Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
David Ambrosetti
(CNRS (France) Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Jean-Herve Jezequel (International Crisis Group)
Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle (Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne)
Send message to Convenors
- Location:
- B2.02
- Start time:
- 28 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel invites to scrutinize African Experts (with the imprecision of the label) as co-producers, as well as a relevant manifestation of, what we call the "International Government of Africa", where diverse forms of government interlace and produce policies, regulation and political orders.
Long Abstract:
This panel stems from a research program that explores the interlaced forms of government into the African continent, where the activities of international and national/local actors from diverse social and professional fields overlap, connect and compete, as to produce policies, regulation and transform political orders.
The panel invites to address this view through the study of the African Experts, from specialized analysts, consultants, to international organizations (IOs) professionals and national civil servants, who are involved in the making of this International Government of Africa.
Scholars have already explored the role of international experts and expertise in the local fabric of the African state. Some point at the nexus between knowledge and power in the way IOs have been mobilizing experts in order to enforce structural adjustments policies in Africa. Others stress the disturbing disconnection between international expertise and endogenous knowledge.
However, the presence of a growing number of Africans among international experts is rarely considered.
In what ways do these experts play a different role? Are they producing a different kind of expertise? Are their personal trajectories different from their counterparts (in terms of training, career, relation to political offices and political networks)?
Moreover, African experts are not necessarily "local experts" as most work for IOs as expatriates. Therefore the question of their relationship to the local fabric of governance appears particularly uncertain. Where do they locate themselves in the complex relationship between African states and IOs? What is "African" in an African expert?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Perrine Bonvalet (Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution aims at analyzing the activist role played by doctors specialized in AIDS care and occupying key positions in AIDS institutions by looking at how they use their expert position to promote activist orientations of the AIDS care policy making process in Benin.
Paper long abstract:
Doctors specialized in AIDS care play a central role in AIDS care policy making in Benin. Not only are they mobilized as experts in therapeutic protocol and policy building but they also occupy most of the key positions in AIDS institutions in the country.
Going further than previous works on the central role of bio-medical oligarchies in AIDS policy-making in Africa, this contribution would like to analyze the activist stand that they defend from within institutions they work for.
Involved in a transnational professional network diffusing a particular view of the AIDS epidemic at the national level, they advocate for better care through access to technologies available in Western countries. Their "neutral" position as recognized experts provides them with a unique opportunity to push for solutions that are technical in appearance and activist by nature. They thus contribute to maintaining the "exceptionalist" building of the AIDS field and its stand within the health sector in Benin. This paper therefore aims at analyzing the diffusion mechanisms of this construction of AIDS care among AIDS specialists in Benin and how these AIDS experts develop this "institutional activism".
Céline Ségalini (Political Institute of Bordeaux, LAM, EDSP2)
Paper short abstract:
This study focuses on careers of local experts and shows how local expertise gets standardized. To understand this standardization, it analyzes the role played by professional aspiration for development and how they limite critical involvment.
Paper long abstract:
The involvement of local experts in development projects is an issue that has been raised by focusing on the role played by organizational, bureaucratic and political dynamics that give consistency to the daily work of such experts.
This paper aims to show how these different modes of involvment are intertwined and shape local expertise. It focuses on careers of local experts and shows how local expertise gets standardized. More specifically, to understand this standardization, it pays attention on the role played by professional aspirations for development world and finally shows how these aspirations may limite critical involvment.
Lydie Cabane (Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Paper short abstract:
Through the study of the development of a disaster science in South Africa and its ramifications in the African continent, this paper contributes to the analysis of science and expertise, as intermediaries and knowledge producers between states and international organisations.
Paper long abstract:
From the years 2000s, training and research programmes in disaster risk reduction have developed throughout the African continent, and most particularly under the aegis of South African scientists. These programmes aim to develop a sound and expert approach to disaster management, that would support the management and the prevention of disaters by African states through the professionalisation of local expertise. This development of expert knowledge may at first sight appear as a by-product of global governance as it is heavily funded by USAID and participates to a global movement, led by the UN, that seeks to promote models of risk management in order to prevent disasters and ensure stability. Although it is necessary to acknowledge these global macro factors, this paper will seek to develop alternative explanations to the development of this science, its role and its effects. By adopting a fine grain analysis, following scientific trajectories, analysing carefully circulations of knowledge and experts, I will show that disaster science is not a simple intermediary between international organisations and the local environment, but also serves as a producer of knowledge both in Africa and globally. To do so, I will trace the development of a disaster science in South Africa and its ramifications on the African continent, at the crossroads of international development, state transformations, and academic practices. More generally, using insights from political sociology of science and historical studies of colonial science, this paper aims to contribute to the analysis of contemporary dynamics of expertise and science in Africa.
James Merron (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
Socially, scientifically and technologically concentrated around centres of knowledge production, experts and technologies travel from centre to periphery; urban locations to the countryside; the North to the South; South to South; and South to North.
Paper long abstract:
Scientific expertise was central to imperial development, a topic that is paradigmatic to post-colonial critique and often analysed through the application of coercive colonial policies and technical failures. Not to debate this 'historical fact' but uncritically assuming this state of affairs might result in 'anti-developmental, anti-innovation thinking about science and technology that could obscure rather than illuminate scientific expertise, limiting an open curiosity about inter- and trans-disciplinary research'. Science is political and travels with experts on an uneven global terrain. While global in its extent and consequences however, scientific practices are emplaced, applied differently across regions and legitimised through distinctive cultural meanings and sociological circumstances. What render knowledge claims about the management of resources real and relevant are not only abstract systems but also locally situated, geographic and material preconditions embedded within cultural, ethical, economic, historical and political values. Accepting the mishaps of technical failures and coercive colonial interventions in the past, this paper draws inspiration from Beinart et al., (2009; 2011) and Ferguson (2010) to highlight the conceptual innovation of 'experts' to shifting values about how land and resources ought to be managed in South Africa. This theoretical point will be illustrated using fresh empirical findings from a World Heritage Site in the Eastern Cape Province.
