Jerome Bachelard's book asks how we can understand the moderate progress towards good governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. He asks this question because he believes that good governance is both the key to growth and also possibly to more democratic political systems. It is corruption, neopatrimonialism, and narrow forms of political authority that constrain African states in their quest for progress.
The book addresses the question through two contributions. In the first place, the book offers a political model of governance progress based on the interweaving of pressures and counter-pressures for reform. This pluralist model allows the analytical framework of the book to encompass a diversity of political agencies and to allow that they might act in ways that promote or resist governance reform. Pressure is defined in a fairly familiar behaviouralist fashion – the observed exercise of material or normative power in the pursuit of a push for or against a specific kind of governance reform. This leads to a set of four hypotheses: that incumbent neopatrimonial states will resist reform, that domestic pro-governance organisations will be more effective with external support, that pressures for democratisation need to outweigh pressures against for elections to be free and fair, and that pressures for good governance need to outweigh pressures against to ensure new rulers do not regress into neopatrimonial practices.
Reflecting on these hypotheses, two thoughts occur. Firstly, these hypotheses seem almost like the common sense of the bulk of mainstream political analysis of African governance to the extent that they are more akin to social facts than hypotheses. They verge on being tautologies within which, say, a regression towards neopatrimonialism is explained through the pre-eminence of neopatrimonial forces. Secondly, the use of the term ‘outweigh’ suggests something that can be empirically demonstrated, perhaps a set of independent variables to regress against a dependent variable of governance (there are subsections on this in the book but they do not actually deal with variables), or a quantification of pressures and counter-pressures. The book does not do this and as a result, the balance of forces, the interaction between agencies in pursuit of different agendas, and the ambiguous behaviour of donors or African governments largely boils down to a far more anecdotal analysis within which country case studies are reviewed over specific periods as sequences of events.
The country case studies are clearly and expertly set out. They give a flavour of the pluralised and complex interactions of agencies with a focus on the ways these agencies have promoted or resisted governance reform, especially in regards to elections. I could not see clearly how the hypotheses set out earlier added values to these narratives. The impression one got from the case studies is of contingent political situations, equivocal donor action, and embedded state practices that are harder to change than some expected.
The book is a clearly written and interesting overview of Africa's limited progress in generating strong governance progress in terms of electoral democracy and transparency.
