This year’s OSSREA Congress focuses on the theme of “International Aid, Trade and Development in Africa: The Search for a new Paradigm.” This raises the question of whether the outlines of a new development “paradigm” (or more than one of them) are in fact discernible: does the search have any real focus? Leaving aside the thorny questions of whether there is anything really “new” on offer for Africa, and whether what is on offer can be properly thought of as a “paradigm,” the short answer is yes: there is a coherent package of proposals and initiatives that has taken shape over the past half-decade. A crucial theme in this package is a North-South “partnership,” or bargain, based on “mutual accountability.”

This short article probes the elements of this new package, or “vision”, for Africa from the vantage point of a medium-sized northern “partner” - Canada. It asks what is really new about it, and then outlines some of the grounds for skepticism concerning its likely impact on the development trajectory of African peoples and countries. It concludes, however, by arguing that there are nevertheless valuable advances and opportunities in this new vision. Moreover, communities of researchers, especially in Africa, have a crucial role in identifying and exploiting these hopeful openings.

At one level, the answer to this question is “not much.” The overall vision remains firmly neo-liberal in important respects, emphasizing private sector-led development, economic liberalization, sound economic management, and growth through trade. The renewed emphasis on social development, galvanized around the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation, primary education, basic health care, gender equality, and environmental sustainability can be seen as the 1970’s emphasis on “basic human needs” redux. Similarly, the emphasis on infrastructure to facilitate trade and investment renews an even older emphasis on transportation, power generation, and communication infrastructure from the first post-World War II decades of development, even if the technological context has changed dramatically. Likewise, the “new” emphasis on higher education, particularly but not only in the areas of science and technology, restores a much older developmental priority that was badly neglected and eroded over the past couple of decades. The pivotal emphasis on “governance” – ambiguous as it is – has been around since the start of the 1990s. The emphasis on building the foundations for peace and stability through, for example, support for African conflict prevention and peacekeeping capacities has been around almost as long and in some respects recapitulates a much earlier, post-colonial emphasis on support for Military Training. Even the rhetoric of partnership (with non-state and corporate actors as well as between north and south) and “ownership” (“Africa in the lead”, in the words of the Commission for Africa) is familiar enough to elicit cynical eye-rolling from many in the world-weary development community.

What is arguably new, however, is the comprehensiveness of the vision that has been formulated, recognizing the fundamental importance of advances on several fronts at once and developing increasingly concrete proposals in support of this understanding. Also new is the consistency and concertedness of the renewed emphasis on Africa, through the articulation and promotion of complementary NEPAD and G8 objectives over the past five years, and through regular interaction between African and Western leaders around these objectives. This has led, in 2005, to substantial new commitments of resources in the form of debt relief and increased aid, with a promise of more to come on both fronts. Promises for substantially more aid have been accompanied, among the members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, by an emphasis on improving the quality of aid, including substantial untying and steps to promote greater coordination and alignment with recipient objectives in the context of longer-term, more predictable commitments.

The emphases on “governance” and “ownership” remain difficult to conceptualize and operationalize; but there are clear signs that northern governments and development agencies have at least become increasingly sensitive to these challenges and are actively wrestling with them. Some interesting experiments in formal mechanisms for recipient “leadership” are underway in countries like Tanzania and Mozambique. Finally, and related to this, there are refreshing professions of the need for “greater flexibility, open-mindedness, and humility” on the part of policy makers in north and south. There is also a welcome degree of self-criticism – for example, with regard to western governmental and corporate complicity in corruption and bribery, and the hypocrisy of western trade policies – that seems to indicate a more honest and complete understanding of the challenges confronting the continent. In short, while it would be a mistake to overstate either the degree of change in western approaches to Africa, or the depth of consensus concerning both analysis and prescriptions, there are ways in which the Africa policies of 2005 represent a genuine advance on anything that has preceded them.

Many Africans and students of Africa elsewhere are, justifiably, deeply skeptical and cynical about this “new vision” for the continent. The grounds for these reactions are several.

Practically, there is good reason to doubt the sustainability of the new commitments that have been made, particularly on aid as well as the relatively vague and platitudinous commitments to trade liberalization through the “Doha Development Agenda” of the WTO. The United States’ government will almost certainly continue to march to its own beat, and be, at best, a selective participant in any new consensus concerning the continent. Changes of government leadership in Europe – both current and pending – cast further doubt on the reliability of commitments to reach the aid target of 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2015. The G8’s collective emphasis on African issues, sustained over the past half-decade, seems unlikely to persist beyond the highly concerted British approach culminating at Gleneagles in 2005 to the Russian presidency in 2006. Africans are all too familiar with the inconstancy of international interest in their continent, and the unreliability of previous commitments; will the current “project” be any different?

At a deeper level, there is concern and resentment over the way in which ‘Africa’ continues to be portrayed in the western world’s constructions of and responses to it. Notwithstanding some new tendencies toward official acknowledgement of co-responsibility and western culpability in the continent’s multiple challenges, the “Live8/G8” mobilization of popular and political interest in Africa during the past summer reflected, at least in part, the recurrent tendency to portray Africans as dependent victims – to deny African agency – while reinforcing images of western compassion and obfuscating western responsibility. The British historian of Africa John Lonsdale has reportedly characterized Tony Blair’s Africa agenda as yet another expression of the “self-righteously civilizing mission of the past two centuries… a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance.” Insofar as this largely undifferentiated, passive and dependent image of Africa remains widely held in policy as well as popular circles, it is not only a deep affront to Africans but, more concretely, a serious misrepresentation that is likely to breed misplaced analyses and policies.