Rozenn Nakanabo Diallo (LAM-Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Paper short abstract:
At the top of the state, key actors are senior officials sponsored by donors, thus creating “islands of efficiency” where the administration is particularly efficient. Policymaking is thus characterized by a close interface between the state and donors, as shown through a sociology of senior officials.
Paper long abstract:
At the top of the state in Mozambique, key actors are senior officials sponsored by donors, thus creating "islands of efficiency" where the administration is particularly efficient. Policymaking is thus characterized by a close interface between the state and donors, as shown in the paper through a sociology of senior officials in the tourism ministry.
Aid is indeed notably made of "administrative enclaves", where senior officials respond to the state, but are at the same time paid by donors such as the World Bank, which sponsors these "islands of efficiency" by providing important means (including competitive wages) as well as imposing its own agenda in policymaking.
The paper consists in a sociology of senior officials composing such an administrative enclave, namely the TFCA (Transfrontier Conservation Areas) Unit in the tourism ministry, as well as of some other Mozambican actors sponsored by other donors in the same ministry. The analysis of their professional careers and their worldviews is a first step towards the hypothesis of an international government of Africa, for the state and donors are worlds closely tied to one another.
Jean-Herve Jezequel (International Crisis Group)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the question of African expertise in relation to the “developmentalist state” in Senegal. Focusing on food anthropology and nutrition, it explores the role of different generations of Africans experts in producing knowledge and public policies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the question of African expertise in relation to the "developmentalist state" in Senegal. Indeed from colonial informants to postcolonial experts, Africans seem to play a growing role in the production of knowledge that came to become a central component of the "developmentalist state" (Bonneuil 2001). Focusing on two domains of expertise related to food issues (food anthropology and nutrition), this communication explores the trajectories of different generations of African experts - not necessarily Senegalese - in terms of professional careers, access to political offices and influence on food security policies.
First we will look at the dynamics that transformed the field of expertise and more particularly at the training and professional opportunities opened to Africans between the 1950s and the 1970s. In what ways did the late colonial state and the Senegalese postcolonial state came to rely on African expertise more than their predecessor? In term of careers how did these African experts move between emerging national institutions, growing UN agencies and the older but still present French research centers?
Second we will question the role of African experts in the internal debates and tensions that characterize the "developmentalist state". How "African" is the African expertise in domains related to nutrition and Food anthropology? How does their expertise differ from or coincide with their western counterparts? How do they relate to the redefining of priorities and public policies on food issues in the late colonial state and in Independent Senegal?
Isaline Bergamaschi (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Paper short abstract:
This article analyses the continuity and transformations of the “international government” in Mali following the coup d’Etat of March 2012.
Paper long abstract:
This article analyses the continuity and transformations of the "international government" in Mali in the past years, with a focus on the period following the coup d'Etat in March 2012. It argues that, despite the current focus on its regionalist, criminal and religious dimensions, the crisis can also be understood, adopting through a political economy lens, as a crisis of the international aid governance implemented in the 2002s.
Previous aid and development-oriented models, norms, practices (aid efficiency, the Millenium Development Goals, etc.) and professionals are being challenged by the latest events, and the international focus has shifted from poverty reduction to security, military and humanitarian concerns, especially after the occupation of Northern parts and, since January 2013, the French military intervention. In brief, the international government of Mali continues but is under deep transformation.
The article focuses on three main trends of this transformation: first, the adaptation strategies (suspension of aid, change in its modalities, purposes and executing agents) provided by « traditional » donors since the coup ; secondly, the new competition between the latter and rapidly-coming humanitarians (UN agencies and international agencies), which reactivates a divide between experts (aid/development professionals vs emergency workers) but is also leading to a division of labour between them; and finally, the debates and postures in the Malian public space adopted around the meaning and desirability of foreign - French, regional or multilateral - « intervention ».
Camille Al Dabaghy (EHESS)
Paper short abstract:
To understand the role of Malagasy experts in the “anti-politic machine” as well as the position of aid in their professional trajectories, I propose to focus on aid tools (technical assistance, consultancy contracts…) and the practices of production, power and identification involved.
Paper long abstract:
Which role do African experts play in the aid machine and in the international government of Africa? Reversely which role plays foreign aid in careers of African administrative and political elites?
To address that, I will use results from my PhD research in which I describe the formation of the professional world of Malagasy decentralization policy, given that this "national" policy is largely co-produced by the foreign "partners" of Malagasy government. My paper will focus on the Malagasy part of this world of civil servants inside ministries, employees of aid agencies and independent consultants.
To achieve that, I will use individual trajectories as well as analysis of aid tools (technical assistance, consultancy contract…), and ethnography of consultancy contract as well as sociological and discursive inquiry based on texts commanded or produced by foreign aid agencies or Malagasy ministries.
Paying attention to the practices of aid production, to the aid tools and their political equipment enables us to scrutinize practices of power and identification at stake in the interactions between foreign and "local" experts. Among these practices, knowledge and information processes (inquiries, reports…) in aid production lead to struggles about labor division through which foreign and Malagasy experts define their professional and social identities.
Besides, taking seriously social actors' goals and justifications prevents us from simplistic analysis of strategic behavior and domination relationships. Thus, it forces us to reconsider the cause-and-effect relation between commercial goals, career strategies, impoverishment and depoliticization of analysis and practices, conflict and critics avoidance.