy is another issue permitted by the Qu’ran but under circumstances that would be difficult to meet (providing absolute equality between spouses). This allowed Morocco to make polygamy very difficult legally. Reform requires political risk taking and leadership that was in the offing in Mali. In Mali, the opinions of religious leaders had to be addressed, and this prevented the more drastic changes that human rights organizations preferred. The High Islamic Council illustrated its ability to bring thousands of Malians into the streets in protest. This put President Touré in a precarious position in which he either had to face widespread social upheaval or

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continue the dialogue until a compromise was reached. The process of reform was influenced by the ability of opponents to mobilize and garner widespread popular support, whereas women’s associations and their allies were unable to mobilize the populace to the same extent. As is evident in the reform process in Mali, Benin, and Senegal, the relative power of advocates and proponents of reform and the level of interest-group mobilization are critical factors for institutional change. Despite democratic reforms and state ratification of international instruments designed to protect women, it is commonplace for the rights of women to be considered as Western values. As customary laws that once protected women are undermined, new laws are either not put into practice or simply denied in the courtroom. The contradictions between international and domestic legal codes and customary and religious norms continue to be problematic. One of the broader social ramifications of a lack of legal reform is the continued dependency of women and their children on male relatives. This dependency can have negative consequences on children’s education and health care. These examples also reveal how the language of traditional and modern, and African and Western, has become central to these debates. Such language challenges the syncretic nature of law and the idea of African ownership of legal reform.

Conclusion Increased urban and rural linkages are likely to influence the pace of change with respect to family law reform as urban populations have already begun to alter their views toward women’s rights and traditional authorities. Similarly, as the education of girls increases, it is likely that a younger generation will grow up in an environment more accepting of women’s participation in the public sphere and of increased protection of women’s rights. For the most part, families in each of these countries are unaware of the legal codes that govern their relations. It is only when disputes arise that the legal system is called on. Indeed, many individuals seeking resolution to familial conflicts will find answers within their own compounds and will rarely seek outside input. The problem arises for those who do seek the protection of the legal system and find a precarious mix of laws that can be used to restrict their own rights. Despite the unwillingness of the French to tamper with personal laws in their colonies, the social upheaval of

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colonialism has had a lasting effect on how legal reforms are perceived within postcolonial states and has made the passage of womenfriendly family law reforms (which might occur as a result of democratic openings) even more challenging. Economic and political liberalization have also had an important effect on gender roles within families and the laws that protect families in Africa—particularly for women. Economic liberalization has provided opportunities for men and women at the same time that it has made life more difficult for many and, therefore, required a change in gender roles as men and women seek alternative sources of income. In Mali, 86.6 percent of the population lives in poverty according to the 2010 multidimensional poverty index of the UN Development Programme (UNDP). In Senegal 66.9 percent of the population lives in poverty, and in Benin 71.8 percent. 53 In every instance, poverty is widespread, and it is understood that women are shock absorbers in times of economic crisis and that their labor often keeps households going.54 Political liberalization has brought democracy and increased demands and opportunities for equality and women’s rights. In many cases, this liberalization has sparked a backlash. The influences of globalization have affected family structures at different rates across the continent, but everywhere those representing customary and religious norms have resisted change. In Benin and Mali, opponents to legal reform framed proposed changes to family laws as threatening to communities and cultural ways of life. In Senegal, legal reform proposed by CIRCOFS was in essence an effort to prevent further changes to the legal environment that would promote women’s rights, but also was an example of an attempt on the part of an Islamic group to bring the legal structures in line with everyday marital practices in the country. Sharia is widely respected across the country, and family law does not reach the lives of many who live in rural areas since they are unaware of the state laws. In defending their proposed family law reforms, CIRCOFS argued that the secular state in Senegal was a fallacy and that the political leadership of Senegal had merely mimicked France. This perspective challenged the authority of the constitution and of the state. Some will be quick to argue that Islam plays a crucial role in determining family law reform and this is not surprising given studies that show gender inequality is more prevalent in predominately Muslim than non-Muslim societies. 55 However, religion is by no means the determining factor with respect to whether or not progres-

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sive family law reforms take place. For example, predominately Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Pakistan all have family codes that are more women friendly than non-Muslim states such as India and Zambia. When considering institutional change, the state’s autonomy in relation to traditional and religious leaders is crucial, as is the access that interest groups have to resources and their relative ability to mobilize in their own interests. In nearly every culture, women are perceived as the embodiment of cultural values and are expected to pass on these values to their children. As a result, protecting customary law is often represented as preserving cultural norms, and this important task is commonly the obligation and duty of community leaders. As these cases reveal, intracultural disputes over norms are often articulated as a conflict over preserving cultural ways in the face of Western cultural imperialism. The more powerful members of the community support the status quo, and those who seek more independence violate community norms and, therefore, are perceived as threatening the community’s very survival. My intention in this chapter was to highlight the key areas of conflict in legal rights of citizens in each of these democratic states as they deal with the process of reform. While some may argue that there is a normative value in legal codes that increase women’s equality, I sought to emphasize how, because of the nature of the reform process and the problematic nature of the contradictions currently existing as a result of legal pluralism, this has not yet proven to be true in reality. Reform of family law continues, however, to be a priority for many women’s associations and human rights groups in Africa. It is misleading to presume that this is driven by the West or by individuals who have become Westernized and are therefore no longer appropriately African.

Notes Aspects of this chapter appear in different form in Susanna D. Wing, “Legislating Marriage: Globalization and Family Law Reform in West Africa,” in Family Structures and Globalization in Africa, ed. Ana Marta Gonzales et al. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011). 1. Throughout this chapter, I refer to both “traditional” and “customary” norms or laws. It is understood that these are imprecise concepts that continue to undergo change in society. I have not placed these terms in quotation marks in the text; however, it should be stated at the outset that their syncretic nature is understood.

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2. As I show below, Senegal offers a slightly different version in which one proposed reform seeks to reinstate sharia as personal law. 3. See Aili Marie Tripp, “Women’s Movements, Customary Law, and Land Rights in Africa: The Case of Uganda,” African Studies Quarterly 7, 4 (2004). 4. This chapter was drafted prior to the March 2012 coup d’état in Mali. See Susanna D. Wing, Constructing Democracy in Transitioning Societies in Africa: Constitutionalism and Deliberation in Mali (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5. This position is evident in multiple interviews conducted by the author with members of the National Assembly, magistrates, human rights activists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs in Mali (Bamako, June 2007) and Benin (Cotonou, August 2003) as well as in the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys. See Afrobarometer Network, Michael Bratton, Carolyn Logan, Wonbin Cho, and Paloma Bauer, compilers, “Afrobarometer Round 2: Compendium of Comparative Results from a 15-Country Survey,” Working Paper no. 34 (2004); Afrobarometer Network, “Afrobarometer Round 3 Survey in Benin, 2005: Summary of Results,” 2005, www.afrobarometer.org; Carolyn Logan, Tetsuya Fujiwara, and Virginia Parish, compilers, “Citizens and the State in Africa: New Results from Afrobarometer Round 3,” Working Paper no. 61 (2007); and Eric Little and Carolyn Logan, compilers, “The Quality of Democracy and Governance in Africa: New Results from Afrobarometer Round 4: A Compendium of Public Opinion Findings from 19 African Countries, 2008,” Working paper no. 108 (2009). 6. The National Assembly passed a revised Family Code on December 2, 2011. At the time of this writing President Touré had not yet signed the code into law, but it was widely expected that he would do so promptly. Leonardo A. Villalón, “The Moral and the Political in African Democratization: The Code de la Famille in Niger’s Troubled Transition,” Democratization 3, 2 (2007): 41–68. 7. For discussions on the debates, see Werner Menski, Comparative Law in a Global Context, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism?” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24 (1986); and Gordon R. Woodman, “Ideological Combat and Social Observation: Recent Debate About Legal Pluralism,” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 42 (1998). 8. Ousseina D. Alidou, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 9. Legalbrief, “Constitutional Court Abolishes African Customary Law Prohibiting Women from Owning Property,” www.legalbrief.co.za/article .php?story=20081208174049373, accessed January 14, 2009. 10. This argument is based on the fact that one cannot equate family law today (even when it is purportedly based on Islamic law) with historical understandings of sharia and Islam. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “Shari’a and

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Islamic Family Law: Transition and Transformation,” in Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book, ed. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im (London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 3. 11. Ibid., p. 18. 12. United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals Report 2011” (New York: UN, 2011), www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/mdg/MDG _Report_2011.html, accessed March 19, 2011. 13. The twenty-eight countries that have ratified the protocol as of June 2009 are Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Comoros, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Libya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Signatories and ratifications to the protocol are updated regularly at the African Union website, www.africa-union.org/root/au /Documents/Treaties /List/Protocol%20on%20the%20Rights%20of%20Women.pdf. 14. Political theorists have grappled with the challenge of group rights versus individual rights as well as complexities of multiculturalism and justice. These issues often arise as a result of legal pluralism. 15. See Jacques Vanderlinden, “Le pluralisme juridique,” in Le pluralisme juridique, ed. J. Gillissen (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1971); Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism?”; and Woodman, “Ideological Combat and Social Observation.” 16. Sally Falk Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field As an Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law and Society Review 7 (1973): 719–746; Etienne Le Roy, Les Africains et l’institution de la justice, entre mimétismes et métissages (Paris: Dalloz, 2004). 17. It is possible to imagine customary practices that empower women in ways that a legal system may not. My intention is not to judge the normative value of either system, but rather to illustrate the complexity of the legal environment in which individuals may expect one set of norms and protections to apply when they are not legally binding. 18. The use of the word “modern” reflects the language of proponents of family reform in the cases I studied. Benjamin Soares, “Islam in Mali in the Neoliberal Era,” African Affairs 105, 418 (2005): 77–95; Susanna D. Wing, “Women Activists in Mali: The Global Discourse on Human Rights,” in Women’s Activism and Globalization, ed. N. Naples and M. Desai (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 172–185. 19. The fifteen countries included in the survey are Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. 20. Gender and the rural/urban divide are important factors that likely contribute to how individuals responded to these questions. Further research is needed in this area as the survey data available do not provide a breakdown for gender or residence.

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21. This may also be linked to the role of religious authorities, but the data available do not specify religious versus traditional authority. 22. Unfortunately, these questions were not asked in Benin so numbers are not available for comparison. 23. Maaike De Langen, “Les Assesseurs et la Justice: Configurations du droit et de la coutume dans les conflits fonciers à Douentza, Mali,” unpublished paper, Projet Cooperation Juridique Malienne-Néerlandaise, 2001; anonymous interview by author with magistrate, Bamako, January 12, 2007. 24. UNICEF, www.unicef.org/statistics/index_countrystats.html. 25. Afrobarometer Network, “Afrobarometer Round 2.” 26. Equality Now, “Senegal: Submission to the UN Human Rights Committee, 61st Session,” October 1997,” www.equalitynow.org/english /campaigns/un/unhrc_reports/unhrc_senegal_en.pdf, accessed January 14, 2009. 27. Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 28. Emile Kouton, “Moves to Outlaw Archaic Marriage Customs Stir Storm in Benin,” Agence France Press, July 26, 2002. 29. Geneviève Boko Nadjo, “Persons and Family Code of Benin,” paper presented at the NGO Forum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, October 2004. 30. Kouton, “Moves to Outlaw Archaic Marriage Customs”; Emile Kouton, “Trouble and Strife Among Benin’s Menfolk as New Law Bans Polygamy,” Agence France Press, June 23, 2004. 31. Ali Idrissou Touré, “Droits-Benin: Le code de la famille consacre la monogamie, mais n’interdit pas la polygamie,” Inter Press Service, June 17, 2004, www.ipsnews.net.fr/internat.asp?idnews=2238, access date June 24, 2004 (translation mine). 32. USAID, “Gender: Promoting Women’s Legal Rights in Benin,” p. 2, http://usaid.gov/bj/gender.html, accessed January 14, 2008. 33. WILDAF, “Situation des femmes Sénégal,” November 2004, www.wildaf-ao.org/eng/spip.php?article47, accessed March 9, 2012; Nadine Sieveking, “‘We Don’t Want Equality; We Want to Be Given Our Rights’: Muslim Women Negotiating Global Development Concepts in Senegal,” Africa Spektrum 42, 1 (2007): 38. 34. Amsatou Sowsidibe, “Senegal’s Evolving Family Law,” University of Louisville Journal of Family Law 32, 2 (1993–1994): 421–430. 35. Sieveking, “‘We Don’t Want Equality.’” 36. Ibid. 37. Women Living Under Muslim Laws, “Senegal: Victoire pour les forces progressistes mais pas forcement pour les femmes sénégalaises,” www.wluml.org/french/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd%5B157%5D=x-157-15172, accessed January 2008. 38. Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal: Tocquevillean Analytics in Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 118.

