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Notes
Chapter 1 Introduction: Governance and development 1
2
In The Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson (1982) regarded rent-seeking by distributional coalitions as undermining economic development and contributing to economic decline. He saw society as a constant struggle between creative and productive agents, whose hard work helps to enrich an economy, and organized groups of lobbyists, special interests, brigands and tax collectors whose rentseeking activities reduce the overall size of the pie and could well turn economic growth into stagnation and even regression. In Structure and Change in Economic History, Douglass North (1981) focused on securing property rights from the threat of appropriation by the Monarch. While for North, security and constraints on the executive were paramount, for Olson, the nature and origins of property rights were just as important. See Kurtz and Schrank (2007a, 2007b) and Kaufmann et al. (2007) for rejoinders and replies.
Chapter 2 The seductiveness of good governance 1 2
3 4
5
6 7
Book 1.indb 183
Adapted from Abrahamsen (2000): Introduction and Chapter 3. A revised and updated version of Disciplining Democracy is forthcoming. Both these documents represent major research efforts by the World Bank. Governance and Development (World Bank 1992a) is the product of 22 members of staff, while the 1989 long-term perspective study was partly a response to critiques of structural adjustment programmes and consulted numerous scholars outside the Bank. A similar point is made by Beckman (1992). This view of associational life as more or less automatically supporting democratization also finds widespread support in academic writing (see, for example, Bratton 1989; Chazan 1982, 1988a, 1988b, 1993; Diamond 1988a, 1988b). Useful explorations of the concept of civil society can be found in Cohen and Arato (1992), Calhoun (1993), Keane (1988), Taylor (1990), and Walzer (1991). The conception has only more recently been introduced to the analysis of African politics; notable contributions include Bayart (1986), Fatton (1995), Harbeson, Rothchild and Chazan (1994) and White (1994, 1995). A similar observation is made by Bangura and Gibbon (1992). Ekeh argues that civil society in Africa is highly apolitical and is ‘largely indifferent, to the affairs of the civil public realm over which the state presides’ (Ekeh 1992: 197). While this may be a rather heavy-handed generalization, it nevertheless serves as a useful corrective to the uncritical interpretation of civil society as an automatic check on the powers of the state.
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