Introduction

Overview

Introduction

Although some Sub-Saharan African countries are catching up to higherincome countries, many are falling behind despite their best efforts and those of the development community. Since their independence, a number of African countries have faced state-building and governance challenges, sometimes in the context of widespread political turbulence, civil conflict, military rule, and state failure, which has resulted in unevenness of national state capacity (asymmetrical state capabilities that vary across sector, scale of government, and over time), weakened political settlements, and ineffective civil society. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic could exacerbate these challenges and lead to the emergence of new ones from the socioeconomic effects of containment measures.

To explain current development outcomes and inform reforms, an increasing number of development partners are integrating sociopolitical framings into their strategies and programs. Development policy of the 1980s and 1990s often focused on liberalization, privatization, and austerity, aimed at reducing or limiting the size and scope of the state. These reforms were later criticized for their shortcomings, which spurred a rethinking of the approach to statebuilding and development. The World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law, for example, argues that “policies that should be effective in generating positive development outcomes are often not adopted, are poorly implemented, or end up backfiring over time” (World Bank 2017, 2), and that the radically uneven character of public policy formulation, implementation, and enforcement is a matter of governance, namely, “the process through which state and nonstate actors interact to design and implement policies within a given set of formal and informal rules that shape and are shaped by power” (World Bank 2017, 3).

One particular sociopolitical framing attracting attention is based on the “social contract.” Within the World Bank, for example, a recent report by the Independent Evaluation Group identified 21 Systematic Country Diagnostics that “use a social contract framing to diagnose and explain complex development challenges such as entrenched inequalities, poor service delivery, weak institutions, and why decades of policy and institutional reforms promoted by external development actors could not fundamentally alter countries’ development paths” (IEG 2019, 7). The reason for this phenomenon is that social contracts relate to (1) the literature on the nexus between politics, power relations, and development outcomes, while (2) also bringing into focus the instruments that underpin citizen-state relations and foster citizen voice. Social contracts as a framing tool also directly speak to many contemporary development trends such as the policy-implementation gap, the diagnostic of binding constraints to development, fragility and conflict, taxation and service delivery, and social protection.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, an explicit treatment of social contracts has been largely absent from the development discourse. Over the past four or five decades, a complex and sophisticated body of scholarship from Africa has addressed the challenges of state-building and governance, sometimes against the backdrop of widespread political turbulence, civil conflict, military rule, and in some instances, something approaching state collapse. However, an explicit social contract lens has most often been missing. The lack of centrality of social contract theory in explaining Africa’s recent history and development is perhaps not surprising given the theory’s European roots and the need to “reinterpret” and adapt critical elements to some of the particular features present in African states.

With this in mind, this report seeks to lay the foundation for a unified framework for applying a social contract framing to development policy and using it to analyze the nature of social contracts in the region. To this end, the work makes a significant effort to set up a practical framework to allow the wide applicability of a social contract lens to relevant development challenges in specific sectors, countries, or regions in the continent. In doing this, the report—and the broader research program on which it rests—aims to address one of the critical limitations of the use of social contract diagnostics at the World Bank so far, that is, the lack of a formal conceptual framework or shared understanding of what the term means. The report, hence, focuses on the process by which social contracts are forged in the region, how they change over time, and how a more in-depth understanding of social contracts can help inform reform efforts. This approach stands in contrast to a normative approach that details the desirable content for the social contract in particular areas.