Ambition, Authoritarianism, Participation and Decentralisation

Western donor insistence that their privileged African partners should demonstrate high levels of ambition in terms of their development goals, particularly on poverty reduction, led these regimes to make significant efforts to market such ambitions, both domestically and externally, as legitimising tools. This chapter reviews such aspirations as expressed in their national vision statements and poverty reduction plans as well as the progress they achieved. Given obstacles to the realisation of such goals, these regimes framed issues in terms of a trade-off between economic and social progress on the one hand, and political and civil freedoms on the other. Their ambitious development objectives were used to justify centralised control, the maintenance of systems impervious to what were cast as anti-development domestic pressures, and when necessary, the use of force to overcome constraints. The chapter also references recent important research which undermines the argument regularly put forward by these regimes that democratic regimes have been less capable of triggering growth and development than authoritarian ones. The chapter concludes with a case study on how they coped with Western pressures to implement participatory consultations and decentralisation in such a way as to maintain their firm control over economic and political processes.