AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	17. States at work: African public services in comparative perspective
Paper ID	162
Author(s)	Fichtner, Sarah
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Within the framework of the program "States at Work. Public Services and Civil Servants in West Africa: Education and Justice in Benin, Ghana, Mali and Niger", the PhD project presented in this paper intends to analyse the intersecting field of state engagement and international non-governmental intervention in the formal primary education sector in Benin. Education, defined in francophone West Africa since the beginning of the 20th century as a public good, became a global good in the 1990s. International institutions like the World Bank provide the normative and financial frame in which international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) increasingly interact with state authorities in shaping the education system. By focussing on the “real” functioning of public services in the processes of these organisations’ day-to-day intervention, the means and mechanisms through which educational norms and institutional structures are transferred, translated, negotiated and implemented by state and non-state actors, thus defining and redefining the multiple, entangled and shifting relations and roles played by the ‘State’, ‘civil society’ and the ‘international system’, this research project follows processes of state-building (“étatisation”) and state-withdrawal (“desétatisation”) based upon recent empirical research in a local context. The local context to be presented here is the municipal education committee (“Comité Communal de l’Education”, CCE) created in the municipality of Nikki in north-eastern Benin. Taken as an example of INGOs increasing tendency to work on the side of structural transfer or “capacity building”, i.e. on the creation and training of special committees to solve problems within the municipalities themselves, the municipal education committee of Nikki is portrayed as an arena of political interaction between state and non-state actors, discussing, defining and acting upon the rules and roles within the field of local level education politics. The CCE presents an arena in which the process of political decentralisation is enacted; in which responsibilities, authority claims, concurrences and dependencies are negotiated; in which the notion of solidarity is instrumentalised, and in which strategies of competition are used to motivate people’s participation. It serves as an example of the partly statal, partly parastatal construction site of Beninese public primary education in a process of reorganisation, decentralisation, internationalisation and re-privatisation. Its analysis highlights the dominant role that INGOs play in the Beninese education sector, but it also shows the local actor’s initiatives and creativity beyond current constraints.

Relations between the State and international non-governmental organisations in the education sector in Benin: The case of the municipal education committee of Nikki