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39. Sowsidibe, “Senegal’s Evolving Family Law,” p. 427. 40. Ibid., p. 428. 41. “Senegal: Beaten in Silence,” June 16, 2008, p. 2, www.irinnews .org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78743, accessed June 17, 2008. 42. Ibid. 43. Fatou K. Camara, “Women and the Law: A Critique of Senegalese Family Law,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 13, 6 (2007): 787–800. 44. Leonardo A. Villalón, “Senegal: Shades of Islamism on a Sufi Landscape,” in Political Islam in West Africa: State-Society Relations Transformed, ed. William F. S. Miles (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005), pp. 161–182. 45. Melinda Adams and Alice Kang, “Regional Advocacy Networks and the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa,” Politics and Gender 3, 4 (2007): 451–474. 46. “Mali: Moins de droits pour les femmes le nouveau code de la famille,” Radio France International, December 5, 2011. www.rfi.fr/afrique/20111205 -mali-moins-droits-femmes-le-nouveau-code-famille, accessed December 11, 2011. 47. Ibid. 48. Dado Camara, “Mali: Révision du code de la famille—Quel sera le nouveau statut de la femme?” Nouvel Horizon (January 21, 2008): 2, www .wluml.org/french/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-559874, accessed January 2008. 49. Cassandra Balchin, “Mali: The Wedding Dress with Attitude,” Women Living Under Muslim Laws, December 11, 2009, www.wluml.org/ar/node /5779, accessed March 8, 2012. 50. Benjamin Soares, “The Attempt to Reform Family Law in Mali,” Der Welt des Islams 49, 3 (2009): 398–428. 51. Serge Daniel, “New Family Law in Mali Upsets Islamists,” August 31, 2009, Agence France Press, www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article /ALeqM5hGoaw0Y6-KWE_a7tGRHfsSTjOXLw, accessed March 8, 2012. 52. Ibid. 53. “UNDP’s 2010 Multidimensional Poverty Index,” http://hdrstats.undp .org/en/indicators/38406.html, accessed March 8, 2012. 54. Joni Seager, The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, 4th ed. (New York: Penguin, 2009). 55. Steven M. Fish, Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7 Religion, Democracy, and Education Reform in the Sahel Leonardo A. Villalón

Education is a centrally important public good, significant both

for its role in training a workforce adapted to development goals and for its long-term impact in shaping the political orientation of new generations of citizens.1 In much of Africa, however, education has been poorly delivered and, most strikingly, has been of sharply declining quality in the postcolonial period. At least part of the reason for this is that in much of Africa (and perhaps especially in Francophone Africa) the institutional structures of educational systems that were inherited from colonialism have been a poor fit with societal demands and cultural realities—and this is at least part of the reason for the widespread failure of education policies to foster developmental outcomes. There were some critiques of education policy in the new states just after independence, but continuity quickly won out over rupture. In the case of Niger, for example, in 1964 the leftist intellectual and politician Abdou Moumouni (after whom the national university is named) published a critique of colonial education policy and an eloquent plea for a “new conception of education and teaching in Black Africa,” but such pleas had little to no echo at the time.2 Despite such critiques, the overwhelming logic of continuity in policy areas such as education meant few changes during the first three decades of independence. At least part of the failure to change was due to the argument by French-educated elites that efforts to Africanize education

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were tantamount to lowering standards for the citizens of newly independent countries.3 Across the Muslim majority countries of the Sahel, one societal response in the postcolonial period (which had in fact begun well before independence) to the bad fit between the provision of public education and social expectations has been the development of a vast parallel system of informal religiously based education. Outside the official state educational system, it has been created largely in explicit response to the limitations of the state system. These unofficial, “informal,” or “parallel” schools developed in widely varied forms and levels, ranging from basic Qur’anic schools to quite sophisticated “Franco-Arabic schools.” Seeing them as competing with the official educational systems, states variously attempted to suppress, control, or ignore these alternatives throughout the first three decades of independence. The policies played out differently in each country and at different times, but in each regular stories can be heard about government efforts to force children to attend the official state schools and of the strategies and ruses by parents to resist. As Louis Brenner notes in surveying Mali’s education policy in the first three decades of independence, the underlying theme of the story is “a profound conflict between government policy and an opposition to it expressed by means of Islamic education.”4 Interestingly, however, following gradual but significant changes that occurred in both the domestic and the international governance contexts beginning in the 1990s, a number of factors prompted a broad array of countries in Africa to embark on significant experiments in reforming education and galvanized a renewed attention by the international community on education as a key factor in development.5 In the context of the Francophone and Muslim countries of the Sahel, a striking aspect of the reform processes has been the attempts to bring the informal and semiformal religiously based educational systems more squarely into the formal state system, or at times to reform the formal system to borrow characteristics from the informal system, such as the introduction of religious education in state schools. To be sure, there is a long history of debates about the relationship of religion to education policy in the region, and there are parallel debates elsewhere in the Muslim world.6 But given the long history of postcolonial policies of maintaining Francophone and secular education, these reform efforts are truly unprecedented in the region.

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While still in development, and although the extent of their impact has yet to be seen, the very fact of undertaking such reforms marks a significant departure from previous policy in the region and a key example of how the changing social contexts of the past two decades have allowed for—and sometimes driven—significant policy shifts. In this chapter, I comparatively examine the politics of education reform in three Sahelian countries—Niger, Mali, and Senegal—all of which are fairly well advanced in the implementation of such reforms. In all three of these countries, the impetus for reform is largely driven by the argument that bringing educational institutions more in line with local social realities and expectations will help to create systems that will work with social and cultural realities rather than against them. In these countries then, states have embarked on reform projects to recognize or capture the flourishing parallel educational systems while also trying to impose some degree of formalization, resulting in the creation of what might be considered new hybrid systems. These reforms have themselves been made possible by changes in the nature of the state, and of state-society relations in the era of liberalization that has occurred since the early 1990s. In many ways, the arguments that now carry along the reform efforts in these countries were unthinkable in earlier decades. Reflecting the broad dynamics sketched out by the editors in Chapter 1 of this volume, these new policy initiatives have been made possible and have been promoted by key actors due to the changes in the governance context, themselves the product of gradual and incremental societal changes set in motion in the period of political liberalization of the 1990s. In what follows, I first sketch out some elements of these transformations in the political context. I then discuss more closely the nature of reforms in the education sector in each country.

The Governance Context: Negotiating Islam and Democracy in the Sahel Despite some differences in the broad outlines of their political histories and from the perspective of recent democratization, Senegal, Mali, and Niger face a similar set of issues on the evolving relationship between Islam and democracy in the Sahelian region, with important consequences for the governance context. In demographic terms the

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three countries are quite similar; all have populations around 12 million to 15 million, of which the best estimates suggest some 90 percent to 95 percent are Muslim. All three came to independence in 1960 as a result of the dissolution of France’s West African colonial empire. Mali and Niger each quickly followed the common African model of postindependence authoritarianism, with single-party regimes giving way to military ones (in 1968 in Mali and in 1974 in Niger). These authoritarian regimes lasted until they were toppled in a context of popular mobilization in 1991, each giving way to ongoing but variously successful “democratic experiments.”7 Senegal was often described as a rare democracy on the African continent in its first three decades of independence, but from the added perspective of another two decades or so, it is clear that in fact Senegal was less exceptional than it seemed. Like elsewhere on the continent, Senegal moved quickly after independence to the consolidation of a de facto single-party regime. And when it did take the exceptional move of reauthorizing opposition parties (indeed, mandating them constitutionally) in the mid-1970s, it did so within carefully circumscribed limits that ensured that they would not in fact accede to power. Strikingly, as economic conditions deteriorated and political frustration increased throughout the decade, Senegal ended the 1980s in a political situation not much different from that of many other regimes on the continent: with significant social unrest and under strong pressure to democratize. Indeed, faced with calls for a national conference or a transitional government on the model of some neighboring countries, the ruling party was obliged to embark on a series of fundamental and profound political reforms in the early 1990s. The 1993 presidential and legislative elections were arguably the first truly democratic ones in independent Senegal, notable in that they were the first held in a context in which all parties agreed on the rules of the game. 8 And in the subsequent presidential election in 2000, Senegal experienced its first electoral change of government. The important point to note here is that in the early 1990s all three countries embraced significant political liberalization in the name of democracy. The processes of democratization since then have been incomplete and with important limitations. Notably, in the case of Niger it was punctuated by major setbacks, including three coups in 1996, 1999, and 2010. Yet even in Niger, the latter two coups were carried out in the name of restoring democracy from incumbent

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presidents who were subverting it and, for much of the period, all three countries were in fact ruled by elected governments within constitutional frameworks that were popularly endorsed and widely accepted. Most significantly, since the early 1990s the dominant discourse has consistently centered on democracy. In this context then, it is clear that the experience of this liberalization has gradually produced significant social transformations and changes in the nature of these states and their relations to society. Liberalization has particularly resulted in a rapid expansion of religious influence in public life and, in all three countries, similar fundamental debates about the appropriate role and place of religion for Muslim societies attempting to establish a democratic political order.9 In their seminal work on Africa’s “democratic experiments,” Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle suggest that “in many respects, political transitions center on struggles over the rules of the political game, with alternate clusters of rules representing opposing regime options.”10 I argue on the contrary, however, that in post–Cold War Africa much of the struggle over regime rules often took place posttransition: that is, after a founding election had been held and a new government had been put in place. In most cases, fundamental issues concerning the form and the substance of democracy were left unresolved at the transition, to be decided by the first elected government. Transitions, thus, were not fundamentally about rules, but in large part rather about the acquisition of power to preside over a subsequent elaboration of rules. This basic structural characteristic of the incomplete nature of democratic transitions in much of Africa is at the root of much societal change and of the parallel political developments in the Sahel. Indeed, in Chapter 6 of this volume, Susanna D. Wing examines the similar dynamics at play with regard to family law. In the period following the transitions, with a dominant discourse on the principle of democracy but significant disagreement as to its content, intense political debates about core issues have marked all three countries. The very fact of these debates gradually effects social transformations, in turn shaping the possibilities for governance. As the editors note in Chapter 1 of this volume, the cumulative effects of gradual “microtransitions” and societal changes produce new terrains and playing fields for politics and for the governance context. Efforts to understand this context in the region today must attempt to

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account for these changes, as well as for the fact that policies that were politically impossible twenty years ago can now be imagined and promulgated. The dynamic of social change following liberalization with incomplete transitions was clearly visible in both Mali and Niger, where the first elected governments were explicitly tasked with the process of elaborating many aspects of the core institutional and legal infrastructure of the new democratic state—issues left unsettled by the transitional governments. And while this situation was somewhat different in Senegal given the significant negotiation and reforms that had occurred in the early 1990s, it is still striking that the aftermath of the transition resulting from the 2000 presidential elections was immediately consumed by debates concerning the fundamental restructuring of the entire political system. 11 Indeed, immediately on coming to office President Abdoulaye Wade declared his intent to break with the existing regime by drafting a completely new constitution, which he did within a year.12 The democratic openings in the Muslim Sahel, like those across much of Africa, in fact marked the beginning of a process of reform and transformation, and not its culmination. Thus, they opened the door to longer-term and perhaps more fundamental social and political transformations and to unintended and unanticipated consequences. Specifically, the newly liberalized contexts opened the door to the organization and mobilization of new social groups and empowered them in their efforts to exert control over the agenda and their attempts to shape the outcomes of reform. Importantly, in the Sahel, this bore the potential for significant posttransition conflict when the societal agenda of those new groups included elements that are difficult to reconcile with the Westernderived, but now globally dominant, conception of democracy espoused by the prodemocracy activists who most often led the transitions. Specifically in the three Sahelian countries that I discuss, with their dual heritage reflected in their variously being qualified by the adjectives “Muslim” or “Francophone,” the notion of democracy that was embraced by the democratic reformers and reflected in the first democratic governments quickly brought a confrontation between two different worldviews and visions of the political order: the secular and the religious.13 In many ways the period of liberalization in all three countries has been shaped by a power struggle between the partisans of these visions.

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Symbolically, the struggle has been seen in a debate over the meaning of secularism, or more specifically of its French variant, laïcité, which has served as the point of departure for postcolonial debates on the subject. 14 The substantive content of these struggles has thus been framed in terms of what policies are acceptable in a democracy and in an état laic. While the debate on this issue has seemed abstract at times, and positions have evolved gradually and incrementally, the consequences have been profound and substantive. Importantly, the debate about education policy has been significantly affected by the struggle over competing visions of secularism. This is rooted in the fact that a key and essential pillar of the French conception of education that long served as the model in the region was a strict and uncompromising secularism, itself the product of a power struggle between the church and anticlerical forces in the French Third Republic.15 Given this heritage, schools in the Sahel found themselves suspended, as Kadir Abdel Kader Galy has phrased it, “between Islam and laïcité.”16 Democratic change in the Sahel in the early 1990s was almost universally led by opposition activists and intellectuals deeply rooted in the secular worldview that had been imbued by the Francophone education that had shaped and defined them. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the immediate reaction of many religious elites was to view the intentions of the prodemocracy activists with suspicion and often to explicitly oppose what was presented as the democratic agenda. And yet, quite strikingly, this initial opposition was rather quickly abandoned as religious groups became cognizant of their demographic advantages in the new democratic game. That is, significant evidence from the region shows that in a newly liberalized context, with the fundamental pillars of the old regimes called into question and with the weight of influence among the masses of the population on their side, religious groups saw an opening—and took it—opening the door to significant and unforeseen longer-term transformations. The fate of the debate on family law in Niger (as well as somewhat later in Mali, as Wing discusses in Chapter 6 in this volume) illustrates this dynamic well. Elaboration and passage of a set of laws known as a “Code de la famille” (Family Code) was one of the agenda items bequeathed by the transition process in Niger to the country’s first elected government in 1992, and this was promoted as a key element of democracy by the secular activists who dominated this debate. Almost immediately, religious groups objecting to its provisions mobilized

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against the code, declaring in effect: “If that’s democracy, we don’t want it.” Rather quickly, however, the position of religious groups shifted as they became aware of the power inherent in their sway over popular opinion, and their new argument became: “Since this is a democracy, let’s have a public debate, and let’s vote on this issue to see what people want.” Given the context of electoral pressures the secular elites were unwilling to risk the wrath of public opinion, which could clearly be mobilized in defense of what they presented as the “Islamic” family against the threat of an imposed Western model. As a result, this element of the agenda that had been initially deemed essential by the prodemocracy advocates has instead become an issue of protracted and ongoing debate and negotiation (both between and within secular and religious society) precisely because of democracy.17 Such ongoing discussions and struggles are transforming both the religious and the political domains, and the intersection of changes is thus shaping the outcomes of processes of democratic negotiation. In the religious domain, the liberalization of the public sphere entailed by democratization has brought in turn significant transformations— indeed, in some real sense, one might speak of a democratization of religion. The remarkable rise of many new religious movements, with wide variations in ideology and theology, in the newly liberalized contexts has allowed an unprecedented public questioning of established religious authorities and a challenging of religious orthodoxies. Thus, there is now an extensive public debate and negotiation among religious groups. This phenomenon resembles what Alfred Stepan labels a “nonliberal public argument,” and which he has suggested is often key to the elaboration of compromise solutions (“twin tolerations”) between religion and democracy.18 The Sahelian debates are nonliberal in the sense that the central questions now are not about what democracy demands of us. Rather they are about the correct position of Islam on this issue raised by democracy or, more fundamentally, about who has the right to determine the correct position of Islam. In largely parallel ways in each case, a major consequence of debating these questions has been significant socioreligious change. In addition, and in many ways following from this, the liberalization of political life has opened the door to religious critiques of the established political order and, hence, to an increased and more assertive role for religion in public life. Thus, we see the politicization of a certain number of issues that are put on the agenda by the

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concerns of religious groups and thereby become new areas for negotiation or bargaining. While these dynamics are of course constrained by the parameters of given histories and specific social contexts, a comparative consideration reveals some strikingly similar patterns in the region. 19 Therefore, as I have noted, understandings about the nature of the state—and specifically of what democratic secularism might mean in the African Muslim context—have evolved in the context of intense and ongoing debates. Similarly in all three countries, the role of the state in regulating gender relations and family life has moved to center stage in public life. The result of these changes, I argue, is that a historical process of significant transformation in relations between religious societies and officially secular states has been—tentatively and imperfectly, but perceptibly—taking place in the Muslim Sahelian countries since the early 1990s. Social change has thus altered the terms of the debates as well as the relative power of social forces to shape the outcomes. In Niger, for example, as the Family Code issue has simmered, what has gradually replaced the argument is a series of ongoing (and, at times, acrimonious) negotiations and discussions, both within religious communities and between religious and secular groups, about how various specific facets of family life and of gender relations should be regulated. More broadly, across the three countries, issues that began as debates or arguments about democracy in the early 1990s have moved gradually into a process of democratic “bargaining” or “negotiation” on how to adapt the core of democracy to varying Islamic and African visions for a good social and political order. In the process, the governance context has shifted, with profound consequences for the parameters of policy options.

