Following the end of the Cold War, while the rest of the world focused on the seismic changes taking place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the African continent was undergoing its own political and economic transformation. No longer supported by their Soviet paymasters, all socialist regimes fell. The 1990s also brought an end to Western support of their anticommunist counterparts. The ideological defeat of socialist economic-development policies, and the disappearance of socialist foreign aid, brought everyone—genuinely or opportunistically—around liberal economic ideas. Aid was now conditional on democratization reforms and structural reform programs—including decentralization. Almost everywhere on the continent, large-scale reforms, funded and supported by international donors, arrived with a big bang and were put into law in a top-down manner. Twenty-five years on, the picture on the ground is uneven. Not all of the promises of decentralization have been met. In some places, the reforms seem to have engendered vibrant grassroots democracy at the local level; elsewhere, it has allowed the central government to permeate local politics and indeed exert control over what happens at the grassroots level; in other places, decentralization does not seem to have had any effect at all, and yet in a handful of them the reforms have remained on paper without any real change in day-to-day policy.
This edited collection takes stock of how things look 25 years after the reforms. The observations have both theoretical and applied lessons. Theoretically, this is an opportunity to examine the long-term consequences of institutional design, and to see whether comparative analyses using the nation-state as the unit of analysis and prioritizing the causal relationship between a few select variables across a large number of cases is the best explanatory approach. In applied terms, this is an opportunity to examine the real and long-term consequences of top-down institutional reforms and the “best practice” mind-set, which assumes that the same policies deliver the same results.
The collection is based on a project initially supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). There are 10 case studies that follow the framework that was originally formulated in the 2009 Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook of USAID. All chapters follow the same four dimensions: authority, autonomy, accountability, and capacity adopted from this framework. This brings in a degree of internal coherence difficult to achieve in edited volumes—especially one that includes cases as diverse as Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Most of them will not be that familiar to readers, and so this presents a challenge to both the editors and the authors of the case studies. The challenge is to provide some descriptive background while also pursuing explanatory goals. The majority of the case studies manage to balance these two intellectual goals remarkably well.
Most of the case studies seem to suggest that decentralization cannot be divorced from local politics and history. As the case studies on Mali, Nigeria, and Ethiopia show, decentralization also has to navigate the question of who is native to the land, especially when internal migration upsets delicate ethnic balances at the local level. Another interesting observation that emerges from the case studies is that when all the money comes from the center, the creation of local government encourages rent-seeking behavior. In their chapter on Nigeria, Dele Olowu and James S. Wunsch show how decentralization reforms have fueled demands for additional local councils as a way of “sharing the national cake” (p. 161). But it is in the concluding chapter by J. Tyler Dickovick and Rachel Beatty Riedl where most of the comparative lessons are provided. The authors highlight structural variables (demographics, geography, and economics), historical legacies (state formation, colonial heritage, and conflict), political institutions (authoritarian and democratic regimes; federalism and unitarism; political parties and party systems). The chapter also contains a very helpful overview of the 10 case studies.
In addition to the comparative lessons highlighted in the conclusion, a couple of other general patterns emerge. One is that by itself, decentralization and the minutiae of institutional design bringing this about mean little. It is the broader political and social context that seems to determine if and when decentralization will deliver on its promises. Decentralization is not a mere technical matter that can be confined to the subfield of public administration; it is inseparable from politics. A few months after the book was published, a scholar of decentralization, Gilles Cistac, was murdered in broad daylight in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. His work had found merit in the opposition party’s claims for political devolution. There had also been the recent discovery of one of the world’s biggest offshore gas reserves along the country’s long coastline stretching into the opposition strongholds in the north.
The second general pattern is how almost all decentralization reforms can be traced back to the 1990s big bang. While this broad pattern seems to hold, individual variations exist, of course. The case study on Uganda shows how decentralization reforms initially had homegrown roots, only later to be joined by the prescriptions cooked up by various international donors. Thus, the risk of what might be called “too many cooks, too many best practices” came later. As Paul Smoke, William Muhumuza, and Emmanuel Ssewankambo put it in their chapter: “[The] government used external assistance for decentralization selectively. This kept reform motivation high and prevented an onslaught of development partners bearing diverse ideas and programs—the curse of decentralization in many developing countries. … [S]ome of the early donors were not experienced with decentralization in developing countries. This may help to explain why such an ambitious reform was so rapidly undertaken in a postconflict, low-capacity country” (p. 243).
Perhaps one angle that is missing from the comparative framework is subnational variation. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, there are huge domestic differences in the level of economic development, precolonial and colonial history, ethnic and religious composition, demographics, and even geography. And this is confined not only to the three large countries with federal systems: Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. To be fair, the chapters on these cases all address subnational variation (these also happen to be some of the strongest chapters in the volume), but this variation is not part of the framework guiding the work. In a couple of case studies, subnational variation is deliberately left out. For example, the case study on Tanzania inexplicably leaves semiautonomous Zanzibar out and focuses on the mainland, using a seemingly technical public-administration language that in fact obscures rather than illuminates. As a result, not only do we miss out on what is politically most interesting, but also the frequent use of acronyms like LGRP, LGDG, HRM, LGA, PMO-RALG (just to name a handful) renders the text almost incomprehensible. Thankfully, most of the chapters do not bury the analysis in jargon.
One minor (and perhaps more stylistic) point that is not clear is the second part of the volume’s title. Other than a little hint in the concluding chapter, it is never quite clear what this paradox is. But at the end of the day, despite a few patchy spots, the collection is remarkably coherent and contains insights that have both theoretical and applied relevance. Considering that there are 22 contributors and 10 different case studies in Decentralization in Africa, this is a credit to the editors.
