After five years of analysing institutions across contexts, a final assessment of the institutional challenge and the institutional opportunity that define Africa's current moment.
The Assessment
Africa's institutional moment is defined by the intersection of three structural realities that together determine the trajectory of the next generation. The demographic reality: the continent has the world's youngest and fastest-growing population, whose demands on institutional systems — for education, for employment, for healthcare, for governance — will be the largest institutional stress test that African institutions have ever faced. The economic reality: the continent has the natural resources, the agricultural potential, and the technological leapfrogging possibilities that could support the economic development that the population's demands require — if the institutional framework can translate these endowments into broad development rather than concentrated extraction. And the political reality: the institutional governance of these resources and this development is contested between the democratic, accountable governance that development theory says produces broad-based outcomes and the concentrated, extractive governance that the political economy of commodity-rich states with weak institutional accountability tends to produce.
The institutional opportunity within this moment is genuine and time-limited. The African states that build the institutional quality — the accountability mechanisms, the capable bureaucracies, the rule of law, the democratic governance — to translate their demographic and resource endowments into broad-based development will be the African success stories of the next generation. The African states that fail to build this institutional quality will produce the concentrated wealth, the widespread poverty, and the political instability that extractive governance without institutional accountability produces. The difference between these outcomes is institutional governance quality — and it is being determined now, by the specific political choices being made in specific African states about the institutional frameworks they are building.
Africa's institutional moment is the moment when the institutional choices being made will determine the life trajectories of the largest young generation the world has ever seen. The institutional analysis that makes those choices and their consequences visible is the contribution that the analytical tradition this blog represents can make to the moment. The institutional work that translates the analysis into governance improvement is the contribution that the people who govern African institutions can make. Both are necessary.
Discussion