AFRICAN TIME In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Lord Mawuko-Yevugah explores the challenges of political reform and democratic governance in Africa at the beginning of the 21st century, focusing largely on Ghana's experience. The inspiration for the title of the collection, AFRICAN TIME, comes from Kwame Nkrumah's pan-African optimism as well as from recent discourses around "African Renaissance," "Africa's Century," "Africa Rising," etc. At Ghana's founding in 1957, Nkrumah proclaimed: 'Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African...

Global development actors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund claim that the shift to the poverty reduction strategy framework and emphasis on local participation address the social cost of earlier adjustment programs and help put aid-receiving countries back in control of their own development agenda. Drawing on the case of Ghana, Lord Mawuko-Yevugah argues that this shift and the emphasis on partnerships between donors and poor countries, local participation, and country ownership simultaneously represents a substantive departure from earlier versions of...