Reforming Education in the New Sociopolitical (Governance) Contexts One key domain in which these parameters have clearly shifted, and potentially with significant long-term consequences, is in the field of education. Sahelian countries have embarked in recent years on parallel and unprecedented changes in the relationship of the state system to religious education. These changes have been given their impetus from the liberalization of political systems and the consequent social and religious transformations under way in the processes

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described above. In all three countries recent innovations are reforming and reinforcing the parallel nonstate systems of education built on Arabic language and religious instruction. And these reforms are being undertaken in the name of “giving parents the educational system they want” and are defended as the actions of a democratic state sensitive to the needs of its citizens.20 The stage for these reforms was set by a confluence of factors. The core underlying factor, as shown above, concerns the maladaptation of the Francophone system of education inherited from the colonial period and maintained into the postcolonial context as part of the ideology of the état laic (secular republic) in the context of deeply religious and overwhelmingly Muslim societies. This system had been built on the need to create a Francophone elite primarily to staff the state apparatus. It was closely linked to French notions of laïcité (secularism) that had shaped political battles in the French Third Republic at the end of the nineteenth century, precisely as colonial systems were being established. The influential French politician Jules Ferry, who twice served as minister of education in 1980s, institutionalized the enduring notion that secular schools were key to the development of a “republican citizenry.” 21 These debates were echoed in discussions on colonial education policy. 22 While various alternatives were explored, in the end the ideological underpinning of secularism in education imbued colonial (and postcolonial) policies. Colonial schools were intended to create a citizenry imbued in a French “republican” culture. At the same time, colonial logic also prescribed that only an extremely small percentage of the population ever completed secondary education, and the high attrition rate was to change little after independence. In 2005 and 2006, for example, UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) figures from various reports suggest that only between 30 percent and 40 percent of children in the three countries completed primary school. Of these, fewer than half continued to lower secondary school and the continuation rate from those who completed lower secondary to higher secondary is only about 50 percent. There is variation among the three countries, with Niger being particularly low and Mali having made the most advances in the 1990s and into the 2000s (though at a high cost in terms of quality). In all three cases, however, the school enrollment rates represent a steep pyramid. Parents enrolling children in such

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schools thus face a high probability that their children will abandon or fail to continue in schooling by the examination barriers at each level.23 The results of this education policy should be unsurprising; the vast majority of parents across the Sahel have seen the official state schools as—at best—unattractive options and, indeed, have often actively resisted efforts to enroll their children. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and the fact that formal schooling is something that populations have continually resisted is taken as a given in much of the literature. For example, Olivier Meunier describes the “hostility of parents to the [French] form of schooling.”24 Anneke Breedveld notes a similar “rejection of formal education” in Mali25 for reasons echoed in the description of education as “estrangement” in Sten Hagberg’s account of another Malian locale.26 Economic crises and the structural adjustment programs, which emerged from the Washington Consensus beginning in the 1980s and advocated significant cuts in public spending, only worsened education. These policies further diminished state capacity to support schools, often shifting the costs and burdens to parents and only further adding to the unattractiveness of state schools to local populations. Meunier notes that even any attraction that the prospect of future employment in the state bureaucracy might have held for some parents disappeared in the 1980s as the possibilities for recruitment to state employment evaporated in the context of deep fiscal crises.27 By the late 1990s, however, the international consensus had shifted. The new focus on “poverty reduction” and the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals reopened the door to a focus on appropriate state policies as the key to developmental outcomes. In this context, initiatives such as the UNESCO Education for All campaign that grew out of the 1990 World Conference on Education for All in Thailand, and the follow-up conference in Jordan in 1996 and the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, placed significant international pressures on states to define policies that would expand school enrollment rates across Africa. In the Sahel, particular pressure was put on states to increase school enrollments of girls in the official French-based schools, something singularly unattractive to many parents of girls, given the social risks involved.28 The confluence of these pressures on states under circumstances of highly limited resources set the stage, as various observers note, for

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a reconsideration of the role of Islamic education. 29 Across Africa, David Stassage has found significant evidence that democratization, by increasing pressures for increased state responsiveness, results in increased spending on education. 30 But in the contexts of extreme fiscal shortfalls of the Sahelian countries, and with limited capacity to institute significant change, there also were strong incentives for state bureaucracies to improvise and experiment with new alternatives, particularly when such options were suggested by social demand. Thus, in the Sahel, and no doubt in various forms elsewhere, beyond the simple factor of democratic contexts demanding better performing governments, issues were raised about the nature of the changes demanded by populations. Not only did social demand pressure states for more or better schools, but the very type of educational system itself could now be called into question. In the new governance contexts of liberalized systems, then, this situation of simultaneous strong pressures on states to expand school enrollment, in the context of low and diminishing capacity to do so, offered an unprecedented opportunity for reform. The result was that some reformers were able to push for fundamentally new education policies, including the strengthening of religious educational institutions and their incorporation into the official education system overseen by the state. The key actors were typically a coalition of state agents in the historically small directorates of Arabic education in the ministries of education and the directorates of religious affairs most often housed in ministries of the interior. In the context of strong pressures to increase school enrollment rates, these advocates found allies (albeit sometimes reluctant allies) among other sections of the state. International actors, especially a program of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) to support education reform, gave further impetus to these efforts.31 Most importantly, this was clearly facilitated by political systems that, as a direct result of electoral processes, had been gradually growing more receptive to religious concerns following societal changes that had empowered religious groups. Thus, in all three countries the response has been a gradual effort to capture the social dynamic, which had escaped the states to varying degrees, via various processes of formalization of religious schools. The terminology varies from country to country, but a version of the Franco-Arabic school has become the model of choice for reformers. This school typically includes modern subjects and the core of the official state curriculum, but also incorporates religious subjects and

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education in Arabic. Interestingly, advocates in each country present this model as an alternative to both the French school system (which is criticized for ignoring cultural values and religion) and to the traditional Qur’anic educational system (which is criticized for failing to prepare children for productive lives in the modern economy). It is thus interesting that in each country there have been significant critiques leveled against traditional Qur’anic education and that these critiques have been accepted by the promoters of reform.32 The result has been significant support and growing demand from parents for an educational system balanced, as Roman Loimeier phrases it in the Zanzibari context, “between social skills and marketable skills.”33 The logic of each has been strikingly parallel, but the specific forms of reforms, however, have been shaped in each case by existing institutional structures and political processes. In Mali, the postcolonial period had seen an increased formalization and regular expansion of the system of religious schools known locally as “médersas.” 34 The Malian state had foreseen the creation of what it called Franco-Arabic schools at the implementation of some education reforms in 1962, but these state schools in fact differed from the official French schools only in that the Arabic language was a required examination subject. While the statesupported Franco-Arabic schools thus had little success, the médersas, by contrast, boomed. Médersas were first founded during the late colonial period, independently of state control and largely in reaction to the unpopularity of state schools. Their logic, as elsewhere, was presented as an effort to rationalize and modernize the traditional Islamic education of Qur’anic schools. There were some efforts by the military regime in the 1980s to prescribe programs for the médersas at the primary level as a means of control and, in 1985, their supervision was moved by decree from the Division of Religious Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Education. Efforts to integrate them into the official state system, however, stagnated. A sticking point of particular concern was the refusal by the state to sanction exams on religious subjects in the médersas, a key element of their identity, and they thus largely remained outside state control. Despite the limitations imposed by the refusal of official recognition of their diplomas, however, the pace of establishment of new médersas increased significantly in the 1980s, a sign, as Etienne Gérard labels it, of a social “reorientation in the demand for schooling.”35

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In the wake of the 1991 democratic transition, however, the possibility of change arose. In 1992, the new Malian government convoked a “séminaire nationale sur les médersas” to begin discussing the future of these institutions in the new democratic context. This was followed by other such forums and discussions over the next decade. Given their extensive development and long history outside the state system, the reform logic that emerged in the Malian context was to try to find a basis for formalizing the médersas and granting them official recognition of their diplomas—with certain conditions attached. The effort therefore was to capture and incorporate this dynamic sector into the national educational system.36 The process of attempting to formalize the relationship brought strong resistance on both sides—secularists within the state bureaucracy feared strengthening the religious movements while religious directors of the médersas, and some parents, feared cooptation by the state. Over the course of some fifteen years, however, in a series of incremental steps, a process of negotiation gradually produced a series of compromises so that a formalized médersa education program, incorporating the official state curriculum and French language as well as religious education and Arabic through the secondary school level, was finally put in place in 2002–2003. At all levels in the new system, médersas include religious education as an examination subject. Officials in charge of this process in the Ministry of Education tellingly argue that part of the challenge was to get the schools to accept more French language instruction since “in an état laïc, one needs French to advance in life.” At the same time, they note, they had to sell the argument to secularists that the médersas had an important role to play in a democracy. Since the constitution charged schools with the task of “educating the good citizen to serve his country,” the médersas could contribute to this by “educating the Muslim person to be a good citizen.” In incremental steps, sufficient common ground was gradually found to move the formalization process forward. Thus in August 2007, for the first time, the médersas presented candidates for the official state baccalaureate degree and the exam results for médersa students proved to be comparable to those in the state schools.37 Similar dynamics have also led to a parallel, but somewhat different, evolution in Niger.38 By contrast with Mali, however, Niger had an officially recognized state system of Franco-Arabic schools

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starting from the late colonial period, when the first “madrassa” (the word in Niger refers to the primary-level state Franco-Arabic schools) was founded in 1957 in the religious town of Say. This proved to be very popular and, at independence in 1960, it led to a great demand for the state to develop an educational system built on such madrassas. Diori Hamani, the first president, reluctantly agreed to establish further madrassas, but as a parallel to the French-based schools (which in Niger came to be known as “traditional schools”) rather than as a substitute for them. While the system was eventually expanded to include a number of madrassas around the country, they were historically poorly served, underfunded, and marginalized in comparison to the Francophone state schools. This, their advocates insist, was because the Francophones in the Ministry of Education saw such schools as a threat to the laïcité of the state. Inspecteurs (ministry representatives) in the regions presented madrassas as rivals to the traditional French schools and saw them as obstacles. In addition, the system stagnated due to limited options for students at the secondary level. The first Franco-Arabic middle school (Collège d’Enseignement Générale, CEG) was opened in Niamey in 1973, and this was the only one for ten years. In 1983 a second Franco-Arabic middle school was created in Zinder (1,000 kilometers from Niamey), and in 1984 the first Franco-Arabic high school was finally opened in Niamey. Throughout the remainder of decade, however, there was little other development of this education option. In addition, under the authoritarian rule of Seyni Kountché (1974–1987), little room was allowed for the development of any kind of private schooling in Niger and, hence, the development of religious schools was highly circumscribed. As Kountché’s rule weakened with his illness (he died in office in 1987), and given the dynamics seen elsewhere of decreased state capacity due to economic constraints along with increased demand for religious education, the situation changed. Starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, Niger experienced a rapid expansion in the founding of private schools variously described as Franco-Arabic or Islamic, which frequently were funded by wealthy merchants. Given the existence of the state Franco-Arabic curriculum and model (however underdeveloped), there was room within the existing system for the state to recognize such schools if they agreed to state supervision and curriculum.

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As in Mali, however, the confluence of the pressures noted above and the era of democracy opened up opportunities for change. In terms of Niger’s legal framework, only the 1966 law regulating FrancoArabic schools and a 1970 law concerning private schools had modified the colonial educational system. In the 1990s, however, prolonged discussions on education began, which eventually led in 1998 to the adoption of the first comprehensive national law on education, known as the Loi sur l’éducation nationale (LOSEN), that explicitly adopted the UNESCO goals of Education for All. Among other things, the law introduced the possibility of education in “national” languages (as opposed to the official language of French). As various proponents quickly pointed out, this included Arabic.39 Seizing the opportunity and capitalizing on the pressures to increase school enrollment, a major project to expand and strengthen Franco-Arabic education in Niger was launched with funding from the Islamic Development Bank: the Projet d’appui à l’enseignement Franco-Arabe au Niger (PAEFAN). Building on LOSEN, in 2002 the programme décennal de développement de l’éducation further elaborated a framework for education policy in Niger. Among other things the program included a continuation of PAEFAN, known as the Projet de développement de base franco-arabe (PRODEFA), as well as projects to introduce literacy using Arabic script in national languages (ajami). Additionally, a program targeted at reforming traditional Qur’anic schools, le projet pour la renovation des écoles Quraniques, was also launched. The full impact of the reform process is still to be seen, but it is clear that the process has opened the floodgates to strong popular demand for education alternatives, and notably for expanded Franco-Arabic schools. Thus, in the first phase of PAEFAN, the number of madrassas in Niger increased from 180 in 2001 to some 700 by 2007.40 Tellingly, officials in charge of these projects insist that the programs have moved forward successfully because the historical state efforts to suppress Arabic or religious education were no longer tenable in the context of a democracy and in particular because, given the crisis of education, the state needed to do something that responded to popular demand. The shifts in political power that accompanied liberalization— gradually decreasing the overwhelming weight of the Francophone secularists while empowering other social forces—fed this dynamic. It is striking that people on all sides of the issue that I interviewed note

