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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Decentralisation and civil society: negotiating local development in West Africa
| Panel |
16. New ways of managing public administrations in Africa ?
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| Paper ID | 339 |
| Author(s) |
Lachenmann, Gudrun
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | The paper, referring to fieldwork i.a. in Senegal, challenges the concept of decentralisation by regarding the interface of knowledge systems constituting social spaces at the local rural arena. It is asked whether there is a process of marginalisation of knowledge which had been acquired and generated these last years by peasant organisations and women’s movements after the breakdown of the authoritarian development State. Applying an agency and gender perspective, it is asked how decentralisation is conceived of by various kinds of local and especially female actors – including the elected rural councillors – as access to development information from which they are again excluded and therefore obliged to renegotiate. On the other side, their conceptions and experiences of sustainable development including social and food security are devaluated and not made use of in newly designed blueprints of local development plans which are said to be elaborated by participatory procedures, thereby challenging good governance through interaction with other levels. There is a process of reducing pluralism of initiatives through increasing unfertile competition of different groups and insecure lines of authority and informalisation of self-organisation (e.g. regarding new forms of resource management). The international cooperation tries to formalize platforms and fora transcending community-limits in order to overcome the closed system approach.
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