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- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Hull
(SOAS University of London)
Ruth Prince (University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Elizabeth Hull
(SOAS University of London)
- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 2
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel considers newly emerging ideas of the "public good" in Africa. In contexts of austerity and state withdrawal, how is public provisioning being newly structured, funded and legitimised, and with what implications for our understanding of state, citizenship and economy?
Long Abstract:
As austerity and stagnation continue to constrict African economies, and earlier poverty-alleviation programmes have floundered, new efforts are emerging to address trenchant inequalities, many of which address concerns about "the public good". Public works and social protection programmes, the expansion of health insurance as part of aspirations for ´Universal Health Coverage´, education programmes (especially those targeting girls) and 'inclusive' economic initiatives are redefining ideas of citizenship and the public good, often blurring the distinctions between public and private, welfare and work. Following Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur, the idea of the "public good" can be broadened to include not only traditional forms of government provisioning such as health, education and social security, but also techniques of bureaucratic management - those of transparency, fiscal discipline, good governance and decentralization. Often framed as citizenship entitlements, these projects generate a utopian language around which meanings of state and citizenship are debated. Corruption, too, is being newly reclaimed as a public good, as Moses Ochonu's discussion of the popular refrain 'bring back corruption' in Nigeria highlights. Sarcastically drawing attention to plummeting living standards as a result of an ever more constricted economy, the phrase also reveals recognition that a previously more rampant culture of corruption was actually instrumental in producing a trickle-down economy from which people benefited, albeit unevenly.
The panel invites historical and social science papers to explore tensions and contradictions, connections and disruptions produced by emerging narratives and projects of the "public good" and their implications for understanding state, citizenship and economy.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Leslie Bank (Human Sciences Research Council)
Paper short abstract:
The paper draws on anthropological perspectives of gifting, exchange and social reproduction as a means of opening up the debate about the changing meaning of public housing for welfare, redistribution and citizenship after apartheid
Paper long abstract:
The gift of suburbia has been promised by the post-apartheid government to the black majority since the end of apartheid. The "better life for all" has been conceptualised and projected by the ruling African National Congress as access to urban life in a suburban house with decent services and infrastructure. To operationalise this promise the state gifted poor households with millions of free houses on suburban plots, which they were expected to upgrade at their own cost to fully realise the suburban dream, which blacks had been denied under apartheid. The state housing claims to have delivered 4 million houses to the poor free of charge over 25 years.
The paper explores consequences and meanings of this social economy of gifting since the end of apartheid. The gift of the house has provided the foundation for new forms of citizenship after apartheid. For the most part, it is been a dream driven by state ideology and resources, but domesticated at the margins by ordinary people. Capital has circulated in the wings, but has played a subdued role. The paper, based on fieldwork in low cost housing estates, maps out the emerging forms of citizenship and urbanism, and the pathways ordinary people construct to suburban life through the state and its gifts (public goods). The paper draws specifically on anthropological perspectives of gifting, exchange and social reproduction as a means of opening up the debate about the meaning of welfare, redistribution and citizenship after apartheid.
Pauline Destree (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Through a focus on the privatisation of the electricity sector in Ghana, this paper explores the unexpected affinities that arise between neoliberal techniques of governance and informal economic practices, redrawing the contours of the public good and the postcolonial contract of service delivery.
Paper long abstract:
In Accra, Ghana, the privatisation of the national Electricity Company has sparked debates about the changing role of the state and its historical mandate of service delivery. Since Nkrumah's struggle for decolonisation and economic independence, the notion of the public good (especially electricity, in the form of the Akosombo Dam) has figured as an important imaginary of belonging and civic rights. At the same time, the state's inability to distribute essential services has frustrated expectations and fragmented the vision of this postcolonial contract of delivery. Based on 15 months of fieldwork on the politics of electricity in Accra, this paper ethnographically explores the way in which particular techniques of revenue management redraw the contours of the public good in the context of increased neoliberal modes of governance. Focusing on the introduction of 'pole' prepaid meters in shared compound housing in preparation for privatisation, it argues that technologies like the prepaid meter yield social effects that do not readily subscribe to a clear divide between 'sovereign' and 'neoliberal' techniques of governance. On the one hand, the selective implementation of the meters in particular neighbourhoods made electricity a highly differentiated public good as it discriminated between 'trustworthy' and 'unreliable' citizens. On the other hand, the prepaid meters found unexpected affinities with local economic practices and informal livelihoods that popularised its use among lower-income residents. Rather than readily subscribing to a denunciatory analysis of neoliberalism's evil (Ferguson 2009), the paper explores the polyvalent and contradictory credentials of the public good in contemporary Ghana.