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that democracy is key to explaining why the effort to reform and expand Franco-Arabic education was possible.41 The historical existence of an internationally recognized Francophone intellectual elite in Senegal long gave the country the image of having a more developed educational system than its neighbors. In fact, however, Senegal’s experience of education development in the postcolonial period is largely parallel to other countries in the region. The extraordinary strength of a well-organized and hierarchical system of Sufi orders allowed these religious institutions to largely shape popular attitudes toward formal schooling and, with variations among time and across orders, the dominant impulse has been a mistrust of French schools and an insistence on the importance of traditional Qur’anic education in institutions known as daaras.42 Given popular dissatisfaction with French schools, various private schools of religious inspiration began to develop in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, the historical secular Francophone schools remained the unquestioned model for state policy. The final step in democratization, however, the alternance of 2000 in which the incumbent Parti Socialiste lost power after forty years of rule, was to signal a rupture with established models in many domains in Senegal. Among the innovations that caught the prodemocracy civil society by surprise in postalternance Senegal was the decision in 2002 by President Wade to introduce religious education within the public school system around the country. The idea had once been floated much earlier, in a major national consultation on education (Etats-généraux de l’éducation) in 1981, but implementation had never seriously been considered due to the strong hostility of the state functionaries to the idea. As a result, argues the official in the Division of Arabic of the Ministry of Education now implementing the reforms, the educational system had remained based on a philosophy of laïcité that had been imposed or adopted from the colonial period, but never adapted to Senegalese reality. Consequently, a significant portion of the population strongly resisted state efforts to entice school enrollment.43 The problem faced by the new government after the democratic alternance, the same official notes, was how to “get the population to participate in the educational project of the state.” Following a tour of schools around the country by the minister of education and representatives of the Division of Arabic, the proposed solution was to “offer something closer to what the population demanded” in terms of

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education. Religious education in public schools was thus mandated. And quietly—and much less noticed in the public debate—the October 2002 reforms also included the creation of a system of public FrancoArabic schools around the country. By 2007–2008 some seventy-two of these schools were functioning in the regions, though none were opened in Dakar. These reforms, the ministry reports, were a significant factor in the declared success in raising the primary school enrollment rate from the 69 percent where it was stagnated at the time of the alternance in 2000 to some 85 percent by 2007. 44 These apparent successes, in turn, are fueling a continuation and indeed an acceleration of a policy that would have been inconceivable in Senegal’s secular republic as late as the 1990s. In somewhat different ways but with a common underlying logic, all three countries have moved forward with substantive and unprecedented reforms in education. By all accounts, the new institutions have received enthusiastic support from local populations in each case and officials regularly report that they are unable to keep up with the demand for new institutions. While there is still significant reticence on the part of portions of the state bureaucracy, and trepidations of various sorts even among proponents,45 it is clear that the reforms signal a significant new policy departure from what had historically marked these former French colonies.

Conclusion In this chapter I examined examples of the broader phenomenon that the editors of this volume point to in Chapter 1: societal transformations in Africa and “the ways in which they have reshaped the context of power and politics and, ultimately, the fortunes of attempted reforms.” The concern is to try to understand how incremental changes “cumulate to reshape the contours of state power and the emergence of new actors and arenas of contestation.” In the Sahel, liberalization in the name of “democratization,” however imperfect, has proven to be a double-edged sword. The impetus for change was driven by a liberal vision of social and political order, but it also opens the door to a broad debate among highly varied social actors about what that appropriate order should be. In the process, new sources of claims to authority become possible, including in the religious domain, and old orthodoxies are open to

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questioning. In the give and take of the negotiations, arguments, and struggles to define issues and policies, social transformations gradually occur. We see this in the domain of societal expectations for education. As one university professor pointed out in an interview in Senegal, most cadres (educated professionals) in the country today have come to feel that they were not given sufficient religious instruction as students, a sentiment that grows out of the fact that increasingly public policy is debated in terms of its compatibility with religion, and they feel they lack the tools to engage the debate fully. These cadres, products of secular Francophone education, then, are increasingly likely to support, and even demand, that their children’s education include such training. They thus come to support policy changes in schooling along the lines of the reforms I have discussed above. Incremental changes thus create new environments for what is politically feasible, and for what is desired, and hence begin to transform the governance context. The specificities of the historical and social contexts of each country have meant that the recent innovations in educational reform have included some potentially significant differences in form and in content in each case. Nevertheless, they clearly share some fundamental similarities. All of these changes grow out of shifts in power relations between the partisans of the Francophone secular state and those with a more religious vision. These shifts have been driven by gradual, but profound, social transformations and changes in statesociety relations that themselves grow out of the process of public debate in the context of liberalized political systems. These innovations also clearly represent negotiated compromises—although at times still hotly debated ones—in the sense that the education reform projects have all on the one hand strengthened French language and state curricular supervision, but on the other have also entailed state support for religious instruction. The identity of Franco-Arabic schools is everywhere clearly and unmistakably a religious one, albeit a “modern” religiosity. The creation of a class of religiously trained youth that is also able to function effectively in the Francophone state system—in contrast to the historical position of the marginalized arabisants—is one foreseeable result of this process. And this change is sure to entail long-term evolutionary changes in the nature of political systems in all three countries. The processes, it would seem, are thus effecting transformations in state and society with long-term consequences for governance across

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the region. For better or for worse, they are also likely to gradually align state and society more closely than has ever been the case to date in the postcolonial history of the Sahel.

Notes The initial fieldwork on which this chapter is based was carried out with funding from the Carnegie Scholars program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, for a project entitled “Negotiating Democracy in Muslim Contexts: Political Liberalization and Religious Mobilization in the West African Sahel.” I gratefully acknowledge this support for research in Senegal, Mali, and Niger in 2007 and 2008. The topic of education reform emerged as an area of significant interest in the course of that research, and I subsequently engaged in a broader collaborative project examining the reform processes in more depth. This further work was part of a five-year research consortium initiative, the “African Power and Politics Programme,” funded by the UK Department for International Development and led by the Overseas Development Institute. My collaborators in this project were Mahaman Tidjani-Alou, LASDEL and the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niger, and Abdourahmane Idrissa. Other participants in the fieldwork include Mamadou Bodian (Senegal), Issa Fofana (Mali), and Ibrahim Yahya Ibrahim and Ali Bako (Niger). 1. These dual concerns are often reflected in the literature on education in Africa. See, for example, Jibril Aminu, “Towards a Strategy of Education and Development in Africa,” in Islam in Africa: Proceedings of the Islam in Africa Conference, ed. Nura Alkali, Adamu Adamu, Awwal Yadudu, Rashid Motem, and Haruna Salihi (Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books, 1993), pp. 87–96; and Mamadou Bella Baldé, Démocratie et éducation à la citoyenneté en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). For an excellent discussion of education as a “public good,” specifically in the Francophone African context, see Thomas Bierschienk, “L’education de base en Afrique de l’Ouest Francophone: Bien privé, bien public, bien global,” in Une anthropologie entre rigueur et engagement: Essais autour de l’œuvre de Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, ed. Thomas Bierschienk, Giorgio Blundo, Yves Jaffre, and Mahamane Tidjani Alou (Paris: Karthala, 2007), pp. 261–286. 2. It is telling that Abdou Moumouni’s book was republished in the late 1990s at the time of renewed attention to educational policy. The preface to the 1998 edition by the Burkinabé historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo noted: “The republication of the work of Professor Abdou Moumouni on education in Africa was a necessity; this is because the fundamental stakes of this major problem have not substantially changed in our countries, formally independent since 1960.” This and all other translations from the French in this chapter are mine.

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Abdou Moumouni, L’education in Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998), p. 7. (Orig. pub. 1964.) 3. Michel Debeauvais, “Education in Former French Africa,” in Education and Political Development, ed. James S. Coleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 75–91. 4. Louis Brenner, “Medersas au Mali: Transformation d’une Institution Islamique,” in L’Enseignement Islamique au Mali, ed. Bintou Sanankoua and Louis Brenner (Bamako, Mali: Editions Jamana, 1991), pp. 63–85. 5. Robert Charlick, Susanna D. Wing, Mariam Koné, and Bakary Diakite, The Political Economy of Educational Policy Reform in Mali: A Stakeholder Analysis, Report for the US Agency for International Development (USAID)/Mali Democracy and Governance Team (Washington, DC: Management Systems International, 1998); Cynthia B. Lloyd and Paul C. Hewett, “Primary Schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa: Recent Trends and Current Challenges,” Population Council Working Paper No. 176 (2003); Jeanne Moulton, Karen Mundy, Michel Walmond, and James Williams, Education Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa: Paradigm Lost? (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002). 6. For a discussion of early French debates about the role of religion in attracting students to the new French colonial schools, see Denise Bouche, “L’enseignement dans les territories français de l’Afrique occidentale de 1817 à 1920: Mission civilisatrice ou formation d’une élite?” (PhD dissertation, Universite de Lille III, 1975), esp. chap. 7. Examples of such debates in other contexts are available in Wadad Kadi and Victor Belleh, eds., Islam and Education: Myths and Truths (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 2007). For a discussion of the Senegalese case, see Rudolph T. Ware, “The Longue Durée of Quran Schooling, Society, and State in Senegambia,” in New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power and Femininity, ed. Mamadou Diouf and Mara A. Leichtman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 21–50. 7. Leonardo A. Villalón and Abdourahmane Idrissa, “Repetitive Breakdowns and a Decade of Experimentation: Institutional Choices and Unstable Democracy in Niger,” in The Fate of Africa’s Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions in Comparative Perspective, ed. Leonardo A. Villalón and Peter VonDoepp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 27–48; Leonardo A. Villalón and Abdourahmane Idrissa. “The Tribulations of a Successful Transition: Institutional Dynamics and Elite Rivalry in Mali,” in The Fate of Africa’s Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions in Comparative Perspective, ed. Leonardo A. Villalón and Peter VonDoepp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 49–74. 8. Leonardo A. Villalón, “Democratizing a (Quasi)Democracy: The Senegalese Elections of 1993,” African Affairs 93, 371 (1994): 163–193. 9. For a more extensive discussion of these processes, see Leonardo A. Villalón, “From Argument to Negotiation: Constructing Democracies in

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Muslim West Africa,” Comparative Politics 42, 4 (2010): 375–393. Portions of the following section have been adapted from that article. 10. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 42–43. 11. Among the key issues put on the agenda for discussion by the new government of Abdoulaye Wade were: the type of regime (so-called presidential vs. parliamentary variants of the French Fifth Republic hybrid model), the electoral system, the role of decentralized institutions, the organization of the legislature, and the very existence of its second chamber as well as more fundamental questions about relations with and among key social and economic actors. 12. It is true that this new constitution of 2001 in fact resembled the old one in many respects—and has gradually come to resemble it even more with successive amendments—but the important point is that drafting a new constitution put the rules of the political system on the agenda for discussion and eventual change and reform. 13. On Niger, see Abdourahmane Idrissa, “The Invention of Order: Republican Codes and Islamic Law in Niger” (PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 2009). 14. There is a wide variation in the understandings of secularism among established democracies, with the French version distinguishing itself for a particularly strong intransigence in allowing religious expression in public life, a form that Ahmet T. Kuru has described as “combative secularism.” Ahmet T. Kuru, “Secularism, State Policies, and Muslims in Europe: Analyzing French Exceptionalism,” Comparative Politics 41, 1 (2008): 1–19. 15. For an account of this history, see Mona Ozouf, L’Ecole, l’eglise, et la république: 1871–1914 (Paris: Cana, 1982). The contemporary manifestation of this issue in France is the ban on allowing Muslim girls to wear scarves on their heads in French schools. 16. Kadir Abdel Kader Galy, “L’Ecole entre l’Islam et la laïcité,” in Educations, diversités culturelles et strategies politiques en Afrique subsaharienne, ed. Olivier Meunier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). See also Jean-Émile Charlier, “Le retour de Dieu: l’introduction de l’enseignement religieux dans l’École de la République laïque du Sénégal,” Éducation et Sociétés 2, 10 (2002): 95–111. 17. See Villalón, “From Argument to Negotiation,” for a more extended version of this argument. 18. Alfred Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” in Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 213–253. 19. Villalón, “From Argument to Negotiation.” 20. The discourse surrounding these reforms is virtually identical in each of the three countries, as revealed in interviews I carried out with the state

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officials in charge of such programs as well as interviews with and visits to religious schools involved in the process in Dakar, Bamako, and Niamey in January–February and June–July 2008. These interviews form the basis of the descriptions and arguments about reform that I describe below. For the sake of simplicity, representative quotes from officials are not cited individually. 21. Ozouf, L’Ecole, l’eglise. 22. Bouche, “L’enseignement dans les territories français.” 23. The figures and trends noted here are based on statistics available from UNESCO, www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/default.aspx. 24. Olivier Meunier, ed., Variations et diversités éducatives au Niger (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), p. 32. 25. Anneke Breedveld, “The Rejection of Formal Education in the 5th Region of Mali,” Mande Studies 8, special issue, “Education in the Mande World,” ed. Dinie Bouwman and Anneke Breedveld. 26. Sten Hagberg, “‘Why Do the Bench?’ Education as Modernity and Estrangement,” Mande Studies 8, special issue, “Education in the Mande World,” ed. Dinie Bouwman and Anneke Breedveld. 27. Meunier, Variations et diversités, p. 32 28. These goals remain a central part of the international agenda in the Sahel. As an example, in May 2008 USAID issued a call for bids for an $18 million dollar project “to support the West Africa Regional Program objective to improve enrollment, attendance and completion rates for girls in primary schools in the Republic of Niger.” See also Lucila Jallade and Vittoria Cavicchioni, Agir pour l’éducation des filles en Afrique subsaharienne francophone (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005). 29. For example, Stefania Gandolfi,“L’enseignement islamique en Afrique noire,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 43, 169/170 (2003): 261–277; and Hamidou Nacuzon Sall, “Education pour tous à l’orée du troisième millenaire: Perceptions de differents types d’ecole au Sénégal,” Revue du CAMES, Series B, 3 (2001): 3–19. 30. David Stasavage, “Democracy and Education Spending in Africa,” American Journal of Political Science 49, 2 (2005): 343–358. 31. The role of the IDB was central in these reforms in various ways, but it was clearly one of facilitating rather than driving these reforms. The IDB official in charge of the project, Khalil En-Nahwy, is a Mauritanian who served at the Bank’s office in Niger before assuming his post in Dakar. He attributes his interest in promoting the project within the IDB—which had historically included support to formal state schools in the region—to his research on informal schooling in Mauritania and his observations that, while the official educational systems were in crisis, a parallel informal system was booming in the region. It is clear that a key role of the IDB in this process has been to facilitate exchanges between countries, and hence both to the elaboration of common arguments for reform and to sharing of specific policy initiatives. In addition to the three countries that I discuss, Chad, Guinea, and

