A research agenda for African smart public value governance – Insights from a webinar series

ABSTRACT

The article discusses key insights gained from a webinar series that the authors of this article launched when founding the “Centre for African Smart Public Value Governance” (C4SP). As a research centre that aims to improve the quality of public governance approaches in Africa, C4SP invited international scholars and practitioners to talk about their perspectives on “Public Value Governance”, “Unpacking the African Context”, and “Smart Government” during four webinars, taking place between April 2021 and March 2022. The discussions revealed that: i) Smart Public Value Governance (SPVG) is a promising approach to tackle grand challenges; ii) local particularities might hamper the implementation of SPVG approaches in African countries; iii) it exists as a necessity to “listen” deeply to Africa. On this basis, we provide an outlook for future research on SPVG by suggesting studies that can be conducted along three guiding questions that can be addressed by a people-oriented or a concept-oriented research approach.

KEYWORDS:

• African public management
• decolonizing management studies
• grand challenges
• public value governance
• smart government

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all speakers of the C4SP webinar series for their valuable presentations that formed the basis of this insight article; namely, Joel Bothello, Kelly Culver, Anne Griffiths, George Kalebaila, Mogopodi Lekorwe, Sarah Meny-Gibert, Tobias Mettler, Rebecca Namatovu, Laurent Pech, Camilla Rocca, Folashadé Soulé-Kohndou, and Jacob Torfing. We also want to thank Claus D. Jacobs for providing thoughtful feedback on a previous version of this article. And we want to express gratitude to our editor Bruce Lamont who helped us finalize this publication with his useful remarks.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emamdeen Fohim

Emamdeen Fohim is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the KPM Center for Public Management at the University of Bern (Switzerland). From an organizational theory perspective, his research examines measures taken by public sector organizations to address the challenges of a constantly changing and complex environment. He studied the emergence of institutional entrepreneurs’ skills of urban planners, aiming to initiate societal change. He further investigates antecedents for the formation of shared organizational identity beliefs that predefine organizations’ attitudes to approach grand challenges. As co-founder of C4SP, he is furthermore interested in detecting African-specific approaches to tackle today’s grand challenges that can provide insights beyond the continent.

Adeelah Kodabux

Adeelah Kodabux is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Middlesex University Mauritius. She has strong research interests in power structures of the Global South, African governance, and global geopolitics. In addition to her work at Middlesex University Mauritius, she co-founded C4SP. In this role, amongst others, she conducts research, envisioning to improve the quality of public governance approaches in Africa. She is also a member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s Now Generation Network and regularly contributes to discussions on African governance.

Amar Seeam

Amar Seeam is a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University Mauritius and Programme Coordinator for the MSc Network Management in Cloud Computing degree. He is also the administration chair for the Huawei ICT Academy and Cisco Networking Academy for the University. As one of the co-founders of C4SP, he is interested in how to approach “smartness” in governance according to diverging country environments, specifically looking at the African context. Further, he investigates the Wakashio oil spill that impacted Mauritius in 2020, looking at developing an open access decision support platform that will determine the long-term effects of the spill on the marine ecosystem, whilst helping aid in preventing future related disasters from happening.