Development as a collective action problem: addressing the real challenges of African governance

There has been growing recognition in the literature that governance reforms should be guided not by ‘best practices’ based on experience in the West, but by approaches that attain a ‘good fit’ with the needs and possibilities of particular developing countries.
This report argues that this alternative agenda remains ‘dangerously content-free’. There is a need to spell out what country reformers and development agencies should be doing differently. The Africa Power and Politics Programme (APPP) research focused on the question: ‘which institutional patterns and governance arrangements seem to work relatively well and which work relatively badly in providing public goods, merit goods and other intermediate conditions for successful development?’ (p.viii).
Most existing reforms offered as examples of ‘good fit’ have not made a significant break with conventional thinking on good governance, and remain bound up in a principal-agent approach to public management reform. This research advocates an alternative approach – the identification and solution of collective action problems.
African reformers and international donors need to ‘abandon the straitjacket of principal-agent thinking. In that thinking, programmes divide between those that address the so-called ‘supply side’ of improving governance and those that emphasise the ‘demand side’. In the first case, the assumption is that governments want and need help to deliver development honestly and effectively. In the second case, it is assumed that whilst the commitments of governments are open to question, their citizens have a definite and uncomplicated interest in holding them to account for their performance as agents of development. Reforms should be about stimulating this ‘demand’’ (p.viii). This report rejects this framing of the choices facing governance reformers. It argues that governance challenges are about both sets of people finding ways to act collectively in their own best interests.
‘The report appeals for more recognition of the coordination challenges and collective action problems that prevent both governments and groups of citizens from acting consistently as ‘principals’ in dynamic development processes’ (p.viii).
The analysis does not suggest a rejection of the state as a primary actor in development. The ‘grain’ of popular demand in contemporary Africa is not a desire for ‘traditional’ institutions, but rather for modern state structures that have been adapted to, or infused with, contemporary local values.
Politicians and voting publics at both ends of the development assistance relationship ‘need to be convinced that development progress is about overcoming institutional blockages, usually underpinned by collective action problems’ (p.xi). Failures are not the result of funding gaps. Institutional blockages can be overcome, and external actors may be able to make a positive contribution. ‘But this is difficult work, especially for staff of official agencies with diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic responsibilities. It requires the intensive use of skilled labour and calls for exceptional local knowledge and learning capabilities. It may involve greater use of ‘arm’s length’ forms of development cooperation, delivered by organisations that can work in ways that are more embedded and adaptive’ (p.xi).

Summary