Mark Hunter (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
This paper, based on work in South Africa, considers how in postcolonial societies, education drives processes of class formation but also reworks racial-cultural hierarchies.
Paper long abstract:
Especially in the global South the last sixty years have witnessed a massive expansion in public schooling, or what in educational jargon is called student 'throughput'. Yet to focus on qualifications alone is to miss a crucial point: the more people gain qualifications, the more they are devalued. This makes the cultural resources that schools bestow on learners more important. This paper, based on work in South Africa, considers how in postcolonial societies, education drives processes of class formation but also reworks racial-cultural hierarchies. Following the end of apartheid in 1994 the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet the racial pecking order of South African public schools is seen daily when thousands of black learners travel from 'black' townships to attend schools in 'white' areas. This is not simply a move, from 'race to class apartheid' as some on the left argue; in this high-stakes world, whiteness has a value. The seven percent of public schools built for whites compete by showing a fidelity to whiteness, and they sell to the middle class not only qualifications but also cultural aspects, including a 'white' accent. In sharp contrast, poor South Africans often leave school without being able to speak acceptable English — that is, English with the 'right' accent.
Irmelin Joelsson (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper conceptualise the broad scope of repertoires manoeuvring economic governance through anticipation as "popular insurance" by exploring hedging strategies in Dar es Salaam, a city where the access to social security is highly constrained, public goods are scarce; yet insurance are brokered.
Paper long abstract:
"I'm doing it for the connections," Ally asserted, "we don't have insurances here, you see, we make connections and friendships, it's our insurance." It was spring 2016. Mzunguko wa pesa umekatika, "money's stopped circulating," was the expression on everybody's lips. It put the current hardship of life in Dar es Salaam into words, and reiterated in daily conversations it took the form of a contemporary proverb. The austerity narrative had many expressions, and while social insurance as a technology of risk management and financial governance, have come to embed life in the West, life in Africa is often lived uninsured, where only a small percentage is enrolled in a social security scheme.
Inspired by recent calls from Laura Bear et al (2015) and Veronica Gago (2017) to consider the generative powers of capitalism, this paper explores modes of anticipation and "providential practices," conceptualized as here as "popular insurance." When formal welfare institutions do not hold, were never in place, indifferent to paying out what was invested, or "failed" to eclipse the totality of life, its double steps in. The "absent presence" of formal physical and bureaucratic infrastructures in African cities gives life to various "in-structures" (De Boeck 2016) that become operational in the inoperability of its formal twin. I argue that popular insurance is "twinning" the public good, working through investments urban residents put down order to slow down time, to insure life through social and material entanglements, often by making speculative and affective connections.
Michaela Hubmann (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
The PRP Delivery Unit (DU) was established to help rebuilt Sierra Leone after the Ebola crisis. This talk highlights how this new mode of governance impacted on the primary health care management in a district and how it contributed to broader concerns about sovereign power and responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, DUs proved to be a somewhat successful new global mode of bureaucratic management, in that they helped political leaders to stay focused on the delivery of key policy priorities. Since their initiation in 2001, some twenty-five countries have in-cooperated DUs in their governance structure. Sierra Leone has introduced a DU shortly after the end of the Ebola crisis in order to help achieve the PRPs thirteen Key Result Areas, which span across seven priority sectors: education, energy, governance, health, private sector development, social protection and water. In this talk, I highlight how the PRP DU added another layer of governance to an already pluralistic, dispersed and diversified national and district health governance landscape. I specifically focus on how a PRP district delivery team (PDDT) was perceived to be a recentralisation agent as it limited district actors' sovereign power and responsibility. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research, I provide a bottom-up account on how district stakeholders contested this new mode of governance as they felt that their managerial and sovereign right to deliver public goods and to manage and intervene in the district's health affairs was undermined. This, in turn, brought about tensions on who had the legitimate sovereign responsibility to deliver healthcare to the citizens in this district. This research has vast reaching implications on future health system strengthening efforts, as it highlights important strengths and shortcomings of the Sierra Leonean PRP DU and how these played out at a district level, but also on the community level.
