African cities are the sites where the institutional challenges of the twenty-first century are most acute and where the institutional innovations that address them are most urgently needed.
The Laboratory Conditions
The African city is an institutional laboratory in the specific sense that it is developing the institutional responses to the challenges of rapid urbanisation, demographic pressure, climate vulnerability, and technological leapfrogging simultaneously, without the institutional inheritance that made the development of comparable responses in other contexts slower and the constraints less visible. The African city that is solving the challenge of housing rapidly growing populations without the regulatory legacy that constrains housing development in European cities, that is building digital payment infrastructure without the legacy banking systems that slowed digital adoption in the wealthy world, and that is developing community health approaches without the professional healthcare system that resists community health worker integration in the United States is an institutional laboratory in the genuine sense — it is developing institutional solutions to contemporary challenges without the institutional path dependencies that constrain the solutions available in more institutionally settled contexts.
The institutional innovations that have emerged from African cities in the past two decades — the mobile money systems, the community health worker networks, the informal urban governance institutions, and the diaspora-connected investment networks — are not simply African adaptations of institutional models developed elsewhere. They are original institutional responses to specific institutional challenges that the African urban context has made acute, and they are applicable beyond the contexts in which they were developed. The institutional analysis community that learns from African institutional innovation rather than only observing African institutional failure will be better equipped for the institutional challenges of the next generation than the community that does not.
The African city is an institutional laboratory whose experiments are generating institutional knowledge about how to govern rapid urbanisation, digital economies, and demographic transitions that the rest of the world needs. The analysis that takes the African institutional experience seriously as a source of governance knowledge rather than merely as a subject for governance assistance is the analysis that will be most useful for the governance challenges that are coming everywhere.
Discussion