More concretely, there are grounds for skepticism concerning the viability of the reformist “third way” vision towards which African and western leaders have been moving, as expressed in such key documents as the NEPAD and the Commission for Africa’s Our Common Interest. As noted above, this vision combines a firm commitment to market-led economic growth on a global scale with a vigorous call to ensure that the benefits of this process extend to the poor and that the exclusion of marginalized groups is ended. As Our Common Interest eloquently asserts, “The more global the market, the more it must be balanced by a global culture of solidarity, attentive to the needs of the weakest” (p.66). But can the logic of global capitalism be successfully integrated with a project of global social amelioration and poverty alleviation, especially in a late developing region like sub-Saharan Africa? Can a vision premised on dramatically increased rates of economic growth be successfully combined with the urgent imperatives of environmental sustainability? Can Africa’s disparate and internally diverse states become the vehicles of ‘good governance’ that proponents of the new vision regard as essential to the achievement of both its growth and ‘social upliftment’ objectives? Can an ambitious and multi-dimensional “coherent package for Africa” be successfully combined with “greater flexibility, open-mindedness, and humility” on the part of the responsible policy-makers, responsive to both the distinctive conditions and expressed priorities of various African states and societies? These are, to be sure, heroic aspirations and assumptions, whose ultimate prospects are unproven at best.

Finally, there is the question of whether African leaders can and will deliver on their side of the “bargain” underpinning the new vision. In particular, can they deliver the improved quality of governance, including steady progress towards the deepening of democracy, extension of human rights, and strengthening of public administration, that the NEPAD commits them to and northern partners regard as essential?

This is not just a question of practical politics and political courage (although it is this). It is also a question of perception and mutual understanding. What African leaders may perceive as the best ways to advance democratization and improved governance may not be recognized as such among their western “partners”; while the key western markers of progress on these fronts (multi-partyism, free and fair elections, presidential term limits, etc) may not be regarded as the most pressing requirements of good governance in some African contexts. Moreover, symbolically potent cases like that of Zimbabwe can serve as lightning rods for mutual misunderstanding, disillusionment, resentment, and recalcitrance.

In short, a clearer understanding of the requirements for, and steps towards, “good governance” on both sides of this north-south “partnership” will require patient and respectful dialogue, combined with clear thought about what democracy should look like on the political landscapes of Africa. Nevertheless, there is a need for African leaders to demonstrate, to their own societies as well as external partners, the sincerity of their commitment to advance good democratic governance continentally, and clarity about how they understand this objective. Can they meet this imperative?

Despite the grounds for skepticism outlined above concerning the “new vision” for African development, there is much in this vision that is encouraging. Moreover, the research community has a crucial role to play in maximizing its promise.

Perhaps most important are the emphases on African “ownership” and “mutual accountability.” To be sure, these constructs are all too glibly invoked and easily abused. Nevertheless, as suggested above, there is a sense in the new approach to African development issues that they are being taken more seriously than ever before. There is also some promise in the reforms to aid policy practices in western donor states that it may become possible to hold such development “partners” accountable in a way that has not been possible in the past, through steps towards long-term commitments, programme-based approaches, and greater donor coordination and alignment with recipient-defined objectives.

For “ownership” and “mutual accountability” to become meaningful, there are several requirements. First, African governments and societies need to be able to clearly define and articulate the policies they wish to “own.” Too often, mechanisms which purport to facilitate national “ownership”, such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), can become vehicles for “the politics of the mirror”, in which potential aid donors are addressed “in the language that is most congenial, and crucially, most easily reinforces the belief that they [outside donors] understand what [the recipient] needs.” If ownership is to be genuine and sustainable, it must reflect a carefully researched and grounded understanding of the needs and priorities of the country in question, as defined by researchers with a close and credible knowledge of its conditions. Moreover, such researchers must be able to articulate these priorities in ways that can be easily understood and justified to development practitioners within and beyond the country.

Second, if mutual accountability is to be meaningful, African researchers and research institutions (including universities) must develop greater capacity to track and analyze not only the policies of their own governments, but those of western development “partners” as well. African governments need to be held accountable for their commitments to extend and strengthen democratic governance and policies aimed at reducing poverty. This is most effectively done by researchers and citizens from their own societies. Similarly, Western countries need to be held accountable for their commitments to increase both the volume and quality of aid, and to liberalize trade in ways that take account of the particular needs of developing countries. While western civil society organizations and researchers will be crucial in this regard, their efforts need to be concerted with African counterparts who can elucidate the full impact of western policies “on the ground” in Africa.

There can be no illusions about the magnitude of the challenges that lie before the emergent “new vision” for African development, or the difficulty of sustaining the new commitments that underpin it. But there are now at least commitments to which African and western governments alike can be held accountable, and a growing range of opportunities and institutional mechanisms to do so. Researchers with the capacity to analyze the results of these new commitments and initiatives, the ability to propose compelling alternatives when they are found wanting, and the means to disseminate their findings will play a crucial role in the degree of success this new vision is able to achieve.