Development and Governance

Abstract

Deriving from the Overseas Development Institute’s Africa Power and Politics Programme, Governance for Development in Africa makes a strong argument to distinguish between good governance and developmental governance. It does so not to present the two forms as mutually exclusive but rather to make a case that effective developmental action in generalised African conditions requires something more proximate, more realistic, and in a sense more modest than the broader and more abstract desiderata of good governance, based as it is on evocations of transparency, participation, and empowerment. The book rests within an emerging genre of research on Africa which has made two interconnected and important moves: to reject the developmental pessimism that a certain essentialist view about African politics has relied upon, and to work from a kind of institutional realism that is mainly interested in governance practice and its own dynamics.