El cisne negro

Throughout this thesis, three concepts are used quite frequently – institutional framework, local polity and personal networks – and because they are essential to the argument, some reflection or definition regarding each of these three core concepts is appropriate.

Institutional framework

As the two specific research questions of this thesis revolve around the relationship between central government and local polities, the wording “institutional framework between central government and local polities” appears frequently. For this thesis, the concept of “institutional framework” is taken from the work of North, an economic historian associated with the so-called ‘new institutionalism’ of the 1990s (see: Hall and Taylor, 1996). Even though North’s work is generally oriented towards the role of institutions and economic development – his acceptance speech for his Nobel prize was titled ‘Economic performance through time’ (1994) – some of his analytical concepts have also been helpful to analyse the role of institutions in governance in Africa in general, or Uganda and Tanzania in particular (e.g. Alence, 2004; Flanary and Watt, 1999; Kjaer, 1999). For the research in this thesis, North’s work is helpful in a number of ways. First, its origin in economics brings with it a focus on the exchange of resources, as does this research when analysing the relationship between central government and local polities. Second, North emphasises the importance of human agency in historical development over structural determinism.45 “Institutions are … humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction. [T]hey structure incentives in human exchange, whether political, social or economic”, is the opening phrase of his seminal work (North, 1990: 3).46 Simply

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The extent to which the various schools of “new institutionalism” actually emphasise human agency over structural determinism is, inevitably, subject to debate (e.g. Hall and Taylor, 1998; Hay and Wincott, 1998). 46

Aside from the useful concepts developed by North, his choice of words in “the evolution of … economies the sequence of stages of exchange” (1991: 99) has an uncomfortable resemblance with Rostow’s ‘stages of economic growth’ and Rostow’s starting point that European history in one way or another is the template for thinking about development. Some eulogists actively compare North with Rostow (e.g. Parker, 1993: 626). And where North does explore the development of an institutional framework in East Africa – “While tribal chieftains found it profitable to protect merchant caravans they had neither the military muscle nor the political structure to extend, develop, and enforce more permanent property rights” (1991: 104) – his analysis is at odds with an analysis that suggest ‘tribal chieftains’ along the long-distance trade routes in Tanzania and Uganda in the 19th century were very well able to enforce property rights and legal contracts, but they just enforced different rights and contracts. For example, while the concept of interest-bearing capital gained currency among the coastal traders, customary courts in the polities along the trade route did not acknowledge the concept of interest. Likewise, whereas coastal traders acknowledged individualised liabilities, law in the interior polities maintained familial liability. And while legal concepts in coastal polities

64 put, institutions are the rules and organisations are the players. But perhaps most relevant here is North’s differentiation between the formal institutions (such as rules and regulations) and the informal institutions (such as the personal networks and cultural values) and – as a third element – the linkages between these two.

First a closer look at the informal institutions. North distinguishes three types of informal institutions: those that are in fact extensions from formal institutions, those that derive from wider social or cultural conventions, and internally enforced standards of conduct that are very personal ‘values and preferences’. Formal institutions, the second element in the institutional framework, are different from informal institutions as a matter of degree. In fact, most formal institutions have started as informal institutions – unwritten norms, values, and codes of conduct – that ended up being formalised in law or regulations. Unlike the informal institutions, the formal institutions could more or less be ordered in a hierarchy; from constitution, to laws, to judicial rules to contracts and regulations in organisations (North, 1990: 36, 46). The third critical element in an institutional framework is the enforcement. If the enforcement of formal and informal institutions fails, then the predictable and perhaps voluntary exchange of resources in the institutional framework will be affected. According to North, “the inability of societies to develop effective, low-cost enforcement” is the “most important” cause of “underdevelopment” (North, 1990: 54).

From these three elements, North’s work provides at least two useful points of attention for research into the institutional framework between central government and local polities. First, even if formal institutions – such as regulations regarding decentralisation – can be changed or introduced quite quickly, the informal institutions – the norms, values upheld in personal networks – change much more slowly. And since the informal institutions provide legitimacy to formal rules, “revolutionary change is never as revolutionary as its supporters desire” and actual change in behaviour of organisations and people will be different or slower than perhaps anticipated (North, 1994: 366). Second, it is the combination of the three elements – informal institutions, formal institutions and enforcement – that is critical:

favoured compensation in case of a breach of contract, interior polities’ concepts sought to re-establish the pre-contract situation (Lyall, 1986: 123).

