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Abstract
Development partnerships are frequently represented as a way of giving recipient countries ‘ownership’ of their development programmes, whereas critics argue that partnerships are little more than conditionality by another name. Drawing on analyses of governmentality in modern liberal societies, this article advances an alternative understanding and argues that development partnerships can be regarded as a form of advanced liberal rule that increasingly govern through the explicit commitment to the self‐government and agency of recipient states. Focusing in particular on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), it argues that as a form of advanced liberal power, partnerships work not primarily as direct domination and imposition, but through promises of incorporation and inclusion. They derive their power through simultaneously excluding and incorporating, and by using freedom as a formula of rule partnerships help produce modern, self‐disciplined citizens and states by enlisting them as responsible agents in their own development.
Notes
Rita Abrahamsen is at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DA, Wales, UK. Email: [email protected]
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the African Studies Association in Washington DC in December 2002, and I wish to thank the participants, and in particular Holger Bernt Hansen and René Lemarchand, for their helpful comments. I'm also deeply grateful to Michael C Williams for valuable advice.
www.oecd.org.
JD Wolfensohn, ‘The challenge of inclusion’, address to the Bank of Governors, Hong Kong, 23 September 1997, p 9 (www.worldbank.org).
See the recent debate in this journal between C Crawford and A Mallarangeng and P van Tuijl; C Crawford, ‘Partnership or power? Deconstructing the “Partnership for Governance Reform” in Indonesia’, Third World Quarterly, 24(1), 2003, pp 139–159; A Mallarangeng & P van Tuijl, ‘Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia. Breaking new ground or dressing up in the Emperor's new clothes?: a response to a critical review’, Third World Quarterly, 25(5), pp 919–942; C Crawford, ‘Dancing to whose tune? A reply to my critics’, Third World Quarterly, 25(5). This article is not intended as an intervention in this particular debate.
S Kayizzi‐Mugerwa, ‘Africa and the donor community: from conditionality to partnership’, Journal of International Development, 10(2) 1998, pp 219–225; S Maxwell & K Christiansen, ‘Negotiation as simultaneous equation: building a new partnership with Africa’, International Affairs, 78(3), 2002, pp 477–491; S Maxwell & R Riddell, ‘Conditionality or contract: perspectives on partnership for development’, Journal of International Development, 10(2), 1998, pp 257–268.
Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’; A Fowler, ‘Beyond partnership: getting real about NGO relationships in the aid system’, in: A Fowler (ed) Questioning Partnership: The Reality of Aid and NGO Relations, IDS Bulletin, 31(3), 2000, pp 1–13.
A Adebajo, ‘A western wolf in African Sheepskin’, Mail & Guardian, 14 November 2003, p 15.
M Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in: G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; A Barry, T Osborne & N Rose, Foucault and Political Reason, London: UCL Press, 1996; M Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage, 1999.
For a selection of views along these lines, see K Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, London: Heinemann, 1963; J Nyerere, ‘No to IMF meddling’, Development Dialogue, 2, 1980, pp 7–9; J Hanlon, Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots?, Oxford: James Currey, 1991; J Hanlon, Peace without Profit. How the IMF Blocks Development in Mozambique, Oxford: James Currey, 1996; B Onimode (ed) The IMF, the World Bank and African Debt. Volume 2, London: Zed Books, 1989; D N Plank, ‘Aid, debt and the end of sovereignty. Mozambique and its donors’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 31(3), 1993, pp 407–30; K Danaher (ed) 50 Years is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Boston, MA: South End, 1995; M Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty. Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reform, London: Zed Books, 1997.
D Dollar & J Svensson, What Explains the Success and Failure of Structural Adjustment Programs?, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998; DFID, Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor, London: Department of International Development, 2000; World Bank The Comprehensive Development Framework, Washington, DC: World Bank,1999.
DFID, Eliminating World Poverty, p 92; IMF, Key Features of the PRGF‐Supported Programs, Policy Development and Review Department, Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, August 16, 2000, p 1.
World Bank, Partnership for Development: Proposed Actions for the World Bank, Discussion Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank, 20 May 1998.
