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Democrats
and donors: Studying democratisation in Africa
Sara
Rich Dorman1
Extracted from Donors, NGOs, and the Liberal Agenda in Africa Tim Kelsall
and Jim Igoe, eds. Forthcoming, 2004.
2004
http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001100/index.php
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Introduction
Since the
late 1980s, political scientists, donors, and development workers in East
and Southern Africa have devoted much time and resources to the question
of 'democratization'. Yet, it is not clear how this concept of 'democratization'
has helped us to understand African politics or if donor support for 'democratization'
has been successful. There are both methodological and conceptual problems
with the way democratization is used to explain processes as varied as
the de-racialization of South Africa, the post-civil war effort to rebuild
Mozambique, and the different patterns of change to multi-party politics
in Kenya, Zambia and Malawi.
Many accounts of these
processes of democratizations are ahistorical, or decontextualised from
the historical and cultural situations. Secondly, institutions which are
thought to enable democratizations - like churches and NGOs - are poorly
understood and little studied. Assumptions, rather than empirical evidence,
dominate. Such partial understandings of the societies and institutions
under observation leads to inappropriate policy responses by bilateral
and multi-lateral donors eager to support 'democratization'.
In this paper, I explore
the ways in which the development industry has adopted and used political
science concepts of 'democratization' and 'civil society' and the problems
inherent with this process. I focus on the role of local or 'indigenous'
NGOs as recipients of donor aid and potential agents of democratization.
In order to understand why NGOs are assumed to contribute to a process
of 'democratization' we need to examine both what donors think NGOs are,
and their relationship with the state, as well as how this plays out in
practice. In particular, we need to examine the changes that have resulted
from the increased resources made available to the NGO sector. A case
study of a prominent Zimbabwean Human Rights NGO, ZimRights, will be used
to illustrate the problems caused by growth and expansion. First however,
I want to examine the methodology and conceptualization of 'democracy'
as used by donors.
1. This chapter is based
on material included in my DPhil thesis "Inclusion and Exclusion: NGOs
and Politics in Zimbabwe" (Oxford, 2001). The argument benefited from
presentation to Development Studies MPhil Core Course at Queen Elizabeth
House, Oxford in 1999 and 2002, and on-going discussions with Tim Kelsall,
Gavin Williams, Tina West and Tom Young.
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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