Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Arne Tostensen, Inge Tvedten, and Mariken Vaa, eds. Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001. Distributed by Transactions Publishers, Somerset, N.J. 324 pp. References. Index. $24.95. Paper.

The collapse of government capacity in Africa is one of the salient features of the past quarter century. Its consequences have been felt in virtually all spheres, but because urban dwellers are inherently more affected by government than are their rural counterparts, the impact has been strongest and most visible in Africa's cities. Failed economic policy and failed governments have resulted in rising poverty, deteriorating or nonexistent social services and infrastructure, severe environmental problems, and in many cases the near-collapse of formal sector activities. These failings have led to the adoption of reforms aimed at liberalization and state retrenchment; such reforms in some (though not all) cases have further worsened urban conditions.

Despite this almost desperate situation, life goes on in Africa's cities and often does so with a surprising degree of social organization. Moreover, the quality of life within the continent's cities varies enormously from one place to another. Much of the reason for the maintenance of some civil society, and at a fairly high level in places, is that there has been a flowering of social organizations, often without official status, and generally operating at varying distances from the remnants of local and national governments. These organizations and their responses form the theme of this volume, which contains an excellent overview followed by sixteen papers drawn from a conference on the topic organized by the Nordic Africa Institute in Bergen in August 1998.

The volume at no time romanticizes the picture of the multitude of organizations; rather, it provides a generally positive but at times cruelly realistic view of the capacity and motivations of informal social networks, women's groups, religious bodies, land-buying societies, organizations that meet specific infrastructure and public service needs, and various other NGOs and community-based organizations. There is clearly enormous variation in their capacity, motivations, and achievements-although in many cases these are remarkable. While it is hazardous to generalize, it appears that state and civil organizations are at least to some degree complementary: It is difficult for many organizations to flourish in the absence of minimal state encouragement and a functioning legal environment, or in the face of outright state hostility.

The notion that specific state actions can in effect leverage the emergence of civil organizations that substitute for deteriorated public services and infrastructure is an important one, and the authors provide a vast amount of underlying material. They do not, however, address the capacity of profit-oriented businesses to fill these needs, although proliberalization international and bilateral agencies have dealt with this at some length. Perhaps a more important absence is the lack of a chapter outlining what would constitute an enabling environment for the effective development of civil organizations. But the essays do lay the groundwork for such an assessment, which will clearly be a key issue in the coming decade.

The volume's diversity in regional experience (though southern and eastern Africa are best represented) and type of civil bodies will also serve well those who ask about the internal characteristics that help determine whether a civil institution is democratic or authoritarian, broad-based or oriented toward a small group, predatory or socially useful, and whether or not it is sustainable. Beyond these questions of governance, the contributors invite a reconsideration of public sector goals that take into account likely civil society responses.

Associational Life in African Cities does not provide easy reading for a policy-maker whose goal is to distill the descriptive analysis of several different fields into a few neat implications. As an economist, I found the reward, after plowing through an array of jargons, to be a reconsideration of policy modeling reminiscent of one of the most profound changes in macroeconomic policy modeling, namely the emergence of the rational expectations (RE) approach in the late 1970s. Put briefly, the RE approach insisted that economic policy analysts consider the likely public and business reactions to fiscal and monetary policies, which as a whole tended to greatly reduce the scope for effective policy. Here the volume invites us again to consider the civil response to government actions-but with the implication that both effective and deleterious policies are likely to be amplified rather than muted.

Charles M. Becker

University of Colorado at Denver

Denver, Colorado

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