The assumption that governance knowledge flows from the wealthy world to Africa is analytically wrong and practically costly. African institutional experience contains specific lessons that the wealthy world needs.
The Knowledge Direction
The default assumption of the international development community — that governance knowledge flows from the high-institutional-quality wealthy world toward the low-institutional-quality developing world, and that the primary governance task is the transfer of institutional models from the former to the latter — is analytically wrong and practically costly in specific ways. It is analytically wrong because African institutions have developed specific capabilities in specific domains that no institutional transfer from the wealthy world would have produced — the mobile money infrastructure, the community health worker networks, the informal urban governance, and the diaspora financial inclusion mechanisms that have addressed specific governance challenges in ways that were not available from the institutional models that the transfer approach would have provided. It is practically costly because the assumption of institutional transfer as the primary governance modality produces the implementation failures of institutional models that are designed for contexts they do not fit and the underinvestment in the local institutional innovation that the specific context requires.
The specific institutional lessons that African institutional experience offers the rest of the world include: the mobile money model's demonstration that financial inclusion can be achieved through mobile infrastructure where banking infrastructure is absent; the community health worker model's demonstration that last-mile healthcare delivery can be achieved through trusted community members at costs that formal healthcare delivery cannot match; and the informal urban governance model's demonstration that communities can develop effective governance institutions for shared resources without formal legal frameworks, when the design conditions that Ostrom identified are present.
African institutions have lessons to teach that the wealthy world needs to learn. The analytical community that approaches African institutional experience as a source of governance knowledge rather than only as a subject for governance assistance will be better equipped for the governance challenges of the next generation. The knowledge direction is bidirectional, and the institutional analysis that treats it otherwise is missing half the available analytical content.
Discussion