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Burkina Faso have active reform projects funded by the IDB and five other countries have requested projects. En-Nahawi, director of the project on bilingual education for West Africa of the IDB, interviewed by the author, Dakar, October 22, 2009 32. It merits noting that in each country parallel reform efforts were also launched in the same period that were aimed at improving and modernizing Qur’anic schools. These efforts follow the same logic, but are largely seen as the second-best option, with the long-term goal of having traditional Qur’anic education replaced with modern schools of some sort. On Senegal, see Roman Loimeier, “Je veux étudier sans mendier: The Campaign Against the Qur’anic Schools in Senegal,” in Social Welfare in Muslim Societies in Africa, ed. Holger Weiss (Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikaininstitutet, 2002), pp. 118–137. On Mali, see Bintou Diarah Sanankoua, “Les écoles ‘coraniques’ au Mali: Problèmes actuels,” Revue canadienne des études Africaines 19, 2 (1985): 359–367. On Niger, see Laouali Malam Moussa, “La Violence de l’école coranique au Niger: Etat des lieux et source de légitimation,” in Education, violences, conflits et perspectives de paix en Afrique subsaharienne, ed. François-Joseph Azoh, Eric Lanoue, and Thérèse Tchombé (Paris: Karthala, 2009), pp. 57–69. 33. Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 34. For discussions on the médersas in the Malian context, see Louis Brenner, “Medersas au Mali: Transformation d’une Institution Islamique,” in L’Enseignement Islamique au Mali, ed. Bintou Sanankoua and Louis Brenner (Bamako, Mali: Editions Jamana, 1991), pp. 63–85; Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Louis Brenner, “The Transformation of Muslim Schooling in Mali: The Madrasa as an Institution of Social and Religious Mediation,” in Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, ed. Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Quasim Zaman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 199–223; Etienne Gérard, “Le développement des medersas au Mali: Le signe d’une réorientation de la demande scolaire,” in Education, changements démographiques et développement, ed. Patrick Livenais and Jacques Vaugelade (Paris: Éditions de l’Orstom, 1993), pp. 131–144; Etienne Gérard, “Jeux et enjeux scolaires au Mali: Le poids des strategies éducatives des populations dans le fonctionnement et l’évolution de l’école publique,” special issue, “Les Stratégies éducatives en Afrique subsaharienne,” Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 31, 3 (1995): 595–616; Etienne Gérard, La tentation du savior en Afrique: Politiques, mythes et stratégies d’éducation au Mali (Paris: Karthala/Orstom, 1997); Ahmet Kavas, L’Enseignement islamique en Afrique francophone: Les medersas de la republique du Mali (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2003); and Bintou Sanankoua and Louis Brenner, L’Enseignement

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islamique au Mali (Bamako, Mali: Editions Jamana, 1991). Médersa is the Malian version of madrassa. 35. Gérard,“Le développement des medersas.” 36. These points were brought out in various interviews in Bamako in January 2008, most notably with officials in the Ministry of National Education and with the secretary general of the National Union of Médersas. 37. Interview, officials in the Medersa section, Ministry of National Education, Bamako, January 24, 2008. 38. Notable works on the Franco-Arabic and Islamic educational systems in Niger are Olivier Meunier, “Enseignements de base, politiques d’éducation et stratégies éducatives en milieu haoussa: Le cas de ville de Maradi (Niger),” special issue, “Les Stratégies éducatives en Afrique subsaharienne,” Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 31, 3 (1995): 617–634; Olivier Meunier, Dynamique de l’enseignement islamique au Niger: Le cas de la ville de Maradi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); and Meunier, Variations et diversités. 39. Including, among others, interviews with officials in the PAEFAN project headquarters and in the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Humanitarian Action, Niamey, February 5, 8, 9, 2008. 40. These figures were provided by an official in the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Humanitarian Action, interviewed by the author, Niamey, February 5, 2008. 41. Interviews in Niamey, February 2008. 42. Mamadou Ndiaye, L’Enseignement Arabo-Islamique au Sénégal (Istanbul: Organizations de la Conference Islamique, Centre de Recherchers sur l’Histoire, l’Art et la Culture Islamiques, 1985); Ware, “The Longue Durée.” 43. Interview, director of the Division of Arabic Education of the Ministry of Education, Dakar, January 8, 2008. 44. Interview, director of the Division of Arabic Education of the Ministry of Education, Dakar, October 19, 2009. 45. Among the issues that cause concern, two are notable: (1) Unease about who will determine the content of religious education in the schools. That is, whose Islam will be taught? Interestingly, it is primarily religious actors and people with an Arabist background who worry about this issue; and (2) Are the new reformed schools, which most often simply add further religious and language subjects to the existing official curricula, sustainable or will they overburden children and lead to weakened performance in key examination areas?

8 Rethinking the Dynamics of Reform in Africa Ellen M. Lust and Stephen N. Ndegwa

In this book, we challenge current development approaches and

urge scholars and policymakers engaged in governance to shift their perspectives in three ways. First, they need to abandon a binary perspective on reform outcomes by recognizing the potentially cumulative impacts of small steps, the nonlinearity of results, and the messiness of development. Second, they need to look anew at the landscape of governance by paying attention to new or reshaped actors; reconsidering the role of the state; and exploring how challenges to sovereignty affect, and are affected by, governance programs. Finally, development specialists need to reshape governance programs and attendant measurements of change by taking into account a more complex, and yet tractable, understanding of governance.

The Complexity of Reform Development specialists should temper the tendency to proclaim success and failure in the strides made toward better governance that has consumed debate in the past two decades—often reflecting disappointment perhaps born as much from unreasonably high expectations as from lack of recordable progress. Not only have African countries differed enormously in the social, economic, and political changes that they have experienced, but individual countries have had very different reform 203

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experiences over time and across sectors—with uneven results. This unevenness is itself a defining aspect of the complexity of change rather than an outcome to be denounced. Perhaps most importantly, seeming steps forward in one arena (e.g., representation) often accompany movements backward in another (e.g., accountability), as Michael Bratton shows in Chapter 2. Indeed, as Bratton in Chapter 2 and Peter Lewis in Chapter 3 demonstrate, reform at the macro level is messy. Government alternation through elections may be accompanied by increased liberties, but may also lead to a responsiveness gap, as citizens experience difficulties in navigating rules and procedures and feel that elected officials do not hear or respond to their needs. Similarly, one might have expected democratization to lead to improved economic conditions for average citizens; yet again, as Lewis argues, there is often a “‘disconnect’ between macroeconomic indicators and microeconomic performance” (Chapter 3). Citizens’ experiences in everyday life, as well as data on poverty and social provision, leave no doubt: broad political, economic, and social changes often move at different paces and create contradictory outcomes. The case studies of reforms in education, family law, and property rights clearly illustrate the highly intertwined, complex relationships between social, political, and economic change. Catherine Boone’s study of land reform in Chapter 4 reminds us that the same socioeconomic pressure that drove democratization also contributed to conflict over land reform and ensuing debates over citizenship. In Chapter 5, Ato Kwamena Onoma also shows the political impact of land reforms as chiefs whose powers are derived in part from their ability to sell, and resell, rights to the same land find their power diminished by the strict enforcement of property rights regimes. Susanna Wing and Leonardo Villalón in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, point to the ways in which democratization heightened and shaped debates over family law and education reform by incorporating new actors into debates or strengthening the hands of old actors whose preferences (e.g., to restrict women’s rights, limit property reforms, or scale back secular education) at times run contrary to the liberal development paradigm. These arenas are highly intertwined: changes in one arena affect possibilities of change in other, often seemingly unrelated, arenas over time. This is not only because new actors emerge to shift the balance of power but also because, by learning the implications of changes, they develop new strategies. For instance, Villalón shows that as religious groups in the Sahel came to appreciate newfound power under democracies, they changed their strategy. He argues in Chapter 7 that

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almost immediately, religious groups objecting to its provisions mobilized against the code, declaring in effect: “If that’s democracy, we don’t want it.” Rather quickly, however, the position of religious groups shifted as they became aware of the power inherent in their sway over popular opinion, and their new argument became: “Since this is a democracy, let’s have a public debate and let’s vote on this issue to see what people want.”

Over time, changes in education—which alter the distribution of skills in society, notions of national identity and citizenship, and political demands—will spur economic and political change as well.

Reconsidering Development Interrelated, continuous changes in economic, social, and political spheres shape governance challenges in both their nature and the possibilities available for progressive reform. In drawing attention to this, we hope to do far more than point out the ways that development communities have attempted to create legibility and segmentation in a complex world—a point that Timothy Mitchell powerfully argues.1 We also hope to go beyond simply pointing out the incrementalism and unintended consequences inherent in development processes and governance challenges. Instead, we argue that these insights suggest the need to reconsider development with a focus on changing actors, arenas, and agency. Rethinking Who Counts

First, development agents need to question prevailing assumptions about who counts, and who does not, in contests over social and political transformation. We have a tendency to dismiss as irrelevant agents who do not immediately fit Western models of development (particularly if they also do not fit Western notions of comportment) while embracing other actors—who do—as relevant, significant, and powerful. Similarly, we tend to ascribe untested preferences to actors because we view them as similar to actors who hold these preferences elsewhere. Knowledge of actors and their preferences must be based on rigorous analysis, both quantitative and qualitative. Such analysis should also be open and responsive to the differences and contradictions they present, rather than dismissing such differences as pathological. Indeed, Onoma’s analysis of land reform in Ghana provides a powerful example of how taking a blunt view of the contest over property rights is likely to lead to misreading the preferences of actors engaged in

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it. In contrast to conventional wisdom that elites benefit uniformly from strong property rights regimes,2 he shows that chiefs had very different preferences over land tenure administration depending on their own use of land. Where the chiefs allocated land for use in production (e.g., farming) on which they relied for a revenue stream, they preferred and upheld strict property rights regimes. Where they were able to make handsome profits through the sale and resale of land rights (e.g., real estate), they tended to undermine land law reforms. In short, because they used property so differently, otherwise similar elites had divergent attitudes over property rights reform. As a result, attempts to develop such reforms in the absence of these considerations yield mixed outcomes. Similarly, Wing’s analysis of family law reform shows how actors that we may not immediately think of as relevant to issues (often because they do not seem proximate to the public contest) may actually be critically important to reform. So too, issues that may appear peripheral may in fact be a hidden fulcrum or lever for change. In Benin, Senegal, and Mali, the inheritance of a pluralist legal system means that debates over family law are not simply struggles over gender roles but also are an integral part of broader power struggles between customary and secular judicial systems—a struggle that is very much about defining the reach of the modern state. Villalón’s review of the politics of education reform shows the zigzag of these processes: the limited benefits for secularly educated children in Senegal’s poststructural adjustment period led to parents’ preference for Islamic education, with the political opening permitting the movements to prevail against a state that had long established preeminence in this sector. In other cases, potential allies may exist even further afield than development specialists often realize. It is therefore important not to dismiss agents and issues that do not immediately fit our models of change or of institutional forms. Unexpected coalitions may form to find different, but functionally workable, solutions in these societies. By failing to recognize the importance of new actors and relationships that have arisen as a consequence of the previous transformations, we overlook opportunities to strengthen these actors and relationships and to enhance institutional density and complexity (an important goal for strengthening governance). This failure arises because we have established, conventional notions of what actors are important to track (e.g., a focus on civil society, parties, and parliaments), while we ignore other social forces that have developed to fill gaps as the state has with-

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drawn politically, socially, and economically. In doing so, we miss or mischaracterize the relationships between different social forces that may be critical to how we can effectively support good governance. At worst, ignoring these actors eventually undermines the social processes that have produced them and which, we argue, in some cases are fundamentally more powerful forces in elevating goals of cross-cutting governance improvements than donor programs targeted at a particular area. Rethinking Institutions

Second, the predominant ethos of development remains one that seeks to reproduce institutional structures we are familiar with in the West. Not unlike earlier modernization efforts, we settle too easily on analyses and prescriptions that insist on the form and substance of institutions, and we perceive shortcomings—as measured by our notions of ideal standards—as a sign of resistance. Where such resistance to a reform intervention is encountered, the tendency is to push toward understanding the political economy or the context of reform rather than the enduring underlying relational aspects of actors within these institutions. The case studies in this book powerfully illustrate the wide gap that often exists between the expectations and outcomes of institutional changes. Onoma reminds us that reforms intended to reinforce property rights had different chances of implementation depending on the chiefs’ resistance and their ability to undermine or circumvent reforms. Similarly, Wing demonstrates how seemingly stronger and more modern institutions may actually produce worse outcomes for women—at least in the short run. She argues that family law reforms that shifted the locus of dispute from customary institutions to secular courts, which often lacked the teeth to make and enforce rulings, actually undermined women’s security. Viewed at a broader level, Wing also reminds us that the widening of debate that is part and parcel of democratization can actually limit and shape reforms in other arenas—specifically, hindering the state’s ability to press family law reforms. Thus, while the form and design of an institution changes, the driving underlying processes—especially where norms rather than formal structures matter—remain more or less intact and reproduce the preexisting pathologies, power dynamics, and relations between state and society. The survival or mutation of these underlying processes and incentives thus subverts reform intents. Taking institutions as expressive of a stable equilibrium, it is important for reformers to not simply

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attempt to disrupt or assert a new equilibrium (often by installing the alternate modern form), but to invest in multiple arenas and steps to over time shift the dynamics that improve the chances of a preferred equilibrium arising from contests challenging the existing equilibrium. Rethinking the State and Sovereignty

Development specialists continue to focus on engaging with and strengthening the state, as idealized in the West, despite a significant shift in the nature of the state across Africa. State sovereignty has diminished in at least three ways. First, claims of total autonomy of the state (by incumbent politicians) have been effectively retracted due to major changes in the landscape of power—the emergence of salient actors (new actors and old actors who are new winners or losers), distribution of power across them, and relationships between them. Second, the rise of constitutionalism reflects and potentially reinforces the notion of citizens—as individuals, collectivities, and firms—making claims in terms of (what some consider universally ascribed) rights and extracting compliance, if grudgingly, from the state. Third, in terms of the international political economy, claims to unquestioned sovereignty have been diminished by the actions of more powerful regional or global powers, collectivities, or internationalized norms. The appropriation of global norms by domestic actors and the intervention of other states and global actors impacts how the state’s role and obligation in the provision of services, rights, and economic management is viewed. It is unclear how development donors’ support for governance programs recognizes that the nature of sovereignty has changed. Sovereignty is now more often than not reformulated or shared with other actors—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or international organizations, especially in postconflict and fragile settings—or subject to contest by citizens and organized groups (e.g., in decentralization attempts). On the one hand, as the case studies clearly show, the development community is itself an actor powerfully shaping political contests over reform in education, family law, and property rights. At the same time, it approaches political engagement as an outsider, acting as if the problem of reform is a technical one that requires a set of appropriate solutions or a one-off choice in which the development community seeks to favor reformers over their opponents, rather than as a political struggle in which development agents are themselves on stage as active participants.

