The governance of daily life in Africa: ethnographic explorations of public and collective services, edited by Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Leiden, Brill, 2009, 347 pp., £58.80, ISBN 9789004171282
This volume examines how African citizens tackle their relationship with the state, and how the state tackles (with more or less efficiency) its quotidian tasks, including sanitation, waste management, water supply and all manners of public services. It takes an ethnographic approach, showing how ‘governance’ has become a local, discursive resource and what it means for contemporary African citizens to ‘collectively and individually govern themselves in their daily lives’ (p. ix). It contributes to an exciting body of anthropological work on imaginations and enactments of the state at a local level by its citizens and functionaries. In the face of processes of privatisation, a weakening of public institutions and a more general retreat of the state in Africa, the idea of ‘the State’ has remained surprisingly pervasive, even if frequently only as representation: ‘a state grasped more in terms of its desired or perceived essence, than through the reality of its routine functioning’ (p. 18). Reasons for this include the severe limitation of economic resources, the influence of political elites and systems of patronage, and the proliferation of illicit transactions: African states are being privatised both from within and without.
The volume contains 12 chapters by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, economists and public health specialists who have studied state bureaucracy, health systems, corruption, conceptions of public and private, and the management of refugees in Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa. The editors' introduction outlines some cross-cutting themes. First is the question of how colonial regimes of rule reverberate in the governance of the post-colony (Olivier de Sardan, Becker, Bouju, Fresia, Turner). Olivier de Sardan's chapter demonstrates how pre-colonial forms of power were disrupted and reshaped by francophone colonial administrators. The colonial period also laid the foundation for systems of clientelism and the impunity of civil servants through its cultivation of specific notions of contempt and privilege differentiating civil servants from the population at large. A second theme in the volume is how citizens and bureaucrats alike have to deal with the quotidian public infrastructures and bureaucratic powers in their everyday lives. Obrist discusses the gendered nature of water provision, sanitation and waste management in a Dar es Salaam neighbourhood, arguing that women's role in these domains means that they are the ones predominantly dealing with local service providers – which should be more actively acknowledged. Given the pervasive sense of arbitrariness when it comes to the application of bureaucratic regulations, service operators and users often draw on a shared but informal system of knowledge and practice, which allows a more or less successful negotiation of this situation. Anders discusses the ‘backstage’ of such interactions, focusing on a ‘parallel social order’ (p. 135), centred on asymmetrical power relations and indebtedness, unofficially governing the administrative realm. This order is characterised by a marked ‘ambivalence of vernacular conceptions of practices labelled as corrupt’ (p. 122), challenging normative interpretations.
A third theme, dominant in cross-disciplinary discussions of the African state, is the lack of accountability and illicit diversions of public goods for private benefits (Bouju, Fresia, Olivier de Sardan, Turner, Tidjani Alou). Whilst the volume presents familiar examples of embezzlement, Tidjani Alou describes an interesting, reverse case of decentralisation and increasing accountability accompanying the installation of small-scale water infrastructures in villages in Niger. Through local participation, new decentralised management structures divert authority away from existing centres of power, whilst the introduction of transparent forms of compulsory accounting transforms prevalent conceptions of citizens and their role in processes of government.
A fourth theme is the institutional, legal, and normative pluralism of development and good-governance regimes and the implications for actual cases where such policies and projects are implemented. Political rivalries and struggles for resources and meaning emerge in these contexts (Fresia, Turner), and the implementation of governance schemes (new and old) involves processes and practices of boundary-making. The boundaries of public and private and of professional competence and intervention are not rigid but performed and contested in the engagement between institutions, services, and their supposed beneficiaries (Hornberger, van der Geest and Obirih-Opareh). Gruénais, Okalla and Gauvrit discuss the constitution of a ‘new health map’ (p. 107) in Cameroon, following the 1988 Harare Conference, which pivots on the ‘health district’ as an interface between centrally defined policies and strategies, and community demands. The carving up of geographical space with a technical rationale is accompanied by the allocation of responsibilities and the (re)mobilisation of local political conflict. Bouju's chapter tells quite a different story about the demarcation of spaces of administrative responsibility, focusing on the startling difference between the cleanliness of private and public spaces in Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso). At issue are two opposed historical–cultural normative logics regarding the ordering of space practised by the city's authorities and its inhabitants respectively. Public space is widely regarded as ‘socially useless and therefore suitable for dumping and tipping’ (p. 152); but since public space, infrastructures and sanitation services are viewed as the territory of local public authorities, the dirtiness of the city is generally interpreted as a sign of a decrepit municipal system and political antagonism. Local assessments of what gets done and what does not go hand in hand with assessments of capacity, including moral capacity, of the actors involved.
The richness of the material is difficult to convey in a short review. The focus on local-level state practices, processes of planning and management is a welcome change from the more usual discussions of ‘development’ processes and projects in Africa. The authors show that whilst the implementation of good governance programmes and policies (re)constitutes citizens and bureaucrats in new ways, it also makes way for the emergence of new intermediary roles (Anders, Fresia, Nauta), adding to historically important forms of brokerage (Becker, Olivier de Sardan). It is this range of emergent and reshaped subjectivities that a contemporary study of the African state needs to take into account. In doing so, the volume will appeal to a wide readership interested in gaining new insight into how the workings and malfunctions of the African state are lived on the ground.