The double movement in Africa: a Nkrumah-Polanyi analysis of free market fatigue in Ghana’s private sector

Abstract

Karl Polanyi’s double movement is a key tool for conceptualising free market fatigue in African business communities wrought by the insecurities of trade liberalisation. Synthesising Polanyi with Kwame Nkrumah’s work on neo-colonialism, the article argues that exhausted business communities in Africa can contest free market reforms and push for a return to developmentalist strategies, underscoring a double movement. In this discussion it highlights Ghana, a ‘donor darling’ in terms of historical implementation of free market reform. It builds upon the author’s engagement with 66 interviewees – business people and policy stakeholders – in relation to the condition of that country’s poultry and tomato industries. Unpacking interviewee narratives, the article points to a striking common theme, namely that business stakeholders call for the re-embedding of the economy via developmentalist strategies to move beyond neo-colonial trade systems. In this vein, the article provides an original contribution to studies of International Political Economy by demonstrating the efficacy of a Nkrumah-Polanyi ensemble for making sense of business communities’ potential role in countermovements for developmentalism in Africa.

Keywords:

• Double movement
• free trade
• Ghana
• Nkrumah
• neo-colonialism
• Polanyi
• private sector

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations which helped to hone the argument in this article. Many thanks also to Luis Lopes Costa and Katharine Wright for their encouragement and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for instance, Cammack (2004) and Fine and Saad-Filho (2014) for critique of the free market footing of current day Post-Washington Consensus donor policies.

2 Nkrumah’s government actively provided state support for the creation of key industries as part of a developmentalist drive to move Ghana beyond colonial patterns of production. This coincided with the wider Keynesian consensus of the immediate post-war period in which Western donors themselves envisaged a role for the state in economic development in former colonies (see for instance Bilotti, 2015 on the Keynesian consensus and development approaches in the Cold War period). Contemporary business demands for state intervention and developmentalism in Ghana, therefore, reflect a desire to return to an embedded economic model, as had historically been pursued prior to donor-sponsored free market reforms in the Washington Consensus. See Ayelazuno and Mawuko-Yevugah (2020) for extensive discussion of Nkrumah’s historical economic programmes.

3 Ha-Joon Chang (2010) defines the concept of developmentalism/developmental states as follows: ‘developmental state… [is] a state that intervenes to promote economic development by explicitly favouring certain sectors over others’. He also explains that the historical literature on developmental states focuses upon East Asian varieties that involved active state involvement in economic co-ordination through robust industrial policies. State actors in return gained popular legitimacy through impressive economic performance in the region.

4 Again please see Ayelazuno and Mawuko-Yevugah (2020) for an extensive discussion of Nkrumah’s historical developmentalist strategies.

5 It is known as the interim EPA since the EU hopes that Ghana will eventually accede to a full West African EPA alongside Nigeria, Ivory Coast and other regional partners (see CONCORD, 2015). The ongoing refusal of Nigeria to implement this regional free trade deal, however, has effectively put paid to the EU’s wider ambitions for the time being.

6 See Asamoah (2020) on political vigilantism in Ghana.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Langan

Mark Langan is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London. He is particularly interested in the trade and development aspects of EU relations with African countries. In the context of his study of intrusive donor interventions, Mark is interested in African liberation thought, neo-colonialism, pan-Africanism and democratic developmentalism.