The first decade of the 21st century marked a new beginning for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After the signing of a peace treaty in 2002, the country re-connected with the world to engage in post-conflict reconstruction. In... more
The first decade of the 21st century marked a new beginning for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After the signing of a peace treaty in 2002, the country re-connected with the world to engage in post-conflict reconstruction. In this blogpost, the authors ask who really benefitted from the ensuing peace dividend? By re-examining the evidence, they conclude that the country missed an important opportunity to combat the country’s devastating poverty.Non-PRIFPRI5; 5 Strengthening Institutions and GovernanceAF
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This paper examines the sources of bureaucratic fragmentation and coherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo by exploring the connections and tensions between interface bureaucracies and the back-office administration tasked with... more
This paper examines the sources of bureaucratic fragmentation and coherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo by exploring the connections and tensions between interface bureaucracies and the back-office administration tasked with managing the public payroll system. Building on the ‘real governance’ literature and the notion of ‘infrastructural power’, we analyse the recent history of payroll management in Congo and especially its evolution over the last decades of state implosion and reconstruction so as to gauge the potential of different drivers of state infrastructural power. The return of the state in the first decades of the twenty-first century led to a spectacular and unprecedented growth in the number of civil servants, made possible by a reconstituted state budget and renewed donor engagement. Yet this growth largely reflects increased political competition and further disarticulated the payroll system, increasing its vulnerability to the issue of ghost workers. The case...
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African Studies, Development Studies, Political Anthropology, Political Science, Democratization, and 11 moreDemocracy, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bureaucracy, Colonial and Postcolonial History of Congo, Grassroots, PAYROLL SYSTEM, Payroll, African Affairs, Sociology of the State, Payroll Management, and Governance and State Capacity
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Wars are, besides sources of negative growth, also sources of rising inequality, especially between the cities and the countryside. This hypothesis goes back at least to Max Weber in his analysis of the ancient city-states. Concomitantly,... more
Wars are, besides sources of negative growth, also sources of rising inequality, especially between the cities and the countryside. This hypothesis goes back at least to Max Weber in his analysis of the ancient city-states. Concomitantly, the net result of both processes of negative growth and rising inequality is difficult to predict in advance for a city like Kinshasa. In this text, we start with documenting the recent evolution of economic development in Kinshasa. We point out that notwithstanding the collapse of the formal economy, data on child malnutrition show remarkable stability. We identify three causes to explain this stability for the nineties and up to 1998, each of them being related in its own way to economic regress. First, we the increasing level of informalisation can to an extent explain the « gap » between purely economic data and data on malnutrition. Second, households seem to have adapted their structures and composition so as to be better able to « contain » ...
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If the standard of living of populations is always in part the result of good or bad luck, luck does not only originate in nature but also in the behavior of those on whom one depends. In this contribution, we try to come to a deeper... more
If the standard of living of populations is always in part the result of good or bad luck, luck does not only originate in nature but also in the behavior of those on whom one depends. In this contribution, we try to come to a deeper understanding of the possibility of preventing this relational vulnerability. We apply our analysis to specific cases of development aid.
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This paper establishes the importance of good governance in improving local livelihoods and support for conservation. The study uses empirical realities from Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, an afromontane Gorilla sanctuary that was... more
This paper establishes the importance of good governance in improving local livelihoods and support for conservation. The study uses empirical realities from Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, an afromontane Gorilla sanctuary that was recognized by UNESCO in 2005 as a world heritage due to its rich biodiversity. Governance is an important procedural dimension of equity that entails decision making processes and how local people are involved in matters that most affect them. The paper uses a Policy Arrangements Approach to illustrate the procedural dimension of the Justice and Equity Framework. A mixed method approach was used to generate results in this paper. Household surveys, key informant interviews and Focus Group Discussions were employed for data collection. Linear and Multi Logistic Regressions were used to determine the level of significance and relationships that exist between governance, people’s livelihoods and conservation support. Polychoric Principal Component Analysi...
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We analyse the politics of the reform of teacher payment modalities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in light of the uneven territorial reach of the DRC state. The reform focused on extending this reach by paying all teachers via... more
We analyse the politics of the reform of teacher payment modalities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in light of the uneven territorial reach of the DRC state. The reform focused on extending this reach by paying all teachers via a bank account, replacing longstanding shared governance arrangements between state and faith-based organizations with a public-private partnership. By using qualitative and quantitative data, we map the political practices accompanying the implementation of the reform. While the reform itself was officially deemed a success, its intended effects were almost completely offset in rural areas. Moreover, governance of teacher payments was not rationalized but instead became even more complex and spatially differentiated. In sum, the reform has rendered governance processes more opaque and it deepened the existing unevenness in the geography of statehood.
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Economics, Public Administration, Education, Sociology of Education, Corporate Governance, and 15 morePolitical Science, Politics, Negotiation, Democracy, Education and Conflict, Democratic Republic of Congo, Multidisciplinary, Teacher, Public Private Partnerships, Public Services, Social Science Research Network, Payment, DRC, Teacher Remuneration, and Teacher Working Conditions
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ABSTRACT Although international development discourse considers the state as a crucial development actor, there remains a significant discrepancy between the official norms of the state and public services and the actual practices of... more
ABSTRACT Although international development discourse considers the state as a crucial development actor, there remains a significant discrepancy between the official norms of the state and public services and the actual practices of political elites and civil servants. This text interrogates the variety of ways in which state policies and legal norms have been translated into the set of practical norms which make up real governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the concept of practical norms is an appropriate tool for an ethnographic investigation of public bureaucracies, interactions between civil servants and users, and the daily functioning of the state in Africa. It demonstrates that practical norms are usually different from official norms, complementing, bypassing and even contradicting them. In addition, it explores the positive and negative effects of different aspects of this ‘real governance’.
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A partir d'une lecture de la conception d'Adam Smith des relations entre economie et societe, les AA. proposent une analyse de la question de la monnaie et des changeurs de monnaie a Kinshasa (Congo/Zaire), s'interrogeant... more
A partir d'une lecture de la conception d'Adam Smith des relations entre economie et societe, les AA. proposent une analyse de la question de la monnaie et des changeurs de monnaie a Kinshasa (Congo/Zaire), s'interrogeant notamment sur les causes de la credibilite dont jouissent souvent les changeurs de rue, les cambistes, comme on les appelle localement. Ce qu'ils proposent, c'est une histoire monetaire par le bas, a partir surtout d'interviews realisees avec des cambistes, et secondairement d'articles de la presse locale sur la desintegration du systeme monetaire. Si le marche est un lieu de rencontre et d'echange fonde sur la confiance, dans le cas du marche de l'echange des devises a Kinshasa, le developpement du cambisme en tant que champ social autoregule y est constamment menace par la violence. D'autre part, il ne s'agit pas d'un marche unifie. Il y a differentes generations de cambistes auxquelles correspondent differents types d'acteurs avec des logiques culturelles et sociales propres.
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ABSTRACT