Competing interests and lack of policy ownership of the reform agenda

The autonomy to make national policies in Africa generally has been ceded to multilateral and bilateral donors in the post-cold war era (Brown 2013). Accordingly, Africa’s domestic policies have been largely shaped by external players and hence laden with Western norms and institutional models (Fatile and Adejuwon 2010) This, coupled with the imposition of Western interest, is a faulty public policy approach used by donors (Polidano and Hulme 1999). Often, donors use the pretext of weak capacity and a short time frame to introduce highly prescriptive and directive policies (Ball 2005). Thus, while, in theory, donors re-spond to client governments’ needs, in practice, they often identify clients’ needs for them (Polidano and Hulme 1999). The tendency of donor-driven reforms to disregard contextual factors negatively afects policy outcomes (IMF 1997). This chapter reasons that while the need to reform Africa’s public sector is paramount, the content and approach used by donors create conditions for dismal performance. Donors use a pretext of policy reforms to globalize Western values and institutions disregard contextual diferences. The African governments cannot resist such value-laden policy reforms even if they deem them inappropriate because of the desperate need to access the much needed fnancial aid.

Other Information

Published in: Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003143840-35