OECD, Shaping the Twenty‐First Century: The Contribution of Development Co‐Operation, Paris: OECD, 1996, p 14. While the notion of partnership has a long history in development and can be traced back to the 1969 Pearson Commission report Partners in Development, the OECD report was the first to place the term on the contemporary development agenda.
Kayizzi‐Mugerwa, ‘Africa and the donor community’; S Lister, ‘Power in partnership? An analysis of an NGOs relationship with its partners’, Journal of International Development, 12, 2000, pp 227–239; Maxwell & Riddell, ‘Conditionality or contract?’; S Maxwell & T Conway, Perspectives on Partnerships, World Bank Operations Evaluation Department, OED Working Paper Series, No 6, Washington DC: World Bank, 2000; Mallarangeng & van Tuijl, ‘Breaking new ground’; J M Brinkerhoff, Partnership for International Development: Rhetoric or Results?, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002.
Lister, ‘Power in partnership?’; Maxwell & Riddell, ‘Conditionality or contract?’
Maxwell & Riddell, ‘Conditionality or contract?’, p 258.
See Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’; Fowler, ‘Introduction’; Adebajo, ‘A western wolf’.
Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’, pp 156–157.
Ibid., p. 157, p 155.
Fowler, ‘Introduction’, p 3, p 7.
According to the Panos Institute, the PRSP process is currently underway in 60 countries. For details on the PRSP process, see Panos, Reducing Poverty. Is the World Bank's Strategy Working?, London: Panos Institute, 2002, and the World Bank's www.worldbank.org/poverty/strategies.
Panos, Reducing Poverty; J Pender, ‘From “structural adjustment” to “comprehensive development framework”: conditionality transformed?’, Third World Quarterly, 22(3), 2001, pp 397–411.
T German, J Randel & D Ewing (eds) The Reality of Aid 2002, Political Interim Report, 2002, available at www.devinit.org/realityofaid/index.htm.
Panos, Reducing Poverty; Pender, ‘From structural adjustment’.
J Gould & J Ojanen, Merging in the Circle. The Politics of Tanzania's Poverty Reduction Strategy, Policy Paper 2/2003, Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2003; C Mercer, ‘Performing partnerships: civil society and the illusion of good governance in Tanzania’, Political Geography, 22, 2003, pp 741–763; R McGee et al., Assessing Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: A Desk‐based Synthesis of Experience in Sub‐Saharan Africa, Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, 2002.
Gould & Ojanen, Merging in the Circle; Mercer, ‘Performing partnerships’; G Harrison, ‘Post‐conditionality politics and administrative reform: reflections of the cases of Uganda and Tanzania’, Development and Change, 32, 2001, pp 657–679.
NEPAD, New Partnership for Africa's Development, 2001, available at www.nepad.org.
NEPAD covers four broad areas, or initiatives, said to be prerequisites for Africa's future success: the Peace and Security Initiative, the Democracy and Political Governance Initiative, the Economic Governance Initiative and the Sub‐Regional and Regional Approaches to Development Initiative. See A de Waal, ‘What's new in the “New Partnership for Africa's Development”?’, International Affairs, 78(3), 2002, pp 463–475; KR Hope, ‘From crisis to renewal: towards a successful implementation of the new partnership for Africa's development’, African Affairs, 101(404), 2002, pp 387–402; J Loxley, ‘Imperialism and economic reform in Africa: what's new about the new partnership for Africa's development (NEPAD)?’, Review of African Political Economy, 30(95), 2003, pp 119–128.
NEPAD, New Partnership, p 27. In response to NEPAD's request, the G8 summit in Kananaskis in 2002 pledged US$12 billion a year by 2006.
AO Olukoshi, Governing the African Developmental Process: The Challenge of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), Occasional Paper, Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 2002, p 27.
Adebajo, ‘A western wolf’.
K Matlosa, ‘The new partnership for Africa's development and regional integration in southern Africa’, Southern African Political and Economic Monthly, 14(11), 2002, p 5.
For a recent example see ‘Bankrupt Zambia to put up tax as aid fails’, This Day, 17 December 2003.
