Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa
Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire
This book challenges previous assumptions about institutions, social capital,
and the nature of the African state by investigating the history of
political and economic change in villages on either side of the Ghana–
Côte d’Ivoire border. Prior to European colonial rule, these Akan villages
had very similar political and cultural institutions. By the late 1990s,
however, Lauren M. MacLean found puzzling differences in the informal
institutions of reciprocity and indigenous notions of citizenship. Drawing
on extensive village-based fieldwork and archival research, MacLean
argues that divergent histories of state formation not only shape how
villagers help each other but also influence how local groups and communities
define citizenship and then choose to engage with the state on an
everyday basis. She examines the historical construction of the state role
in mediating risk at the local level across three policy areas: political
administration, social service delivery, and agriculture, highlighting the
importance of the colonial and postcolonial state in transforming informal
institutions.
Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa
This book relying on data
about language interests, use, and change, draws the national outlines of
Africa's future states. The analysis demonstrates that "language rationalization"
(the emergence of a single, dominant language in each state,
which becomes the official one for education, administration, and cultural
life) will not be the typical pattern of African national development.
Instead, for most of Africa the multilingual state will be the norm. The
multilingual pattern there will not resemble that of Switzerland, Belgium,
or Canada; it will have distinct parameters, caused by the particular constraints
of building a postcolonial state in the twentieth century. Because
African states will have a distinct pattern of national development in the
course of state construction, political scientists need to ask what this
pattern implies for economic growth, political stability, democratic structures,
and political ideology. This book concentrates on the analysis of
language change and provides only a preliminary assessment of the social,
economic, and political implications of Africa's model of state construction.
It attempts to make sense of the cacophony of voices demanding
more rational language policies in Africa and offers modest suggestions
about how some of the fervently expressed goals might be achieved without
courting political chaos and further economic decline.
Governing from Below
Throughout the world, more and more of policy making and the politics that
shape it take place in the urban regions where most people live. This book,
drawing on eleven case studies of similar but disparate urban regions in France,
Germany and the United States from the 1960s into the 1990s, documents the
growth of urban governance and develops a pioneering analysis of its causes
and consequences. This analysis traces the origins of urban governance to the
expansion as well as the devolution of policy making, to mobilization around
local business and institutional interests in high-tech and service activities and
to the growth and incorporation of local social movements. Although nationstates
shape the possibilities for this urban governance, they operate increasingly
as infrastructures for local initiatives rather than through dictates from
above. Where urban governance has succeeded best in combining environmental
quality and social inclusion with local prosperity, local officials have
built not only on supportive infrastructures from higher levels but on regimes
in the local economy and civil society and on favorable positions in the global
economy.
|