Goran s. Hyden

• University of Florida

For over a decade now, the international policy discourse has been premised on the thesis that development equals poverty reduction or poverty eradication. This is particularly strongly stated in the United Nationsillenium Development Goals which target improvement in human welfare and the human condition. While two thirds toward the finish line fo...

Research on public administration in Africa has been prescriptive rather than analytical. Solutions have been provided in search of problems. Little, if any, attention has been paid to the role of local administrative cultures. This article problematizes public sector reform efforts on the African continent by identifying the cultural realities in...

In more recent years climate change impacts have been obvious around the globe. This non-contentious reality has resulted in various global initiatives to reduce climate change impacts. However, differences exist in opportunities and capacity to adaptation. This paper, descriptive in nature, draws heavily from literature and also uses 2002 Tanzania...

The new approach to assisting developing countries inspired by the Paris Declaration emphasises greater recipient control over the funds provided, thus confining donors'influence to upstream points in the policy process, where political aspects of development co-operation become more important. Understanding better the role that power plays in the...

Public Administration in Africa: Main Issues and Selected Country Studies. Edited by Ladipo Adamolekun. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. xix. 415 pp. (Cloth US$70.00)

Moral economy may be originated from three sources with elements of comparisons between them to be discussed. First, a South East Asia source (James Scott, 1976) states that any peasant has a specific behaviour centred on subsistence because, conversely to the case of a capitalist enterprise, he is both a producer and a consumer. Second, from the i...

A careful review of the literature in political science and neighboring social science disciplines shows that prevailing assumptions in the international development policy community about improved governance as a principal mechanism to reduce poverty in Africa rests more on faith than science. Conventional policy models for tackling poverty fail t...

African Studies Review 48.2 (2005) 171-172 This book is an attempt to place important constitutional issues in Africa in their broader social and political context. It grows out of a Ford Foundation–funded symposium on the very subject of this volume, although papers included have been subsequently revised and updated. The main themes covered are t...

This article examines the challenges to building a civil society based on strong voluntary associations in Ethiopia, a country like most others in sub-Saharan Africa where neither the social structures nor the institutional setting is congenial to the growth and sustenance of a civic tradition. Drawing on the practical experience of Oxfam-Canada's...

This interesting and insightful book on the political economy of wildlife policy in Africa is an important contribution to the literature not only on African politics but also on the role that institutions play in shaping behavior and decisions. Although wildlife may not occupy the same centrality in African economies as oil and precious metals do,...

In this brief overview, I argue that Africanist contributions to the study of politics have not been insignificant. While Africanists, like many other comparativists, have felt uncomfortable about the imperialist aspirations of rational choice, they increasingly see the future as a time when theoretical and methodological pluralism will prevail.

Purpose: The current literature on social capital, especially among sociologists and political scientists, is characterized by a focus on its “civic” nature and consequently on the role that virtuous behavior plays in fostering democracy and national development. Robert Putnam’s book on the significance of the civic tradition in understanding Italy...

There is substantial confusion in political science and related literatures about the meaning and interpreta-tion of interaction effects in models with non-interval, non-normal outcome variables. Often these terms are casually thrown into the model specification without observing that their presence fundamentally changes the interpretation of the r...

Goran Hyden takes a critical look at African development in relation to today's global world. He offers some insights into why Africa has gone backwards rather than forwards. He questions both African governments and the international community and suggests that through a new approach to global partnership Africans can enter into the modern world o...

This chapter draws together the findings of the case studies on foreign aid agencies and foreign aid to Tanzania during the period 1965–95, tracking the strategy and behaviour of three major donors: China, Sweden and the USA. It also examines the lessons that can be drawn from this study focusing on the common tendency among all three donors to fal...

This article tries to understand the ongoing intellectual discourse on civil society and related concepts in political science, other social science disciplines as well as among policy-makers and practitioners. It suggests that there are four prominent philosophical lineages going back to the nineteenth century from which most of the contemporary d...

Botswana, John Holm and Patrick Molutsi Burkina Fasso and Niger, Pearl Robinson Ghana, Naomi Chazan Kenya, Frank Holmquist et al Nigeria, Richard Joseph Rwanda, Catherine Newbury Senegal, Crawford Young and Babacar Kante Tanzania, Aili Mari Tripp Zaire, Janet MacGaffey.

Presents the rationale for these funds and outlines in some detail their main features. The autonomous development fund model is characterised in the following way: it is a public but politically independent institution; it caters for both government and civil society; it is a funding, not an operational, entity; it aggregates finance from many sou...

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of Americ...

Analyses of structural adjustment in developing countries have increasingly come to emphasize the importance of grounding reforms in the political realities of the countries concerned. While this approach is a step forward from the more “economistic” and prescriptive analyses that prevailed in the first part of the 1980s, we believe that the dynami...

Policy analysis in developing country contexts poses special challenges. Very little is known about the policy process in these countries. Trying to rein the cultural, organizational and political factors that affect problem solving becomes an inductive search beyond the logic of conventional models of analysis. Using the AIDS issue as a case study...

This article suggests a new model of dispensing foreign aid that transcends the limits of conventional one-way transfers and responds to the particular challenges and opportunities associated with the ongoing process of democratization. Applied here specifically to food aid, it illustrates how such dispensations could be better utilized in the cont...

The political constraints slowing the battle against AIDS in Africa are getting AIDS on the public agenda, integrating the international community into the AIDS policy-making agenda and cultural barriers in national AIDS strategies. Policy making in most Africa is bureaucratic rather than democratic, so whether AIDS is a government priority depends...

One of the most encouraging things to happen recently in Africa is the growing concern among local people with the need for respect for civil and political rights. In the forefront of this new movement are many of the continent’s intellectuals. Their agenda includes a more general call for respect of the rights of all citizens but also a particular...

Given the persistence and severity of the African food crisis, the need for strengthening local ‘institutional capacity’ is is likely to be high on the agenda of policy makers during the current decade. Exploratory research in two Tanzanian villages compares the roles of local institutions in food production and examines the mechanisms for coping w...

In November 1989, 23 leading hunger experts met in Bellagio, Italy, issues a document called the "Bellagio Declaration: Overcoming Hunger in the 1990s." The report lists 4 achievable goals: eliminate famine deaths; end hunger in half of the world's poorest households; reduce by half malnutrition of mothers and small children; and eradicate iodine a...

The Government of Kenya has successfully developed macroeconomic policies that overcome constraints in the domestic and international environments and have a relatively well-functioning public sector. At present, the major challenge facing Kenya concerns the ability of the government to improve agricultural productivity given the weakness of its re...

Tanzania is one of many African countries where co-operative organisations after independence have been given a prominent role in the rural development process. Aspiring to be a socialist state, it has probably paid more attention than other countries on the African continent to the question of how to really make these organisations more viable. Th...

This paper sets out to consider two related questions: the significance of elections in single-party systems in underdeveloped countries, and the kind of study which political scientists have made of such elections.

This paper critically examines key concepts that have been dominant in the international development community in the past twenty years. Starting with an analysis of the state in Africa, it shows how the international donors have ignored many of the underlying conditions that make it weak and soft. It continues to argue that while the New Instituti...