Jacinta Victoria S Muinde (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the everyday realities of the recent implementation of Kenya's UHC pilot project to show how claims of corruption have shaped contradicting and competing narratives of 'free' public health provisioning and experiences of citizenship in the country.
Paper long abstract:
In the recent years, social protection projects such as cash transfers and 'universal' healthcare schemes have become a popular 'development' strategy in Africa. In Kenya, for instance, the government is piloting Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in several of its counties, after what has been perceived as successful implementation of cash transfers. Central to Kenya's UHC is not only the promotion of the country's national health insurance, the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), but also insistence on free access to health services and goods including medicines in public hospitals in the pilot counties. However, implementation of Kenya's UHC is faced with various challenges including corruption claims associated with NHIF and shortage, lack of and poor distribution of medicines. Indeed, studies on welfare provision in African countries have noted such factors as inadequate infrastructure and mismanagement of resources, mainly associated with corruption, as key to unequal or unfair redistribution of services and infrastructure. Yet with critical suggestions of an emerging new politics of distribution and redistribution in Africa, few studies have focused on the realities of how such challenges as corruption may inform the experiences and narratives of the state and citizenship in their specific local contexts such as of public health provision in Kenya. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this paper explores the everyday realities of the recent Kenya's UHC pilot project to show how claims of corruption have shaped contradicting and competing narratives of 'free' public health provisioning and experiences of citizenship in the country.
Elizabeth Hull (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the tensions between utopian political narratives of the public good, embodied in plans for a National Health Insurance programme, and configurations of the public good among health professionals in a rural hospital.
Paper long abstract:
The move towards a National Health Insurance (NHI) programme in South Africa signifies attempts to extend responsibilities for the public good to the private sector, while also infusing debates about the public good with a nationalist discourse centred around the so-called 'National Democratic Revolution' (NDR). This is a theory of revolutionary progression from capitalism to socialism that has roots in the anti-apartheid struggle and resonates deeply with many South Africans. Intended to widen access to health care and reduce inequalities, some have suggested that the NHI embodies a fundamental hostility towards private healthcare provision, and serves as a mechanism for the nationalisation of the sector. Yet many have highlighted that the NHI is unrealistic given the profound obstacles it faces, including staff shortages, poor management, high costs and corrupt spending. The paper explores the tensions between utopian political narratives of the public good and the ways in which the public good is being debated and enacted by nurses whose work is embedded within the constraints of daily service provision.
Clara Carvalho (ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon) Jorge Varanda
Paper short abstract:
This communication questions the main policies and programs of social protection comparing two opposed case-studies, Guinea-Bissau, sometimes described as a "fragile state", and Angola, a regional power, comparing access to healthcare, the CSO provision, state services and informal support.
Paper long abstract:
Social Protection (SP) is generally understood as public actions designed to address risks and levels of vulnerability and deprivation regarded as unacceptable (Conway et all, 2000). It tackles basic rights such as employment, education, housing, healthcare, as well as social services for the most dispossessed. In developing countries, anti-poverty transfer programs have been at the core of poverty-reduction policies in the past decade and represent a growing tendency. These programs, which are generally defined as social assistance, assure direct transfers in kind or in cash to individuals or households living in situations of extreme poverty. Even if the literature agrees with the idea that social protection, to be effective, must be led by local governments, cash-transfer programs are more common in middle income countries (MIC), while low income countries (LIC) tend to rely on poverty reduction programs and are more dependent on external agencies, funding contingencies and projects instead of middle term programs. Direct cash transfers are viewed as a more stable, efficient and agency leverage program by development experts, who have insisted in defending their sustainability. In this communication we address the main policies and programs of social protection comparing two opposed case-studies, Guinea-Bissau, a low-income country sometimes described as a "fragile state", and Angola, a middle-income country aiming at becoming a regional power. We compare access to healthcare in both countries, considering the CSO provision (Carvalho 2013), state services (Varanda 2014) and informal support (Afonso & Carvalho 2013), questioning the notion of "social protection" and state responsibility.