Governance for development in Africa: Solving collective action problems

Abstract

The issue of governance is at the centre of challenges bedevilling the delivery of services in most African countries. Poor service delivery is attributed to bad governance. In their new book, Booth and Cammack provokingly condense solutions to problems of service delivery to ‘working with the grain’ of African societies (p. 20). They reject the general solution entrenched in the principal–agent equation but pin it squarely on the unresolved problem of collective action entangled in the political system. These path-breaking findings are contained in a publication grounded in rich empirical evidence on sub-Saharan Africa's low-income countries of Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, and Uganda. The book's overarching theme is to find is a solution to multi-level collective action problems with a focus on the provision of “quality” basic public goods – inclusive of merit goods. The authors' analysis is embedded in understanding bottlenecks of service delivery in institutional frameworks, with case studies at grassroots level revealing both modernist and traditional praxis. The result is a comparative analysis of public goods provision (with a focus on maternal health), hypothesized around policy coherence, provider discipline, and local problem solving. These issues are discussed with an emphasis on the ‘context’ as an overriding factor in solving collective action problems.