H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SAfrica@h-net.msu.edu (April 2005)

Nicolas van de Walle, Nicole Ball and Vijaya Ramachandran, eds.
_Beyond Structural Adjustment: The Institutional Context of African
Development_. Basingtoke: Palgrave, 2003. 324 pp. Index. $79.95
(cloth), ISBN 1-403-96316-9; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 1-403-96317-7.

Reviewed for H-SAfrica by Ian Taylor <ict@st-andrews.ac.uk>, St.
Andrews University

The volume under review argues that the continent's economic renewal
needs an agenda that moves beyond the rather narrow confines of
Structural Adjustment Programmes and their reform ingredients, and
requires the promotion of the region's public institutions. An
increase in their efficiency and effectiveness is, it is argued,
urgently required. Indeed, the editors advance the argument that
economic reform cannot succeed unless those states undergoing reform
construct a far improved productive relationship with other
institutions that organize and regulate economic relations. For it is
within such a milieu that development is understood to take place.
The book argues that an emphasis on institutions is increasingly
important as the recent "democratisation" waves that have ostensibly
swept across Africa have brought new actors and interests onto
the political stage, which impact upon reform projects in various ways.

The volume thus has chapters on financing development, tax reform,
civil service reform, aid effectiveness, governance and the private
sector, private investment, the security sector, and the relationship
between states and associations.  Each chapter seeks to identify the
suitable  role
that various institutions can play in reinvigorating the continent.

The volume fits within a growing literature, which identifies
institutional weakness in Africa as a major stumbling block to
reform. This ties in with the acknowledgment that an effective and
able state, capable of coordinating and spearheading the development
process, is urgently required.  This might be said to represent the
new orthodoxy in some ways.

Yet the volume largely fails to deliver on how an emphasis on
institutions is going to help the continent move beyond the "taming
of structural adjustment" that many observers have remarked upon.  It
is dangerous to assume that the reform process has been successful
and that we now are  in some sort of second stage of reform, where
"getting the institutions right" is the next box to be ticked.  Even
if we remain within the discourse of privatization and liberal
prescriptions, Africa has  privatized only about 40 percent of its
state-owned enterprises. And much of the divestiture has been for
smaller, less valuable, often moribund manufacturing, industrial, and
service concerns.  In fact, of the roughly 2,300 privatizations
between 1991 and 2000, only about sixty-six involved  higher value,
economically important firms.  Less than 7 percent of the
privatisation sales have touched upper-end infrastructure firms. And
activity has been concentrated in only a few countries.  Of the nine
billion dollars raised from 1991 to 2001, a third was generated by a
few privatization sales in South Africa.  Another third came from
sales in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, and Cote d'Ivoire.  Proponents of
the view that SAPs have brought about wholesale privatization might
consider that
between them, some twenty-six other African countries had privatised
a scant total of only seven hundred million dollars in assets up to
2003.

In other words, African elites have been successful in not only
resisting wholesale privatization but have also retained control of
those parastatals and state-owned concerns that are of higher value
and economically important. This, of course, all makes perfect sense
if we are to understand that economic policies and decision-making in
Africa is, on the main, based on the need to distribute resources to
furnish clientelistic networks.  Certainly, the interests of the
ruling elites systematically diverge from the broader idea of raising
the general well-being of the populace.  No wonder that Africa's
institutions need help.  But all this takes place in a context in
which, as Van de Walle terms it, a "partial reform syndrome"
exists--where symbolic gestures, rhetorical commitments and promises
of change mask and further lubricate the diffusion of largesse and
patronage.

Even where the state does liberalize, African states have kept
important minority equity stakes in those infrastructure sales that
they have allowed.  What has been avoided, whatever the critics of
SAPs say, is structural reform and policies aimed at broad-based
development. This resistance is found in both the economic and
political realms.  "Big Man" politics has survived the change from
one party rule to the multi-party system across the continent.  There
really has not occurred any  fundamental structural change in the way
politics operates, although new actors have arrived on the scene.
Politics remains an activity where a minority can make significant
economic gains for themselves and their clients.  Politics still
provides easy access to public sector jobs, most of which continue to
act as little more than sinecures for prebendarys and rents for the
ensconced.  State institutions continue to atrophy and the average
African continues to miss out.

National development and a broad-based productive economy remain far
less a concern to elites within such systems than the continuation of
the gainful utilization of institutions and resources for the
individual advantage of the ruler and his network of clients.  In
fact, the bureaucracy has developed its own set of interests
(personal survival) and logic within Africa's institutions.  This
further distorts their role away from the ideal-type
rational-bureaucratic model inherent in the type of
institutional reforms that the book offers up as a solution to the
continent's ills.  It is hard to see how all this is relevant when
institutions are more akin to a loose set of skeleton institutions,
lacking in most capacities, than developmental agencies which are to
"spearhead" the continent's rejuvenation.  I suppose the key question
is how we move from here to there.  How can we go from institutions
that are really sites for politically connected persons, dependent
upon largesse
from state elites and acting as predators upon the populace, to
developmentally-oriented agencies leading the way forward?  The book
does not really answer this particular--but important--conundrum.


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