65 “It is the admixture of formal rules, informal norms and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance” (ibid, 1994: 366). Arguably, with many of Africa’s states – central governments – characterised as ‘weak states’, the enforcement of formal institutions by this larger polity is quite likely to be ‘overruled’ by the enforcement of informal institutions at the level of the smaller, local polities. This leads to the next core concept.

Local polity

This thesis continuously uses the concept of ‘local polity’ in juxtaposition to central government. However, this local polity is not simply a smaller version of the national polity governed by central government. The national polity has clearly demarcated territorial boundaries that are internationally recognised and its ability to uphold these boundaries is “vital” for its survival (Richmond, 2002: 381).47 Domestically, the national polity requires “the ability to extract the economic resources needed to maintain their differentiated administrative structures” (Clapham, 1998: 156). The local polity, on the other hand, does not need to uphold demarcated boundaries to survive, nor the (delegated or autonomous) ability to extract resources from its inhabitants to finance an administration. In the context of this thesis, the primary boundaries of a local polity are the limits within which North’s concept of ‘enforcement of formal and informal institutions’ is effectively applied. These differences explain why a local polity in this thesis is not simply a smaller version of the national polity; the two have rather different functions.48

North’s description of a polity’s general role in the economic sphere assists in defining a

local polity if his references to economic concepts are placed in brackets: “Polities

significantly shape (economic) performance because they define and enforce the (economic) rules. Therefore, an essential part of development policy is the creation of polities that will create and enforce (efficient property) rights” (North, 1994: 366).49 In

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While it may be ‘vital’ to maintain these boundaries against invasion by other polities or secession by groups from the inside, in an African context where a number of states may be ‘weak’ or ‘collapsed’, the discussion opens to “degrees of statehood” (Clapham, 1998) … or “Quasi Statehood” (Warner, 1989). 48

Migdal’s concepts of “strong societies and weak states” probably capture the distinction between ‘national polity’ and ‘local polity’ quite well (1988).

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North’s awareness of his eurocentric biases is expressed in the remainder of this quote: “However, we know very little about how to create such polities because the new political economy (the new institutional

66 effect, this is not dissimilar from anthropological definitions of “political community”. A review of classic definitions around the concept of polity highlights that a political community is the area within which conflict is settled via negotiated arbitration or compensation among people living in the area. This ‘enforcement’ of the rules may or may not have aspects of coercion, but it always has “a moral basis of political suasion” (Bates, 1983: 11). The latter would probably be encompassed by North’s informal institutions.

By defining the boundaries of a local polity as the limits within which formal and/or informal institutions are enforced, the local polity has become a political entity with boundaries that may be quite fluid, depending on two variables: the character of the institutions, as well as the relative strength of the enforcement capacity of the higher level polity. An example of the size of a local polity varying with the character of the institutions would be the settling of marital matters or domestic property issues. In these cases, the local polity may be confined to the area of a village council. However, when it comes to addressing land or water rights, the institutions are often enforced by district or provincial councils. Similarly, when institutions regarding cultural identity need to be enforced, the local polity can be larger, such as the Baganda or the Bagisu polities in Uganda. The second variable – the relative strength of the enforcement capacity of the higher level polity – may have an impact on a local polity’s size that varies in time. For example, this thesis shows how school committees or PTAs enforced a ‘voluntary’ contribution from parents to secure a school’s continued operations when Uganda’s higher level polities failed to collect taxes and fund schools in the 1970s and 1980s. However, once the higher level polities’ enforcement capacities were restored in the 1990s, the local polity’s enforcement capacity was scaled down by pressure via formal regulations as well as diminishing informal support by parents to pay ‘voluntary’ contributions.

The concept ‘local polity’ is often used in this thesis without defining explicitly which size or type of local polity is meant because it should be clear from the context in which the concept is used. Nevertheless, when talking about schools and dispensaries, the local polity referred to in this thesis is often the smallest of local polities, on which numerous analysts find common ground. Abrahams, for example, presents a “village polity”, with which most

economics applied to politics) has been largely focused on the United States and developed polities. A pressing research need is to model Third World and eastern European polities” (North, 1994: 366).

67 central governments – “the colonial regime and the independent Tanzanian government” – “have at some time come into conflict” (Abrahams, 1989: 356). Klein refers to the smallest local polity as “villages or confederations of villages” ruled by “councils of elders” (2001: 52) and Hyden as communities ruled by the “economy of affection” (1980: 18). Berger’s novelist approach describes this local polity as “the basic unit … the political and social system [that] offered them the minimum of protection [with] their own unwritten laws and codes of behaviour, their own rituals and beliefs, their own orally transmitted body of wisdom and knowledge” (1979: xii).50 However, while many of these definitions suggest an ‘enduring core’ to the smallest type of local polity, this thesis emphasises the fluidity of the size of the local polity. Moreover, the growing number of districts in both Uganda (Green, 2008) and Tanzania (Kelsall, 2000) – “districtisation” as consequence of decentralisation policies – may be on its way to become a type of ‘local polity’ in its own.