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The Way Forward In this volume, we suggest a more radical redirection of scholarship and policies aimed at improving governance. Development specialists widely accept the notion that governance strategies must be tailored to specific circumstances. But more is needed than mere worship of context. Development agents must adopt new strategies, shifting their focus from isolated processes and outcomes to underlying, interrelated actors, aims, and arenas. They must recognize that development processes are the outcomes of intertwined, complex political struggles that are messy, but legible. Significant changes have taken place in particular domains of the public sphere, presenting both challenges and opportunities to the governance agenda in Africa. In addition to these (and especially important) are changes that, cumulatively and interactively, have produced a transformed environment for development agencies to support governance reforms. Some parts of this shift are evident and have received attention, but we argue that without looking at how partial innovations in specific domains shift the whole integrated space, an adequately responsive strategy is impossible. For instance, despite what is seen as a fundamental shift of development strategy—a move from state-centered economic development to one focused on limiting the state’s involvement in the economy—development agencies continue to rely on the state as a major partner in undertaking reforms or as the center of reforms. Furthermore, the predominant focus on the state remains a narrow one, centered on the executive as the principal driver of policy choices and actions. Except where political liberalization and human rights are at the center of sociopolitical contestation, development partners have a limited regard for civil society, legislatures, and other actors that have emerged or become empowered with new state transformations. For instance, even celebrated civil society initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) rely heavily on state action. When strategies include nonstate actors, they are diminutive compared to the weight given to the executive. For example, civil society, legislative strengthening, and other society-focused projects exist among several donors, including the World Bank, US Agency for International Development, European Union, and others, but their relative weight in the development and governance practice is limited. Across the complexity of the change we note in this book, we see at least three challenges that the development community may need to

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consider in how governance support programs are conceived and designed. We agree that an overarching agenda has to be institutional reform in both state and society, but we argue that significant changes are needed in the strategies aimed at achieving these goals. Reforms must take into account that new actors and institutions emerge as the outcome of iterative, interrelated social contests. Engaging in such efforts with preconceived notions of appropriate institutions or “legitimate” actors—imagined as the outcome of independent, one-shot insertions of correctives, is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, initial limited success that leads to declarations of failure or a halt to support unhelpfully unplugs a likely emerging iterative contest from needed resources. First, there is a need for better understanding the cumulative and intertwined nature of the changes taking place and for the formulation of policy responses that are cognizant of these altered states. An important consideration in this regard is the nonlinearity of reforms and the paths that they take. It is not just that institutional reform is incremental, but also that the effects of increments scattered over various seemingly unrelated fronts can cascade over short periods of time to produce transformed political and policy arenas. This does not mean that every reform initiative is critical or will succeed, but rather that a more theoretically grounded reform design is required to understand which small changes in tandem could transform a policy environment. The point is not that present institutional reforms are inconsequential (indeed, the opposite is the case), but rather that to understand the impact of such reforms and to design appropriate strategies for development, scholars and policymakers have to pay close attention to evaluating the interests and power of critical actors, both old and new, and of results in increments and in relation to other changes that emerge along various reform paths. The goal is not to develop a new model of development (indeed, the analyses in this book suggest that such a global model is unlikely), but to develop measures that more accurately capture reform outcomes in specific contexts. Such measures need to better illuminate the scope and unevenness of reforms as well as the full range of development outcomes as they exist beyond the state. Thus, for instance, the World Governance Indicators developed by the World Bank Institute (including political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption, and voice and accountability) are useful, but limited. As Bratton notes, the indicators miss important distinctions in the characteristics one should examine to determine performance in administrative, economic, and political spheres. Equally importantly,

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focused on state institutions and at the national level, they reflect the state-centered bias of the development community and miss important distinctions in the challenges, progress to date, and prospects for good governance related to varied performance outside the center and the state. Second, given the multiplicity of paths to reform, and especially given the propensity for incumbent elites to attempt to contain the effects of reforms, flexibility in reform objectives and in targeted actors should be considered. As reforms take hold and give rise to new actors and new demands, reformers should find ways to support the efficacy of these new actors and to design solutions to second-order problems that arise. For example, in the case of the land reforms in Ghana, projects by donors to update land registration needed to combine both the technical changes in laws and procedures with attempts to foster new norms in the land market—especially through changing incentives and behaviors of chiefs, including empowering client-subjects with information on land transactions. Technical solutions atrophy without a changed normative environment that precedes or accompanies them. Often, second-order problems reveal the political economy goals that are paramount and that underlie a targeted technical dysfunction. Groups privileged by the status quo are likely to reorganize even in the reformed arenas to pursue their interests by new means and coalitions, often with a negative impact for citizens. Development specialists must be able to quickly shift support to new actors, including ones that may be critical of the very reforms that empowered them (e.g., new women entrepreneurs critical of structural adjustment). This is important to creating an organic demand-side environment for new institutions to arise. An empowered and effective civic sphere is necessary to the organic elaboration of legitimate social compacts between the state and society. The ability to recognize and include newly empowered actors into reform programs requires not only flexibility and attention to actors often considered outside the reform paradigm, but also a willingness to work with others on the ground to identify emerging actors, understand their needs and preferences (keeping in mind that actors do not necessarily have preferences they would be presumed to have elsewhere), and find points of intervention. That is, it requires a shift from an overarching development model in which international development actors act on the society at hand to one in which they work more closely and collaboratively with local actors, bringing international expertise together with local wisdom and knowledge to identify both needs and solutions. Finally, in the past two decades, the governance agenda in Africa has predominantly focused on macroeconomic reforms and state struc-

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turing (e.g., civil service reform). These reforms have been largely state centric and neglected societal actors for a variety of reasons: the domination of the policy sphere by the state, capacity and organizational constraints, or weak political bases. Yet clearly these reforms have expanded the number of organizations in society and moved many from a singular focus on individual welfare to making claims in the public realm. Given the limits of state-driven reforms and given the growing competence of societal organizations in pressing both substantive and institutional claims, a demand-side agenda for governance reform may hold more promise for sustained progress toward better government performance and accountability. It is important to support such actors, enabling them to make effective claims. Support must be directed beyond the usual suspects (e.g., NGOs) to include actors not viewed as governance related (e.g., social welfare organizations and charities) or even necessarily pro-liberal (e.g., traditional authorities). Not only do such actors often have multiple identities and arenas within which they act—sometimes they are the only credible institution in the public sphere in remote areas—but they also act in concert with more mainstream NGOs and corporate entities that external actors easily recognize and support. Indeed, the success of a governance reform agenda will depend on both what issues are targeted for support and how that support is designed and deployed. In short, we must alter reform strategies to bring them in-line with the realities of local spaces. Only by so-doing can we hope to marshal global and local resources to strengthen governance and enhance the well-being of Africa’s changing societies.

Notes 1. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). It should be noted that Mitchell would, perhaps justifiably, reject the segmentation of change into political, economic, and social arenas. 2. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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The Contributors

Catherine Boone is professor of government at the University of Texas

at Austin. Michael Bratton is University Distinguished Professor in the Depart-

ment of Political Science at Michigan State University. Peter Lewis is associate professor and director of the African Studies

Program at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Ellen M. Lust is associate professor of political science at Yale University. Stephen N. Ndegwa is adviser on fragile and conflict-affected situa-

tions at the World Bank. Ato Kwamena Onoma is assistant professor of political science at Yale

University. Leonardo A. Villalón is associate professor of political science and for-

mer director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. Susanna D. Wing is associate professor of political science at Haverford College.

229

Index

Abusa tributes, 84, 127–128 Accountability: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 27(table); democratizationgovernance link, 11; dimensions of governance, 22; economic mismanagement in autocracies, 47; fostering economic growth, 47–48; land law reform in Ghana, 90; land sales, 105(nn26,28); politicization of land tenure, 75; reforms constraining, 13; in threshold countries, 4. See also Governance, dimensions of Administration of Lands Act (1962; Ghana), 119 Administrative dimensions of good governance, 21, 27(table). See also Governance, dimensions of African Development Bank (AfDB), 4–5 African Growth and Opportunity Act (US), 67–68 African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, 154, 174(n13) Afrobarometer indicator: data sample, 25–26; economic failure, 61–62; electoral alternation, 31–32; Mali’s electoral alternation, 33; Mali’s political dynamics, 35–36; popular perceptions of democracy and governance in eighteen African countries, 27(table); representation gap, 37

Agriculture: colonial land tenure regimes, 77; commercialization of, 75; distributive conflict account of property rights, 131–132; land use, 113–114; political struggles over Ghanaian land use, 128–129; subsistence farming, 102(n2). See also entries beginning with Land Akan stools. See Stool lands Akyem Abuakwa, 82, 111–112, 118–127, 129–132, 134 Alliance for Democracy and Progress (ADP; Mali), 34 Allodial title to stool lands, 104(n20) Asafo companies, 121, 140(n62) Asante Model of Dispute Adjudication, 85 Atta case, 132 Authoritarian regimes: defining and categorizing, 51; economic performance, 45–46, 50; infant mortality, 58; political transition and economic performance, 54; postindependence regimes in the Sahel, 180; poverty and popular welfare as measure of economic performance, 56; regime type and education, 59. See also Regime type Autocracies: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 28; defining and categorizing, 72(n19); economic disadvantage, 46–47; Kenya’s land tenure under Kenyatta and Moi, 96;

231

232

Index

political transition and economic performance, 53–56. See also Regime type Autonomy, state, 12 Benin: democratic transition and legal pluralism, 152; development indicators and public perceptions of justice and traditional authority, 155–158, 156(table); family law reform, 148, 149, 158, 161–163; family laws, 159(table); infant mortality, 58; international agreements on women’s rights, 154; political transition and economic performance, 53; polygamy, 150–151; poverty statistics, 171; role of civil societies in family law reform, 146–147; traditional leaders’ opposition to family law reform, 148 Botswana: fraudulent land sales, 114; lived poverty index, 61; political transition and economic performance, 53; usufruct system of property rights, 133 Brazil: fraudulent land sales, 114 Checks and balances, 2 Cheetah generation, 17(n13) Chieftaincies: Ghana’s land law reform, 89–90, 206; Ghana’s land tenure and land politics, 82–83; land revenue and ownership disputes, 123–124; land use and exchange, 113; politicization of Ghana’s land issues, 86; preferences of actors in Ghana’s land law reform, 206; Senegalese and Malian trust in, 157. See also Stool lands; Traditional authority Children: family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table); of polygamous marriages, 151 CIRCOFS. See Islamic Committee for the Reform of the Family Code in Senegal Citizen-legislator contact, 37–38, 38(table) Citizenship rights: Kenya’s land tenure regime, 98; politicization of land tenure, 75; social contract gap, 10–11 Civic associations, 17–18(n22) Civil conflict, 1

Civil law: family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table); legal pluralism, 150–151 Civil liberties: dimensions of governance, 23; expansion of, 1; Freedom House measure, 71(n18); regime categorization, 51 Civil society: constraining state behavior, 2; economic change through civic involvement, 48, 64–65; family law reform, 146–147, 149, 158, 168; improving economic performance, 69; protecting women’s rights in family law, 162; state role in, 209; statesociety relations, 10 Class formation: Ghana’s class-like conflict, 88–89; politicization of land tenure, 75 Clientelism, economic performance and, 63–64 Cocoa production, 82, 89, 104(n16), 131, 133 Colonialism: allocation of Kenya’s forest lands, 94–95; control and disposal of Ghanaian land, 118–119; family law, 145–146; family law reform in Francophone Africa, 170–171; Francophone system in the Sahel, 186; fraudulent land sales, 125; Ghana’s land tenure and land politics, 82–83; history of land tenure regimes, 76–77; Kenya’s freeholds, 102(n3); land tenure regime in Kenya’s Rift Valley, 92; land tribute, 103(n7); legal pluralism stemming from, 152; médersas (Malian religious schools), 189–190; neocustomary model of land rights, 78–79; political struggles over Ghanaian land use, 128–129; statist model of land tenure, 79–80 Colored revolutions, 9 Concessions, land, 85–86 Conflict, 1; democratic transition and economic performance, 50–51; Ghana’s landlordism and class-like conflict, 88–89; good governance emerging from, 3; Kenya’s land tenure regime, 91–92; land distribution and use, 85–86, 101–102, 130–132; land reform and, 14; new democracies’ susceptibility to, 30; over family law

Index

reform, 147; political transition and economic performance, 53–56; posttransition conflict in the Sahel, 182–183; stool lands, 104(n18) Constitutions, 155, 198(nn11,12) Corruption: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 26; democratic transition allowing increase in, 21; Kenya’s privatization reforms, 6; Mali’s decline in, 35; popular perceptions of traditional authority and, 156, 157; popular protest of economic grievances, 48; stool land exploitation, 87, 105(n23); World Governance Indicators, 23, 24, 24(table) Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) index, 4–5 Coups d’état, 1, 180–181 Crown lands. See Stool lands Customary law: denying individual rights, 152; empowerment of women, 174(n17); family law reform, 150; family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table), 162; marriage and divorce, 151; negating CEDAW, 154; Senegalese and Malian trust in, 157; undermining women’s rights, 145–146; women’s equality in Mali, 155 Dairy production, 6 Debt restructuring, 4 Decentralization of government: land law reform, 73–74, 101; Mali’s experiment in, 33–35 Democracy-governance connection, 11; economic performance and, 11; electoral alternation, 31–36; Mali’s electoral alternation, 33–36; microconnections, 25–29; mutually constitutive nature of, 41; representation gap, 37–39; statebuilding as prerequisite of democratization, 29–31; statistical significance of, 22–25 Democratic experiments, 180–181 Democratic regimes: defining and categorizing, 20–21, 51, 71–72(n19); economic performance, 45–46; fluctuations in experience, 1; Freedom House measure, 22–24, 71(n18);

