Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa demonstrates how instead of empowering the communities they work with, the jargon of development ownership often actually serves to perpetuate the centrality of multilateral organizations and international donors in African development, awarding a fairly minimal role to local partners. In the context of today’s development scheme for Africa, ownership is often considered to be the panacea for all of the aid-dependent continent’s development woes. Reinforced through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, ownership is now the preeminent procedure for achieving aid effectiveness and a range of development outcomes. Throughout this book, the author illustrates how the ownership paradigm dictates who can produce development knowledge and who is responsible for carrying it out, with a specific focus on the health sectors in Burkina Faso and Kenya. Under this paradigm, despite the ownership narrative, national stakeholders in both countries are not producers of development knowledge; they are merely responsible for its implementation. This book challenges the preponderance of conventional international development policies that call for more ownership from African stakeholders without questioning the implications of donor demands and historical legacies of colonialism in Africa. Ultimately, the findings from this book make an important contribution to critical development debates that question international development as an enterprise capable of empowering developing nations. This lively and engaging book challenges readers to think differently about the ownership, and as such will be of interest to researchers of development studies and African studies, as well as for development practitioners within Africa.

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

Millennium development goals (MDGs) and sustainable development goals (SDGs) have significant implications for global development, in particular for African countries. This book seeks to assist Africa’s policy makers and political leaders, MNCs and NGOs, plus its increasingly heterogeneous media landscape, to understand and better respond or negotiate the evolving development environment of the 21st century. In this collection of nuanced essays, the contributors interrogate the relationship between the MDGs and SDGs in key areas of African development to enhance our understanding and knowledge of the evolving nature of development. They address issues of governance, agriculture, south-south cooperation in a context of foreign aid, natural resource governance and sustainable development, export diversification and economic growth as well as emerging topics such as the internet of things or the sharing economy, climate change, conflict and non-traditional security. The varied, yet interlinked foci present a holistic overview of Africa’s development aspirations, and ability to transform the SDGs’ universal aspirations into local realities. This book will be of use to academics and students in Development Studies, Contemporary African Studies, Political Science, Policy Studies and Geography, and should also appeal to policy makers and development practitioners.

It is a commonplace that the problems of African rural development are becoming increasingly complex--that is, they have grown more numerous, interrelated, and varied. This complexity has generated a multitude of development scenarios. Such scenarios encourage decision making along rigid and narrow patterns that ignore the diversity of local situations and national cultures. Among these is the doomsday scenario, applied to every nation on the continent, best captured in the phrase Everything worksàexcept in Africa. Emery Roe argues that crisis scenarios generated by an expert (usually non-African) elite are self-serving and counterproductive. Despite this, they go largely unchallenged, even when they fail to explain or predict. Except-Africa takes up the challenge of devising development scenarios that do justice to the continent's variegated reality.The book begins by defining what the author means by a development narrative. The subsequent chapters provide alternate scenarios to such dominant models. Chapter 2 sketches four counter-narratives to the tragedy of the common argument, while chapter 3 constructs the most innovative challenge to conventional ways of thinking about Sub-Saharan pastoralism in decades. Chapter 4 develops an alternative scenario of expatriate advising in Africa, while chapter 5 devises a counter-narrative to the all-too-common views about government budgeting in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Chapter 6 presents a case study and counter-narrative from Zimbabwe of a complex local government reform. The book concludes by moving beyond case material and specific situations to answer the most imperative question in African studies and rural development: What would a politics of complexity look like in Africa if complexity were seriously engaged?Contemporary African studies are dominated by narratives about power. Yet in African rural development, power interests are by no means always clear. Development issues are frequently contingent and provisional. Surviving the tangled fusion of narrative and reality requires a politics of complexity. Except-Africa will be an essential work in meeting that challenge.

This volume reflects the highlights of their deliberations.

Tensions in South African universities have traditionally centred around equity (particularly access and affordability), historical legacies (such as apartheid and colonialism), and the shape and structure of the higher education system. What has not received sufficient attention, is the contribution of the university to place-based development. This volume is the first in South Africa to engage seriously with the place-based developmental role of universities. In the international literature and policy there has been an increasing integration of the university with place-based development, especially in cities. This volume weighs in on the debate by drawing attention to the place-based roles and agency of South African universities in their local towns and cities. It acknowledges that universities were given specific development roles in regions, homelands and towns under apartheid, and comments on why sub-national, place-based development has not been a key theme in post-apartheid, higher education planning. Given the developmental crisis in the country, universities could be expected to play a more constructive and meaningful role in the development of their own precincts, cities and regions. But what should that role be? Is there evidence that this is already occurring in South Africa, despite the lack of a national policy framework? What plans and programmes are in place, and what is needed to expand the development agency of universities at the local level? Who and what might be involved? Where should the focus lie, and who might benefit most, and why? Is there a need perhaps to approach the challenges of college towns, secondary cities and metropolitan centers differently? This book poses some of these questions as it considers the experiences of a number of South African universities, including Wits, Pretoria, Nelson Mandela University and especially Fort Hare as one of its post-centenary challenges.