NGOs and the Politics of African Development : The Ghanaian Experience

ISBN-13: 9783639167009 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 320 str.

Paul Opoku-Mensah

Opis

At the height of the NGO Decade in African Development, assertions were made that NGOs were spearheading a fundamental realignment of power relations in Africa. Yet two decades after these assertions, very little empirical analyses exist on how NGOs have restructured African development politics. This is due to an NGO research tradition that has neglected relational and power issues. This book fills this gap by an analysis of NGO-Government relations in Ghana. It documents a significant shift in power with NGOs becoming important actors in hitherto state-dominated processes. Yet this is far from an indigenous process of change as it is heavily influenced and micromanaged by the aid system. This raises important questions about the assumption that changes in African politics is essentially domestic driven and influenced by African regime types. The study concludes with a call to reshape the NGO-Government nexus in ways that embeds it in the African context and realities, legitimises the role of African States to control Africa s development, and at the same time guarantees the viability of NGOs as autonomous development actors.

O autorze

Paul Opoku-Mensah is Associate Professor of Development and
International Relations at Aalborg University, Denmark; and the
Deputy Director, the Comparative Research Programme on NGOs,
University of Bergen, Norway. His extensive writing on NGOs
includes Reconceptualising NGOs and their roles in Development
(2007, as the lead editor).