233

governance context of education reform in the Sahel, 179–185; infant mortality, 58; personal assessments of economic conditions, 62(table); political liberalization in the Sahel, 180–181; political transition and economic performance, 51–56; popular perceptions in Francophone Africa, 156–157; poverty and popular welfare as measure of economic performance, 56; regime type and education, 59; sequencing debate, 30–31. See also Democracy-governance connection; Democratic transition; Democratization; Political liberalization; Regime type Democratic secularism, 183–185 Democratic transition: economic performance and, 50–51; family law reform, 149–150; incompleteness of, 181–182; legal pluralism, 152; popular protest of economic grievances, 48 Democratization: citizens’ uncertainty accompanying, 13–15; economic growth without prosperity, 49; explaining economic performance, 63–66, 69–70; fostering economic growth, 47–48; increase in, 19; land law reforms and, 73–74; opening a forum for family law reform, 152; political mobilization of religious groups, 204–205; redefining the political order in the Sahel, 194–195; of religion, 184; shifting state-society relations, 12–13 Demographic and environmental stress (DES), 75, 96–97 Development, economic and social: agents of, 205–207; differing views of performance, 2–3; education reform, 178; institutional structures, 207–208; legal pluralism as issue of, 153; public perceptions of justice and traditional authority, 156(table); Senegalese family law, 164–165; sovereignty and the state, 208; women’s rights, 148. See also Economic performance Department for International Development (DFID), 90, 99 Direct land exploitation, 113, 115 Discrimination: family law reform, 153

234

Index

Dispute adjudication, 85, 121 Distributional conflict, 74 Divorce: family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table); legal pluralism, 151–152. See also Family law reform Domestic violence, 165–166 Donor-sponsored reforms: economic policy and political dynamics, 66–68; land law reform, 82; political barriers to, 6; resistance to, 3 Drinks money, 137(n7), 144(n125) Dynamics versus outcomes, 5 Economic crises, 9, 49 Economic dimensions of good governance, 21–22, 27(table). See also Governance, dimensions of Economic indicators, 50 Economic liberalization, gender roles and, 171 Economic performance: assessment of, 49–51; authoritarian disadvantage, 46–47; causal factors in growth, 5; correlating democratic performance with, 45–47, 70(n1); democratization and economic growth, 11, 47–48; education decline in the Sahel, 187; explanations of regime type linkage to, 63–66; factors for improving, 68–69; Ghanaian land sales, 122–123; growth without prosperity, 48–49; individual perceptions and measures of welfare, 60–61; institutional reforms’ subordinate status, 11–13; international actors and, 66–68; land exchange and exploitation, 113–114; land use, 113; legal plurals and family law reform, 150; macro- and micro-level changes, 204; personal assessments of economic conditions, 62(table); political hazards of economic failure, 61–63; poverty and popular welfare, 56–60; regime type and regime transition, 51–56, 52(fig.); regimes and education, 59(fig.); regimes and infant mortality, 58(fig.); regimes and poverty, 57(fig.); resurgence after conflict, 4 Economic reform, 5, 13–15, 211–212 The Economist, 4

Education: family law reform, 170; Franco-Arabic school system, 188–192; gender equality in, 153, 199(n28); IDB projects, 199(n31); lived poverty index, 61; postcolonial decline, 177; reconciling religious and formal state education, 178–179, 195; reform efforts in the Sahel, 188–189; regime type, economic performance and, 59, 59(fig.); religious education in the Sahel, 178, 185–186; Sahelians’ rejection of state schooling, 186–187; shaping secularism in the Sahel, 183–184; shifting state-society relations, 12–13; sociopolitical context of the Sahel, 185–194 Effectiveness, governmental, 21, 24, 24(table), 26, 28. See also Governance, dimensions of Efficiency, governmental, 21, 27(table), 28. See also Governance, dimensions of Efficiency theory, 116 Elections: conferring better governance, 41; defining democracy, 20–21; democracy-governance connection, 29; disparate experiences, 1; electoral alternation, 31–33; family law reform in Mali, 169; independent Senegal, 180; preceding statebuilding, 30; reinforcing clientelism, 64; religioussecular power struggles in the Sahel, 184; representation gap, 11; selling land for votes, 115, 136; sequentialism and gradualism, 30; violence following Kenya’s, 18(n24) Electoral alternation, 31–36, 36(table), 204 Electoral democracies: defining and categorizing, 51, 71–72(n19); economic performance, 50; infant mortality in, 58; political transition and economic performance, 53–54; poverty rate, 56; regime type and education, 59. See also Democratic regimes; Regime type Equatorial Guinea, 51 Equity, 22; Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 27(table); economic change through civic involvement, 48. See also Governance, dimensions of

Index

Ethnic cleavages: Ghana’s land allocation, 89; Kenya’s citizenship policies, 98; Kenya’s land tenure under Moi, 96–97 Family law reform: actors and alliances for, 148–150; Benin, 158, 161–163; case study criteria, 158; colonial legacy and legal pluralism, 145–146; democratization shaping, 204; institutional changes, 207–208; legal pluralism, 150–155; linking literacy rates and women’s rights to support for, 157; Mali, 167–170; preferences of actors in, 206; religious versus state law, 153; religious-secular power struggles in the Sahel, 183–184; role of civil societies in, 146–147; Senegal, 163–167 Family laws, 173(n10); Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table) Flame of Peace ceremony (1996; Mali), 34 Food shortages, 60, 72(n21) Forests, allocation of, 94–95, 98, 108(nn63,64), 109(n65) France: fraudulent land sales, 114 Franco-Arabic school system, 188–194 Francophone Africa, 177. See also Benin; Mali; Morocco; Sahel; Senegal Fraud: distributive conflict account of property rights, 131–132; land sales, 87, 114–115, 123–124, 125, 137(n7) Freedom House rating, 1, 19, 22–24, 26, 50, 51, 71(n18) Freehold land, 84, 102(n3) Frontier lands, 104(n17) Ga Traditional Area, 111, 113–114, 118–122, 124–126, 130–132, 134, 137(n7) Gambia: political transition and economic performance, 53 Gender equality, 153, 187. See also Women’s rights Ghana: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 26; citizen-legislator contact, 37; cocoa production, 104(n16); commercialization of agriculture, 75; conflict and land reform, 14;

235

distributive conflict account of property rights, 130–132; economic reform in the civic sphere, 69; emerging stock market, 4; fraudulent land sales, 137(n7); frontier lands, 104(n17); institutional consequences of land sales, 121–127; land allocation and transfer rules, 120–121; land law reform, 89–91; land tenure and land politics, 82–83; land tenure regimes, 76–77; land tribute, 103(nn7,8); land use, 112–116; landlordism and classlike conflict, 88–89; market efficiency theory of property rights, 116–117; political struggles over land use, 127–129; politicization of land issues, 86–89; preferences of actors in land reform, 205–206; research methodology and design, 117–118; rural-urban divide over property rights, 132–134; subsistence farming, 102(n2); tying land use to governance, 129–130. See also Stool lands Globalization uniting women for family and women’s rights, 149 Governance: defining democracy, 20–21; dimensions of, 21–22; tying land use to, 129–130. See also Authoritarian regimes; Autocracies; Democracygovernance connection; Democratic regimes; Regime type Gradualism, 30–31 Hamani, Diori, 191 Headscarf ban, 198(n15) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, 67 Hippopotamus generation, 17(n13) Honesty, governmental, 21, 27(table). See also Governance, dimensions of Inconclusive contests, 7 Incumbency: electoral alternation, 31 Indirect land exploitation, 113–114 Infant mortality, 56, 58 Inheritance laws: Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table), 161–162, 167; Moroccan family law, 169 Institutional structures: emergence of and changes in, 10; government

236

Index

responsiveness, 38; impact on development processes, 207–208; land use policies, 113; political deficits hindering economic performance, 65–66 International actors: education and development, 178; education reform in the Sahel, 188; family law reform, 148–150, 161, 162, 167; land law reform, 74–75, 98–99. See also World Bank International Monetary Fund (IMF), 66 Investment, economic growth and, 4 Investment spending, 71(n12) Islam. See Muslim population; Religious law; Sharia Islamic Committee for the Reform of the Family Code in Senegal (CIRCOFS), 148, 164–167, 171 Islamic Development Bank (IDB), 188, 192, 199(n31) Islamic law. See Religious law Judicial institutions and systems: distributive conflict account of property rights, 132; family law reform in Benin, 163; family law reform in Mali, 168; fraudulent land sales, 124; land sales, 115; legal pluralism, 153; popular perceptions of, 155–156; Senegalese and Malian lack of trust in, 157 Judicial reform, 147 Justice, public perceptions of, 155–158 Kenya: citizen-legislator contact, 37; commercialization of agriculture, 75; conflict and land reform, 14; election violence, 18(n24); forest land allocation, 94–95, 98, 108(nn57,63,64), 109(n65); freehold property rights, 102(n3), 133; insecure property rights, 116–117; land buying companies, 93–94; land law reform, 98–100; land sales, 114; land tenure and land politics, 91–92, 95–98, 101–102; popular protest of economic grievances, 48; privatization reforms, 5–6; Rift Valley land regimes, 92–95; settlement schemes, 93; statist model of land tenure, 79–80; undermining property rights, 136

Kenya African National Union (KANU), 96 Kenyatta regime, 93–96, 98 Kerekou, Mathieu, 64 Kibaki, Mwai, 98 Konaré, Alpha Omar, 34, 168 Kountché, Seyni, 191 Kuffour, John, 119 Kufour case, 132 Kwame Nkrumah, 119 Labor migration, 78–79, 104(n18), 106(n37), 122 Laïcité (secularism), 183, 186, 190, 193, 198(n14) Land buying companies (LBCs), 93–94, 95 Land law reform: citizens’ uncertainty accompanying, 14; democratization and decentralization complementing, 73–74; Ghana’s policy and political discourse, 89–92; gradualist approach, 73; increasing occurrence and visibility across Africa, 100–101; Kenya, 98–100; political impact of, 204; preferences of actors in Ghana’s, 205–206; second-order problems, 211 Land rights: conflict in southern Ghana, 85–86; exclusivity of, 74–76, 81, 83, 85–86, 101–102; family law and women’s rights, 145; land tenure regimes, 76–77; politicization of (See Politicization of land issues); smallholder land regime, 77–80. See also Politicization of land issues Land sales: accountability for, 105(n28); changing modes of governance and, 130–131; chiefly prerogative and state rights, 86–87; chiefly trusteeship over stool lands, 84; fraudulent, 87, 114–115, 123–124, 125, 137(n7); Ga and Akyem Abuakwa, 121–127; judicial recognition of, 103(n8); Kenya’s land buying companies, 93–94; security and, 113–114; stool treasuries and revenues, 103(n7); youth protests against stool lands exploitation, 105(n26) Land tenure regimes: allocation of forest lands, 94–95, 98, 108(nn63,64), 109(n65); colonial roots of, 76–77; concessions under the authority of the

Index

chiefs, 85–86; destabilization of, 80–82; forest land allocations, 94–95; frontier lands, 104(n17); Ghana’s fourpart system, 83–86; inheritance-based, 108(n57); Kenya’s citizenship issues, 98; Kenya’s Rift Valley, 91–92, 92–95, 95–96; lineage lands, 83–84; neocustomary model, 78–79; southern Ghana, 82–83; statist model, 79–80, 91–92; stool lands purchased from chiefs, 84; women’s rights, 151 Land use: colonial control of Ghanaian lands, 118–119; distributive conflict account of property rights, 130–132; locations of, dimensions of, and interest in land, 120–121; political struggles among Ghanaian chiefs and citizens, 127–129; resource exploitation, 112–116; security of property rights and, 134–135; tying to governance, 129–130. See also Stool lands Land values: chiefs as conflict adjudicators over, 85–86; efficiency theory model, 116; exclusive, commercialized land rights, 81; impact on property rights, 111–112; institutional consequences of land sales, 121–127; land exploitation and, 114; land sales, 113–114, 121–127; weak property rights and, 134–135. See also Property rights Landguards, 130 Landlordism (Ghana), 88–89 Late adjusters, 50, 71(n14) Legal pluralism, family law and, 145–146, 150–155, 206 Legality, regime, 21, 27(table). See also Governance, dimensions of Legitimacy, regime: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 27(table), 28; economic performance and, 69–70; elections conferring, 20–21; judicial institutions, 147; Kenya’s land allocation policies, 97–98; political dimension of good governance, 22; political hazards of economic failure, 61–63; success in threshold countries, 4. See also Governance, dimensions of Lesotho: lived poverty index, 60–61 Levirate laws, 151, 158(quote), 161 Lineage lands, 83–84

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Literacy: conservatism in Mali and, 157; early marriage and, 153–154 Lived poverty index, 60–61 Loyalty option of land rights conflict, 86 Macroconnections, 22–25 Macroeconomic reforms, 5, 13, 211–212 Macro-level reforms, 204 Macrotransitions, 6–7 Madagascar: clientelism, 64 Madrassa (Franco-Arabic schools), 191 Majimboism (Kenya), 98 Malawi: food shortages, 72(n21); infant mortality, 58; lived poverty index, 61; representation gap, 37 Mali: democratic transition and legal pluralism, 152; development indicators and public perceptions of justice and traditional authority, 156(table); electoral alternation and the perceived quality of governance, 33–36; family law reform in a democratic setting, 149, 167–170; family laws, 159–160(table); Franco-Arabic schools and médersas, 189–190; infant mortality, 58; international agreements on women’s rights, 154; Islamic groups’ resistance to family law reform, 167; lived poverty index, 60–61; political transition and economic performance, 53; popular perception of electoral alternation on governance, 36(table); popular perceptions of judicial institutions, 155–158; poverty statistics, 171; reconciling education with social realities and expectations, 179; representation gap, 37; role of civil societies in family law reform, 146–147; school enrollment decline, 186–187; state-centered land tenure model, 80; traditional leaders’ opposition to family law reform, 148. See also Sahel Market economies: institutional deficits hindering economic performance, 65–66; land rights, 73 Market efficiency theory, 116–117 Marriage: early marriage-literacy connection, 153–154; family laws in Benin, 158, 159(table), 161; family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal,

