Imported Institutional Blueprints vs. Local Solutions

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Del curso dictado por Universiteit Leiden

Federalism & Decentralization: Evaluating Africa's Track Record

85 calificaciones

Universiteit Leiden

Federalism & Decentralization: Evaluating Africa's Track Record

85 calificaciones

In this political science course you will learn about the twin concepts of federalism and decentralization. You will develop an understanding of the core ideas that federalism and decentralization rest on, and study the building blocks that make them both work. Following a general overview of both federalism and decentralization, we will examine a number of case-studies from Africa where federalism and decentralization have been changing the continent’s political landscape in the last twenty years, coinciding with unprecedented levels of economic growth. What is federalism and how is it different from decentralization? What are the core ideas behind these concepts? Do federalism and decentralization enhance democracy, governance and diversity? Is that why virtually all countries south of the Sahara are now either federal or decentralized? We will be looking at Africa's track-record in order to answer these questions. By the end of the course, you will have acquired a general knowledge of federalism/decentralization and additional empirical knowledge of a number of African cases. Upon completion you will also acquire the ability to unpack and understand a variety of potential consequences of federalism/decentralization reforms in the developing world.

De la lección

Critical Issues in Federalism and Decentralization

This module will cover critical issues in Federalism and Decentralization, and will bring the knowledge and insights from previous modules together. The notion of state capacity will be unpacked into political, administrative, infrastructural, and economic components. We will also evaluate the relative importance of international know-how and local traditions.

State Capacity6:13

Imported Institutional Blueprints vs. Local Solutions6:48

International Involvement10:26

Conoce a los instructores

Dr. Jan Erk

Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, (STIAS)

Welcome to the second video lecture of our final module,

critical issues in federalism and decentralization.

In this video lecture, we juxtaposed two types of solutions to problems.

The very raison d'être of having a course like this is of course to evaluate

Africa's track record in federalism and

decentralization following the reforms of the 1990s.

The twin concepts were introduced with the promises to enhance democracy,

to bring good governance, and to better manage diversity.

The reforms promised prosperity, efficiency, and stability.

And in line with the premium most social science theories put on the causal

centrality of institutions.

The best way to bring these was by importing the institutional setup

that seemed to correlate with such good governance indicators in the West.

You remember this discussion from the concluding overview of module five.

There we had also talked about how homegrown institutions

that were left out of the formal institutional design during this phase.

Indigenous legal traditions, customary law,

indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms for managing disputes.

These were all not part of the reforms.

But, decentralized institutional groupings, carbon copied from the west,

were directly involved.

So there is here, a clear preference for institutional engineering.

If we could design the best institutions, import the best know-how, and

adopt the so-called best practices, we will get the results.

And the local often gets forgotten in this formulation.

And this brings us to a dichotomy between,

let's say, the international best practices and the home-grown.

This is what social scientists call the exogenous and endogenous institutions.

From the Greek prefix exo, denoting outside,

exogenous institutions are those that are imported from abroad.

While endogenous, from the Greek endo prefix, denoting from within,

refers to institutions with local roots.

Now which one works best?

The imported institutional blue prints that seems to have functioned elsewhere

but without local roots.

Or local institutions that have not solved all the problems, but

have managed to solve some, albeit not always effectively and efficiently.

And in the way we juxtapose the two,

we also have to factor in societal awareness and acceptance.

The local solution often enjoys a degree of home-grown social acceptance that

reflects the historic deep roots and

by extension a type of legitimacy that the imported blueprint does not.

And, this debate is much bigger than federalism and decentralization of course.

And it is not a purely technical debate with a straight forward clear answer.

There are, indeed,

normative questions that require the guidance of philosophical reasoning.

By now you are probably becoming aware of our soft spot for

fancy terminology in the social sciences.

The two terms we're juxtaposing today, endogenous and exogenous,

are examples of this.

We feel very scholarly and learned when the terms sound complicated.

Especially when the common people, that is the laity, don't understand what we say.

Of course, it must be because what we discuss is so deep and profound.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote about how all

professions were what he called, conspiracies against laity.

Most professions, especially the white collar ones,

deliberately use jargon to fein technical expertise and to intimidate potential

critics who would fear being exposed as illiterate in fancy terminology.

Now, with that learning objective, pedagogical experts can tick on

their score cards out of the way we should proceed towards more substantive issues.

Of course this is all a little light hearted.

Terms like endogenous and exogenous do help denote complex phenomena,

allow social scientists who are in different fields but

are engaged in similar investigations into contact with one another.

And all of this adds to the scholarly accumulation and growth.

During his visit to Communist China, US President Richard Nixon is rumored to have

asked the Chinese Communist Premier and the Foreign Secretary Zhou Enlai, for

his views on the French revolution in 1789.

Zhou is reported to have said, it is too early to tell.

So maybe it is too early to evaluate Africa's track record in federalism and

decentralization.

Maybe it is too early to see how the imported and

the home-grown interact and evolve in a mutually constituted way.

Twenty years is a long time in an individual's life but

rather short in the lives of countries.

After all, all political systems evolve with time, established federations with

longer histories have all gone through different phases of centralization,

decentralization, recentralization, and even civil war.

Their institutional constitutional blueprints have interacted with

unqualified social structures over the long run, leading to gradual change.

All the federations of the north have also imported various institutional blueprints

and best practices, which then interacted with the home-grown and the local.

The 1848 Swiss Federal Constitution, for example,

directly imported a number of federal institutions from the United States.

Over time, however,

exogenous institutions evolved through an interaction with the endogenous ones.

For such reasons, one should be hesitant to paint a type of federalism or

decentralization that is specifically and entirely African.

And different, for that reason,

from the experience of the older federations of the Northern Hemisphere.

Time will bring the northern and the southern experiences closer together.

And scholarly inquiry after all, is a cumulative process.

The search for answers indeed continues, but our course is nearing its end.

There is only one video lecture left.

So I hope we will see each other during that final lecture.

Bye.

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