Political institutions and developmental governance in sub-Saharan Africa

Alence, Rod

doi:10.1017/s0022278x04000084

Cited by 105 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…We use the presence of collusion and corruption as negative indicators of autonomy, because these have been identified as major obstacles when developing and implementing REDD+ policies (Kanninen et al 2007). To gain an understanding of how autonomy plays out in the earlier forestry reform and in REDD+, we choose not to consider the diverse issues explaining the dependence of postcolonial states (see Kapoor 2002), but rather to examine how the exercise of public power generates private gain (Kaufmann et al 2009) and how behavior at the micro level compromises the state's ability to pursue national objectives (Alence 2004).…”

Section: Theory and Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons for REDD+ from Cameroon's past forestry law reform: a political economy analysis

Dkamela¹,

Brockhaus²,

Djiegni³

et al. 2014

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD+) is gaining traction in Cameroon. However, given the deep-rooted trans-sectoral drivers of forest loss, enforcing REDD+ policies will require major policy change and reform both within and beyond the forestry sector. In this paper, we view the REDD+ policy arena in Cameroon within a political economy framework and conduct policy network analysis to explore the factors that will enable or hinder efforts to implement the broad policy change required to realize REDD+. As the REDD+ context is shaped by the history of Cameroon's forestry sector, we draw lessons for REDD+ from the forestry law reform undertaken in 1994. We focus our analysis on three factors considered necessary for REDD+ success: (i) autonomy of the nation state from interests behind deforestation and forest degradation, (ii) national ownership over reform processes, and (iii) inclusiveness of policy processes. We find that the REDD+ policy process in Cameroon is repeating the weaknesses of the earlier forestry law reform, as seen in the minimal ownership of REDD+ by national actor groups and low inclusiveness among domestic actors at both national and local levels, as well as the absence of a national coalition for REDD+. Furthermore, politics and private agendas are compromising state agencies' autonomy in making decisions about forest resources. Our findings suggest that responses to these weaknesses, as well as to inconsistencies between sectoral policies and to competition over forest resources, will determine whether REDD+ can induce change within and beyond Cameroon's forestry sector.

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Section: Theory and Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons for REDD+ from Cameroon's past forestry law reform: a political economy analysis

Dkamela¹,

Brockhaus²,

Djiegni³

et al. 2014

E&S

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“…In fact, there is now considerable evidence that democratization, even in neopatrimonial contexts, can bring about expansions in civil rights and political freedoms (Lindberg, 2006;Edgell et al, 2017), the institutionalization of constitutional rule (Posner and Young, 2007), improvements in governance (Alence, 2004) and wider distributions of public goods and services (Stasavage, 2005;Burgess et al, 2015). Moreover, some have argued that patrimonialism may actually promote both democracy (Pitcher et al, 2009) and developmental governance (Crook, 1989;Booth and Golooba-Mutebi, 2012;Kelsall, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neopatrimonialism and Democracy: An Empirical Investigation of Africa's Political Regimes

Sigman

Lindberg

2017

SSRN Journal

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Gothenburg. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden, SNIC 2016/1-382 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. The indices of neopatrimonialism used in this paper will be available for public use in V-Dem's v8 dataset, set to be released in April 2018 at www.v-dem.net. AbstractOne of the most common adjectives used to describe democracy in sub-Saharan Africa is "neopatrimonial." Characterized by strong executives, pervasive clientelism and use of state resources for political legitimation (Bratton and van de Walle 1997), neopatrimonial democracy has been (controversially) associated with a range of (mostly undesirable) social, political and economic outcomes. This paper offers an empirical assessment of neopatrimonialism in Africa's political regimes. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, African regimes vary both quantitatively and qualitatively in their embodiment of neopatrimonial rule. Moreover, we find no clear evidence indicating that neopatrimonialism necessarily impedes the advancement or survival of democracy.

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“…One broad implication of our findings is that modern regimes may be more deeply grounded in indigenous societies than previous theories have suggested. 6 Much of the literature on comparative regime development outside Europe has focused on the colonial legacies, effectively treating indigenous political history as secondary. 7 When carried over into the prescriptive realm, our findings suggest that external reformers' capacity for regime-building should not be exaggerated.…”

Section: Figure 1: Current and Indigenous Democracy Across Continentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suggests that more developed indigenous groups were better able to influence national regime trajectories. 28 In the analyses that follow, we used the specification in column (6), since this provides the best description of the data as measured by R 2 . The data on light density at night in year 2000 is provided by the National Geophysical Data Center at NASA.…”

Section: Waltz 1979 131)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy

Bentzen

Hariri

Robinson

2015

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We document that rules for leadership succession in ethnic societies that antedate the modern state predict contemporary political regimes; leadership selection by election in indigenous societies is associated with contemporary representative democracy. The basic association, however, is conditioned on the relative strength of the indigenous groups within a country; stronger groups seem to have been able to shape national regime trajectories, weaker groups do not. This finding extends and qualifies a substantive qualitative literature, which has found in local democratic institutions of medieval Europe a positive impulse towards the development of representative democracy. It shows that contemporary regimes are shaped not only by colonial history and European influence; indigenous history also matters. For practitioners, our findings suggest that external reformers' capacity for regime-building should not be exaggerated.

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Political institutions and developmental governance in sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 105 publications

References 83 publications

Lessons for REDD+ from Cameroon's past forestry law reform: a political economy analysis

Lessons for REDD+ from Cameroon's past forestry law reform: a political economy analysis

Neopatrimonialism and Democracy: An Empirical Investigation of Africa's Political Regimes

The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy

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