![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
Abstract
Starting from a stock-taking of the millennium development goals, the paper emphasizes the need to pay greater attention to Africa’s regional dimension in the context of the post-2015 development agenda. Three main arguments are elaborated in this respect. First, translating the sustainable development goals (SDGs) into regional development strategies can enhance the link between global objectives and the multifaceted reality of a multi-polar world, enhancing policy coherence, and providing a strategic option to strengthen Africa’s bargaining power vis-à-vis both developed and emerging partners. Secondly, a regional approach to SDGs can facilitate the definition of relevant targets/indicators and enhance the monitoring and evaluation framework. In so doing it could also offer the scope to integrate more closely SDGs’ social and environmental concerns into existing development frameworks. Thirdly, focusing just on the economic sphere – the area where Africa’s integration is relatively more advanced – increasing evidence suggests that effective regional integration can support the continent’s transformation agenda and foster more inclusive and sustainable growth.
Notes
1. The assessment succinctly outlined in this paragraph is drawn from UN (Citation2015a).
2. Originally, the number of MDG targets and indicators was limited to 18 targets and 48 indicators, but this has been gradually increased with the inclusion of additional elements, most notably productive employment.
3. With reference to MDG 8, it is worth recalling that the target for developed countries to mobilize .7% of their GNP in ODA was first taken up in the UN General Assembly Resolution 2626 (XXV), voted on 24 October 1970, and was since then reiterated in numerous other official declarations (OECD/DAC, Citation2010). Similarly, the ODA target of .15–.20% of DAC countries’ GNI to LDCs was first adopted in the Paris Programme of Action for LDCs (1990), and has been reaffirmed since (UNCTAD, Citation2010).
4. Only Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom met the .15–.20% MDG 8 target. On another note, it is worth noting that important gaps vis-à-vis MDG 8 commitments exist not only in relation to quantitative aid targets, but also with reference to the sluggish and uneven progress in untying aid, reducing its volatility and unpredictability, and in failing to address the lack of adequate aid strategies and aid management systems on the part of recipient countries (for instance UN, Citation2012; UN, Citation2015b).
5. National accounting identities indeed imply that the difference between national investment and savings (i.e. the so-called resource gap) must be equal to net imports. This is tantamount to say that trade is part and parcel to the investment-growth nexus; in so far as the sustainability of a country’s development trajectory, and hence the reduction of its aid dependency, cannot but hinge on an appropriate form of integration in the international trading, as well as financial system.
6. The implications of intensifying South–South trade on Africa’s structural transformation agenda have so far been mixed (ECA, Citation2013a; UNCTAD, Citation2010, Citation2011 among others). African economies have benefited from the boost in international demand for exports and from greater availability of cheap manufactured imports. However, many African countries also face heightened competition in labor-intensive manufacturing and risk that their commodity dependence be locked in by the emerging international division of labor. While so far the boom of Africa’s trade with Southern partners has stimulated only weakly economic diversification, Africa disposes of large untapped scope to strategically engage Southern partners in a way that is more conducive to structural transformation, eschewing the so-called ‘primary commodity trap,’ and avoiding ‘race-to-the-bottom’ to attract foreign investment.
7. See section 4 for some notable achievements in the area of market integration.
8. The uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Doha Development Agenda is but one of the most visible examples of this trend.
9. At a conceptual level, an externality is defined as localized, when it affects only those in the vicinity of its source, and global otherwise. It is worth noting that the notion of ‘vicinity’ depends, in practical terms, from the intrinsic nature of the phenomenon originating the externality, including the pattern of mobility of the underlying factors.
10. The involvement of African countries in international peace-keeping operations in the region continues to be regarded as extremely valuable, and receives considerable support by a wide range of partners. Recent examples of African Union interventions include the cases of Darfur and Somalia, while Regional Economic Communities such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development – IGAD intervened recently in the case of Mali and South Sudan, respectively.
11. Notice that 16 out of 54 African countries are land-locked.
12. Seen in this perspective, the call for a regional approach to SDGs implementation echoes to a large extent D’Alessandro’s (D’Alessandro, Citation2015) the ‘flexible multilevel regionalism (…) based on policy harmonisation.’
13. Moreover, the standard definition of MDG targets as proportional reduction/increase in a given variable ignores non-linearities in the underlying trends, as well as the impact of population dynamics (UN, Citation2012).
14. We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out this element.
15. For example, the monitoring of health care and natural resource management may greatly benefit from the use of geospatial data.
16. The African Peer Review Mechanism was established in 2003 by the African Union in the framework of the implementation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and currently counts with 33 member countries. It constitutes a mutually agreed instrument voluntarily acceded to by African Union Member States as an African self-monitoring mechanism, to encourage conformity in regard to political, socioeconomic and corporate governance values, codes, and standards.
17. In the context of sustainable development, structural transformation could be regarded as a necessary condition to enhance the inclusiveness of economic prosperity (mainly through employment generation and related poverty reduction), while also shifting towards more sustainable production patterns, through the promotion of value addition over mere resource extraction.
18. In the Common African Position on the post-2015 development agenda ‘structural economic transformation and inclusive growth’ represents the first of six pillars; the others being ‘Science, technology and innovation;’ ‘People-centred development;’ ‘Environmental sustainability natural resources management, and disaster risk management;’ ‘Peace and security;’ and ‘Finance and partnerships’ (AUC, Citation2014).
19. Given the context, the notion of regional integration is admittedly utilized here to refer to a typically macroeconomic process, whose focus is narrower than the one corresponding to the concept of regionalism (D’Alessandro, Citation2015). Regardless of this distinction, it is worth noting that the author reaches a conclusion similar to the one presented here, in so far as she notes that ‛the MDGs did not have an explicit regional dimension also because they did not focus on processes, but on actual goals’ (ibidem, p. 286).
20. The call for deeper regional integration in Africa is certainly not new in the policy debate, but there are some fundamentally different nuances in the way in which it is conceived and pursued. If in the early days of the PanAfrican thinking, the vision of an integrated and prosperous continent was rooted in the common struggle against colonization and in the idea of collective self-reliance, nowadays regional integration tends to be rather conceived as a strategy to exploit the continental market as a spring-board to connect producers with global value chains and gradually insert them into the global market.
21. The strategic dimension refers to the need to ensure the dynamic consistency between a country’s trade policy framework, and its industrialization objectives. This implies that trade liberalization should best take place in a gradual and appropriately sequenced manner, so as to allows key domestic sectors to acquire essential capabilities and tacit knowledge, before facing the unfettered competition of the global market.
22. A similar stance is reiterated in the Common African Position on the post-2015 development agenda, where the Heads of State and Government of the African Union recognize that ‛We must accelerate regional integration including by boosting intra-African trade and enhancing Africa’s participation in the global supply chains systems.’ (AUC, Citation2014, p. 20).
23. This pattern of protection across trade partners is partly due to the fact that African (or LDC) products typically enjoy preferential treatment, when entering the market of numerous developed and developing trade partners.
24. Non-Tariff Barriers can be defined as the wide array of regulatory measures other than duties, which may ultimately have a trade distorting effect. This includes a number of issues, ranging from technical standards and sanitary and phytosanitary measures, to licensing or custom procedures.
25. For instance, Foster and Briceño-Garmendia (Citation2010) estimate that, even when taking into account potential efficiency gains, Africa would still face an infrastructure funding gap of $31 billion per year, mainly in power generation and distribution.