GOVERNANCE AND POLITICS OF PUBLIC POLICY (2023)

Policy outcomes in Africa are fundamentally shaped by the landscape of governance and accountability. This course identifies the formal and informal institutions that populate that landscape, and explores how they interact to enable, constrain, or undermine modern policy-making. After an opening session in which students learn about the origins of African governance institutions and the ideas that animate them, the course is divided into two sections: formal and informal institutions. In the section on formal institutions, we map out the most salient formal organs like the executive, bureaucracy, military, civil society etc. In the section on informal institutions we examine phenomena like personal rule, clientelist networks, ethnic, religious, and generational movements. Each week the emphasis is on understanding the evolution of these institutions in country and comparative context, on grasping their implications for public policy, of analysing their different effects, and on understanding their relation to other institutions.