My treatment of power is necessarily brief. For more extended discussion, see B Hindess, Discourses of Power. From Hobbes to Foucault, London: Basil Blackwell, 1996; For an excellent account of power in global governance, see M Barnett & R Duvall, ‘Power in global governance’, paper delivered at the Annual International Studies Association Conference, February–March 2003, Portland, Oregon, and forthcoming in: M Barnett & R Duvall (eds) Power in Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
R Dahl, ‘The concept of power’, Behavioral Science, 1957, pp 201–215.
S Lukes, Power. A Radical View, London: Macmillan, 1974.
P Bachrach & M Baratz, ‘Two faces of power’, American Political Science Review, 56, 1962, pp 947–952.
Lukes, Power, p 23, p 24.
Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’
Crawford, ibid; D Craig & D Porter, ‘Poverty reduction strategy papers: a new convergence’, World Development, 31(1), 2003, pp 53–69; Fowler, ‘Introduction’.
Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’, p 157; Pender, ‘From structural adjustment’, p 408.
Harrison, ‘Post‐conditionality politics’.
These analyses have some commonalities with neo‐Gramscian political economy and world‐system theory, but do not generally have the same theoretical depth. See S Gill & D Law, ‘Global hegemony and the structural power of capital’, International Studies Quarterly, 33(4), 1989, pp 475–499; M Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation. Contending Visions of a New World Order, London: Routledge, 2000; I Wallerstein, ‘The interstate structure of the modern world system’, in: S Smith et al (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
See note 6.
Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, p 87.
Quoted in G Burchell, ‘Liberal government and techniques of the self’, in: Foucault and Political Reason, p 20.
M Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon, 1970, p 170.
N Rose, ‘Governing “advanced” liberal democracies’, in: Barry et al (eds) Foucault and Political Reason; B Latour, ‘Visualisation and cognition: thinking with hands and eyes’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, 6, 1986, pp 1–40.
N Rose & P Miller, ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 1992, pp 172–205. On the new managerialism, see C Pollitt, Managerialism and the Public Services. Cuts or Cultural Change in the 1990s? Oxford: Blackwell, 1993; S Zifcak, New Managerialism. Administrative Reform in Whitehall and Canberra, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994. On audits, see M Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Rose, ‘Governing “advanced” liberal democracies’, p 57.
Dean, Governmentality.
Burchell, ‘Liberal government’; Rose, ‘Governing “advanced” liberal democracies’.
World Bank, Partnership; OECD, Shaping the Twenty‐First Century; DFID, Eliminating Poverty.
Dean, Governmentality.
B Cruikshank, The Will to Empower. Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Dean, Governmentality, p 168.
Cruikshank, The Will to Empower; J Donzelot, The Policing of Families, London: Hutchinson, 1979; Latour, Visualisation.
Wolfensohn, ‘The challenge of inclusion’; OECD, Shaping the Twenty‐First Century.
World Bank, Partnership, executive summary; OECD, Shaping the Twenty‐First Century, p 14.
DFID, Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the Twenty‐First Century, London: Department of International Development, 1997; GW Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States, Washington, DC: The White House, 2002, p iv, available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf.
NEPAD, ‘The African peer review mechanism’, §2, available at www.nepad.org.
de Waal, ‘What's new’.
NEPAD, New Partnership
R Rose & N Seria, ‘No to stronger peer review’, Business Day, 3 June 2004.
Wolfensohn, ‘The challenge of inclusion’, p 10, emphasis added.
Gould & Ojanen, Merging in the Circle, p 84.
Craig & Porter, ‘Poverty reduction strategy papers’, p 55.
Cruickshank, The Will to Empower, p 2.
Mercer, ‘Performing partnerships’; G Harrison, ‘Briefing: HIPC and the architecture of governance’, Review of African Political Economy, 31(99), 2004, pp 125–128.
Mercer, ‘Performing partnerships’, p 19.
Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’, p 156.
Two notable inventions in relation to the PRSPs are the Medium‐Term Expenditure Framework and the Public Expenditure Review, through which countries tie their budgets to criteria defined by the IMF and make public books available for routine audits by donor representatives.
Harrison, ‘Post‐conditionality politics’, p 669.
Power, The Audit Society, p 8.
See J Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge, 1999.
Maxwell & Riddell, ‘Conditionality or contract?’; Crawford, ‘Partnership or power?’
M Foucault, Society Must be Defended, London: Allen Lane, 2003, p 27.