Personal networks

The third core concept often employed in this thesis is ‘personal networks’, which link people within a local polity and connect them with people inside as well as outside the local polity. It is within these personal networks that many of the informal institutions – particularly values and norms related to social and cultural conventions –are enforced and an ‘informal accountability’ takes place. Personal networks and their “connections to the institutional matrix” are nothing particular of African politics, it happens in all cultures and continents (cf. Eisenstadt and Roniger, 1984). However, as was discussed in the literature review, the phenomenon of ‘neopatrimonial networks’ is particularly associated with African politics. In a seminal paper in 1975, Ekeh argues personal networks form the “primordial public sphere” in the postcolonial state, the sphere where morality is enforced. On the other side he positions the “civic public sphere” of the public administration, which he characterises as “amoral”. In the tension between these two spheres, a citizen “will only continue to be a good man if he channels part of the largesse from the civic public to the primordial public” (Ekeh, 1975: 108). Without mentioning the word, Ekeh was probably one of the founders of the later debate about the ‘neopatrimonial state’.

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Though Gandhi’s description competes: “My idea of the village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbours for its vital wants and yet interdependent for many others in which dependency is a necessity … The outermost circumsphere will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it” (1997: 306).

68 Later, in the 1980s, Bayart becomes one of the principal analysts of the concept of neopatrimonialism and argues that the density of the personal networks in Africa is much higher than elsewhere. Personal networks “link the ‘lowest of the low’ with the ‘highest of the high’ through the agencies of continuous news, requests, gifts”. Via “the news bulletins on the ‘Pavement Radio’ (Radio Trottoir) the ‘small men’ are frequently up to date with the stratagems of the ‘big men’” (Bayart, 1993: 219). Similarly, Chabal and Daloz talk of “a myriad of nepotistic or clientelistic networks” that provide political capital to the political elites in government and the public administration; on the condition they meet the expectations of their clients. And in these personal networks the informal institutions are rigorously enforced: “Even if patron-client relations remain unequally biased in their favour … patrons can easily suffer … ‘the blackmail of the ruled’ (Chabal and Daloz, 1999: 38). As a consequence, Chabal argues, the “informalisation of the state means in effect it cannot institutionalise” itself and “allow the operation of a bureaucracy capable of implementing public policy”. That, in turn, “lends networking the singularly central place it has acquired in the continent’s political economy” (Chabal, 2009: 137, 140).

However, when the concept ‘personal networks’ is used in this thesis, it does not exclusively or necessarily refer to neopatrimonial personal networks in which the members of school and dispensary committees are in continuous contact with politicians or others in the public administration to obtain ‘largesse’ for themselves, the school or dispensary. The personal networks of committee members may or may not include elements of a clientelistic network – this field research could not establish that – but when the concept of personal network is used in this thesis it is more multi-faceted and also refers to more mundane elements of networking, such as building “relationships [that] may have critical strategic implications for resource acquisition and school performance,” as Hite et al

discovered when investigating the personal networks of headteachers in Uganda (2006: 512). Such resources are not exclusively material (e.g. furniture, books, drugs), but also, and perhaps even more so, resources in the sphere of human resources, information about procedures, and professional skills (e.g. Herriot et al., 2002; Kitavi and Westhuizen, 1997). In sum, when the concept of personal networks is used in this thesis, these personal networks include perhaps clientelistic aspects, but they certainly include ‘personalised

69 professional contacts’ with district authorities, fellow headteachers, other committees in the local polity, and contacts with local businesses.

In closing, this third chapter discussed the methodological considerations around the research for this thesis as well as the five principal research methods that produced the research findings as they are presented in the next two chapters. First, chapter 4 presents the findings from the field research carried out in Uganda and Tanzania, using four of the five presented research methods. Second, chapter 5 presents the findings that resulted from the use of the fifth research method: a reading and re-reading primary and secondary sources to provide the historical contextualisation of the findings from the field research. Finally, this third chapter also reflected about the character of three core concepts – institutional framework, local polity, and personal networks – that are woven throughout the next two chapters and bind these chapters together.

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