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159–161(table); family laws in Mali, 160–161(table), 168; family laws in Senegal, 161(table), 163–164, 165; forced marriage, 153–154, 161, 163, 166; legal pluralism, 151–152; polygamy threatening women’s rights, 150–151 Mau Forests Complex, Kenya, 94–95, 108(nn57,64) Mauritius: political transition and economic performance, 53 Mbeki, Thabo, 167 Médégan Nougbodé, Clotilde, 162–163 Médersas (Malian religious schools), 189–190 Microtransitions, 6–9, 17–18(n22), 181–182 Middle East, 14 Migrant labor, 78–79, 104(n18), 106(n37), 122 Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), 67 Millennium Development Goals, 153, 187 Mineral resources: Ghana, 123, 124 Moi regime, 95, 96, 98, 99 Morocco: family law reform, 150; religious involvement in family law reform, 169 Moumouni, Abdou, 177, 196(n2) Mozambique: elections reinforcing clientelism, 64 Multiparty regimes: emergence of, 19; Kenya’s land allocation politics, 97; Senegal’s transition to, 180 Muslim population: democratic openings in the Sahel, 179–185; family law reform, 163; Franco-Arabic school system, 188–192; opposing family law reform in Mali, 169; population statistics of the Sahel, 180; religious education, 178, 185–186; Senegalese family law, 165 Namibia: elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; lived poverty index, 60–61 National Land Policy (NLP; Ghana), 89–92 National Land Policy (NLP; Kenya), 99–100 Natural resources: economic performance and, 51; land concessions, 85–86; mineral resources in Ghana, 123, 124; oil production, 51, 54. See also entries beginning with Land

Ndiaye, Adji Fatou, 166 Neocustomary model of land rights, 76, 78–79, 80, 81 Neopatrimonialism, economic performance and, 14–15, 63–64 Neotraditional land regime, 77, 85, 101 Niger: economic growth, 51; education reform, 177–178; family law reform, 149, 183–184; Franco-Arabic schools, 190–192; gender equality in education, 199(n28); reconciling education with social realities and expectations, 179; religious-secular struggles, 185; school enrollment decline, 186–187; setbacks to democratization, 179–182; statecentered land tenure, 80; women’s rights for marriage and divorce, 151. See also Sahel Nigeria: citizen-legislator contact, 37; economic reform in the civic sphere, 69; elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; food shortages, 72(n21); infant mortality, 58; popular protest of economic grievances, 48 Nonadjusting countries, 50 Nonliberal public argument, 184 Ofori Atta, 127, 128, 130, 134, 142–143(n109), 142(n96) Ofori Atta II, 142(n109) Oil production, 51, 54 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi, 4 Okyenhene, 127–129, 130–131 Oxfam, 99 Partial reform, 6–7 Paternal power, 148–149, 164 Path dependency, 9 Patrimonialism, 11; neopatrimonialism, 14–15, 63–64 Patronage, 11; allocation of Kenya’s forest lands, 95; overriding democratic rules, 40–41; representation responsiveness, 38–39; “retreat and extension” dynamic, 12–13 Personal law, 147, 152 Polarized governance countries, 50, 71(n14) Political dimensions of governance, 22, 27(table). See also Governance, dimensions of Political freedom: lived poverty index, 61

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Political learning, 40 Political liberalization: democratization in the Sahel, 180–181; democratization of religion in the Sahel, 184–185; FrancoArabic schools in the Sahel, 192–193; gender roles and, 171; reconciling religious and formal state education in the Sahel, 195; secular-religious power struggles in the Sahel, 182–183. See also Democratization Political liberties, 1, 23 Political order as prerequisite of democratization, 30–31 Political rights: Freedom House measure, 71(n18); regime categorization, 51 Political stability, 23, 24(table) Political transition: economic performance and, 52–54; Francophone Africa, 157; individual perceptions and measures of welfare, 60–61; infant mortality reduction, 58; postindependence authoritarian regimes in the Sahel, 180–181; poverty rates and, 56. See also Democratic transition Politicization of land issues: Kenya’s Rift Valley, 95–99; land administration, 101–102; political issues stemming from, 75; southern Ghana, 82–83, 86–89; tenure regime variations, 81–82 Polity IV Project, 23, 24, 50, 51, 71(n18) Polyandry: Benin, 162 Polygamy: Benin, 150–151, 161–162; family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table); Moroccan family law, 169; Senegal, 163–164 Popular perceptions: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 25–26, 27(table); effect of electoral alternation on Mali’s governance, 36(table); electoral alternation and governance, 32(table). See also Afrobarometer indicator Popular welfare: correlating democratic performance with economic performance, 45–47; economic growth without prosperity, 49; individual perceptions and measures of welfare, 60–61; poverty as indicator of economic performance, 56–60; regimes and education, 59(fig.); regimes and infant mortality, 58(fig.); regimes and poverty in Africa, 57(fig.)

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Populism, 21 Postconflict states: political transition and economic performance, 53 Poverty: correlating democratic performance with economic performance, 45–47; democratization and economic performance, 69–70; Francophone Africa, 171; as indicator of popular welfare, 56–60; lived poverty index, 60–61; regimes and poverty in Africa, 57(fig.) Poverty reduction efforts: benefits of democratization, 20–21; education in the Sahel, 187; regime change and, 13 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), 67 Privatization reforms, 5–6, 101 Procedural democracies. See Electoral democracies Property rights: family laws in Benin, Mali, and Senegal, 159–161(table); goal of reforms, 135–136; land regimes defining, 75; land use, 113–114; market efficiency theory, 116–117; political implications of, 204; promoting investment in agriculture, 73; research methodology and design, 117–118; role of institutional structures, 207; ruralurban divide, 132–134; selling land for votes, 115. See also entries beginning with Land Proportional representation, 38 Protest: opposition to family law reform, 168, 169; against stool land practices, 87–88, 105(n26) Public good, 10, 56. See also Education Public Lands Bill (1897; Ghana), 125 Public space, 10 Ratsiraka, Didier, 64 Reform: complexity of, 203–204; differing views of performance, 2–6; economic reform, 5, 13–15, 211–212; inclusion of newly empowered actors, 211; judicial, 147; political barriers to, 3; strategies and design, 210–211; tumult versus progress, 2–3, 3–6. See also Family law reform; Land law reform Regime change: economic performance and, 51–56, 52(fig.); institutional

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deficits hindering economic performance, 65–66; poverty reduction and, 13. See also Democratization; Political transition Regime type: economic performance, 45–46, 49–51, 52(fig.), 63–66; education and economic performance, 59(fig.); fluctuations in experience, 1; increasing democratization, 19; investment spending and, 71(n12); political transition and economic performance, 55–56, 55(fig.); Polity scale, 23; poverty and, 57(fig.); regimes and infant mortality, 58(fig.). See also Authoritarian regimes; Autocracies; Democratic regimes; Electoral democracies Regulatory quality, 23, 24(table) Religious education, 195, 201(n45) Religious law: family law reform, 148, 150; family law reform in Benin, 163; gender inequality and family law reform, 171–172; literacy rates and conservatism, 157; opposition to family law reform, 148; secularreligious power struggles in the Sahel, 183; Senegalese family law, 164–165; versus state law, 152–153; undermining women’s rights, 145–146. See also Muslim population; Sharia Rent seeking: increase during democratic transition, 21; Mali, 34; roots of, 83 Representation gap, 11, 22, 37–39, 38(table) Resource exploitation: Ghanaian land sales, 123; land use, 112–116; predatory land practices, 124. See also entries beginning with Land; Natural resources Responsiveness, governmental, 22; Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 27(table); citizen-legislator contact, 37–39; Mali, 35–36. See also Governance, dimensions of “Retreat and extension” dynamic, 12–13 Rule of law: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 28; dimensions of governance, 23, 24, 24(table); legal pluralism and, 152–153; sequentialism and gradualism, 30–31

Rural areas: beneficiaries of land law reform, 74; citizen-legislator contact, 37–38 Rural-urban divide: family law reform, 170; property rights, 132–134 Rwanda: state-centered land tenure model, 80 Sahel: Franco-Arabic school system, 188–192; liberalization as democratization, 194–195; political mobilization of religious groups, 204–205; postindependence education performance, 177–178; reconciling religious and formal state education, 178–179; religious-secular power struggles, 179–185. See also Mali; Niger; Senegal Secondary education, 186–187 Secularism, 183, 186, 190, 198(n14) Secure property rights, 133–134 Senegal: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 29; colonial land tenure regimes, 77; democratic transition and legal pluralism, 152; development indicators and public perceptions of justice and traditional authority, 156(table); elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; family law reform, 148, 163–167; family laws, 160–161(table); Francophone and Franco-Arabic schools, 193–194; incomplete democratic transition, 182; international agreements on women’s rights, 154; popular perceptions of judicial institutions, 155–158; postindependence single-party regime, 180; poverty statistics, 171; reconciling education with social realities and expectations, 179; role of civil societies in family law reform, 146–147; secular-religious education debate, 195, 201(n45); state-centered land tenure model, 80; traditional leaders’ opposition to family law reform, 148; Wade’s new constitution, 155, 198(nn11,12). See also Sahel Senghor, Leopold, 165, 166 Sequencing debate, 30–31 Sequentialism, 30–31

Index

Service provision, 11–13, 68, 72(n27). See also Education Settlement schemes, Kenya, 93–97 Sharecroppers, 79 Sharia, 152–153, 164–166, 171, 173(n10). See also Religious law Sierra Leone: infant mortality, 58 Smallholder land regimes, 77–80, 92–93, 94–95 Social class, impact of economic reform on, 14–15 Social contract gap, 10 Social expectations, 4 Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), 153–154 Social progress, linearity of, 7–8 Social welfare, 13 Somalia, 51 South Africa: citizen-legislator contact, 37; economic change through civic involvement, 65; elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; legal pluralism, 151; lived poverty index, 60–61; political transition and economic performance, 52–53 Sovereignty, 208 Soviet Union: insecure property rights, 117 Sow, Deiynaba Hamady, 166 State autonomy, 12 Statebuilding as prerequisite of democratization, 29–31 State-centered land tenure. See Statist model of land tenure State-society relations, 10–11, 12–13 Statist model of land tenure, 79–80, 81, 91–92, 101–102 Stock markets, 4 Stool lands: accountability for sale of, 105(n28); allodial title, 104(n20); concessions under the authority of the chiefs, 85–86; confiscated farms, 142(nn96,109); corruption associated with, 105(n23); drinks money, 137(n7), 139(n39); exclusivity of land rights, 76; labor migration, 104(n18); lineage lands, 83–84; political motivation behind the sale of, 126; protest against fraudulent practices, 86–88; provision for chiefs’ control

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and disposal of, 118–119; purchased from chiefs, 84; virgin land under the authority of the chief, 84; youth protest against fraudulent sale of, 105(n26) Strong adjusters, 50, 71(n14) Structural adjustment programs, 66–67, 73, 187; land law reform, 99 Subsistence farming, 102(n2) Subverted progress, 7 Tanzania: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 29; elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; food shortages, 72(n21); lived poverty index, 61 Taxation: political struggles over Ghanaian land use, 127–129 Technology, 4 Term limits, 64 Threshold countries, 4 Timber concessions, 85 Touareg people, 34 Touré, Amadou Toumani, 33, 34, 167–168, 169, 173(n6) Trade and investment limiting economic growth, 67–68 Traditional authority: colonial control of Ghanaian property rights, 118–119; development indicators and public perceptions of justice and, 156(table); dispute adjudication, 121; distributive conflict account of property rights, 130–132; institutional consequences of land sales, 121–127; land location, dimensions, and interest, 120–121; land markets and property rights, 112; land use, 112–116; neocustomary model of land rights, 78–79; opposition to family law reform, 148; political struggles over land use, 127–129; property rights, 111–112; seizure of lands, 142–143(n109), 142(n96); tying land use to governance, 129–130. See also Stool lands Traditional law. See Customary law Transaction costs of land sales, 127 Transnational organizations, 149 Transparency: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 27(table), 28; democratic transition inhibiting, 21; privatization

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reforms, 5–6. See also Governance, dimensions of Traoré, Moussa, 34 Tribute, payment of, 83–84, 103(nn7,8), 131 Turnover of governments. See Electoral alternation Uganda: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 29; food shortages, 72(n21) UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 154 UN World Conference of Women (1995; Beijing), 148 Uncertainty, 10, 13–15 UNESCO Education for All campaign, 187, 192 Unions: economic change through civic involvement, 48 Urban areas. See Rural-urban divide USAID, 148, 161, 162, 163, 167, 199(n28) Usufruct system, 75, 133 Values, women’s role in perpetuating, 172 Virgin lands, 84 Voice option of land rights conflict, 86 Voter turnout: Mali, 34 Wade, Abdoulaye, 164, 165, 166, 167, 182, 193, 198(n11) Western influences on family law, 146, 149, 164

Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), 149, 161–162, 164 Women’s Legal Rights Initiative (WLRI), 162 Women’s rights: citizenship questions, 10–11; equal education in the Sahel, 187; family laws in Benin, 158, 161–162; international agreements on, 154; Kenya’s land tenure, 99; linking literacy rates to support for, 157; popular perceptions in Francophone Africa, 155–158; public law-private law divide, 152; role of institutional structures in reforms, 207; Senegalese family law, 166–167. See also Family law reform World Bank: economic growth, 4–5; economic policy and political dynamics, 66; Kenya’s land law reform, 98–99; land law reform, 100–101; property rights reform, 112 World Bank Institute, 21, 210 World Education Forum (2000), 187 World Governance Indicators, 23–24, 24(table), 31, 210–211 Yugoslavia: democratic vulnerability, 30 Zambia: economic reform in the civic sphere, 69; elections reinforcing clientelism, 64; lived poverty index, 60–61; political transition, 52 Zimbabwe: Afrobarometer democracy indicator, 26, 29; food shortages, 72(n21); lived poverty index, 61 Zulu Law, 151

About the Book

What is the cumulative impact of the immense social, economic,

and political changes that Africa has undergone in recent decades? What opportunities do those changes present to improve the lives of the continent’s citizens? Countering the prevailing mood of pessimism in the face of disappointed expectations, the authors of Governing Africa’s Changing Societies demonstrate the significance of even incomplete reforms in the areas of competitive elections and democratization, gender relations, property rights, the public sector, and privatization, among others. In the aggregate, their work reveals how seemingly small or sluggish changes are accumulating to fundamentally, and positively, transform Africa’s governance environment. Ellen M. Lust is associate professor of political science at Yale University. Her publications include Structuring Conflict in the Arab World, the coedited Political Participation in the Middle East, and the edited textbook The Middle East. Stephen N. Ndegwa is adviser on fragile and conflict-affected situations at the World Bank. He is author of The Two Faces of Civil Society: NGOs and Politics in Africa and coeditor of A Decade of Democracy in Africa.

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