Africa's Development Impasse

Africa's Development Impasse PDF

Author: Doctor Stefan Andreasson

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 184813603X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Orthodox strategies for socio-economic development have failed spectacularly in Southern Africa. Neither the developmental state nor neoliberal reform seems able to provide a solution to Africa's problems. In Africa's Development Impasse, Stefan Andreasson analyses this failure and explores the potential for post-development alternatives. Examining the post-independence trajectories of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the book shows three different examples of this failure to overcome a debilitating colonial legacy. Andreasson then argues that it is now time to resuscitate post-development theory's challenge to conventional development. In doing this, he claims, we face the enormous challenge of translating post-development into actual politics for a socially and politically sustainable future and using it as a dialogue about what the aims and aspirations of post-colonial societies might become. This important fusion of theory with empirical case studies will be essential reading for students of development politics and Africa.

Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa

Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa PDF

Author: Jeremiah I. Dibua

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780754642282

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this book, Jeremiah I. Dibua challenges prevailing notions of Africa's development crisis by drawing attention to the role of modernization as a way of understanding the nature and dynamics of the crisis, and how to overcome the problem of underdevelopment.

Handbook of African Development

Handbook of African Development PDF

Author: Tony Binns

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 725

ISBN-13: 131749508X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This handbook presents an extensive new overview of African development - past, present and future. It addresses key core themes and topics that are pertinent to the continent's development - including sections on history, health and food, politics, economics, rural and urban development, and development policy and practice. The volume draws on the expertise of over 60 of the world's leading scholars to provide a detailed and up-to-date analysis of the key opportunities and challenges that confront Africa, and how such issues are being addressed. Arranged by key themes, the handbook provides not only a historical understanding of the past, but also political perspectives on the future. The chapters provide critically informed analyses of their topics by drawing upon the latest conceptual viewpoints and applied experiences in Africa in the form of case studies to offer a comprehensive examination of the opportunities, challenges, key debates and future prospects. This handbook is an invaluable state-of-the-art overview and reference concerning many different aspects of Africa's development, which will be of interest to academics in all fields of African studies, and also academics and students working in cognate disciplines such as development studies, geography, history, politics and economics.

Africa's Development Thinking Since Independence

Africa's Development Thinking Since Independence PDF

Author: Africa Institute of South Africa

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Newly revised and updated, this edition brings together, in a single volume, a series of public documents pertaining to Africa's development since independence. These are various resolutions, declarations, treaties, and plans of action, which represent key moments and turning points in recent history from across the African continent. In its entirety, the collection of documents reflects how development ideas and processes have evolved from the early sixties to the present day. Some of the documents included are: the Charter of the OAU; the Monrovia Declaration of Commitment of the OAU Heads of State and Government; the Lagos Plan of Action; the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (Banjul charter); the UN Declaration on the Critical Economic Situation in Africa; the African Common Position on Africa's External Debt Crisis; the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community; the Cairo Plan of Action; The Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Co- operation in Africa; and The New Partnership for Africa's Development. The volume also includes an introduction on the wider context of the documents by Eddie Maloka, the director of the Africa Institute of South Africa; and a critical essay on Africa's development thinking by an economic and foreign policy analyst.

Beyond the Impasse

Beyond the Impasse PDF

Author: Frans J Schuurman

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781856492102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Development theory in the past decade has met with increasingly heavy criticism. Dependency theories, as well as modes of production and world-system approaches, have come to be considered as internally inconsistent and inadequate for explaining the increasing diversity and unevenness of the Third World. This book confronts the theoretical impasse which many feel has been reached. Development scholars from various disciplines review recent changes in research priorities, procedures and orientations, and detect the emergence of new and diverse lines of theoretical development in the field. In particular, they deal with the important meta-theoretical, political, cultural and ethical questions that have come to the fore.

Contemporary Issues in Africa's Development

Contemporary Issues in Africa's Development PDF

Author: Ehimika A. Ifidon

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-04-18

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1527509524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume reports on the state of crisis in Africa in the early twenty-first century. Africa, on the eve of the ‘independence revolution’, was the continent of hope and high expectations. By the third decade of independence, optimism had been replaced by dismality. African states had been beset by ethno-political squabbles, military rule, civil wars, Islamic and insurgent movements, extreme poverty and disease. With the ascent of redemocratization in the 1990s and of ‘new’ pan-Africanism derived from the formation of the African Union, Africa appeared set to claim its vaunted destiny. This book asks, with hindsight to the first decade of the twenty-first century: how real was the renaissance in African life? If the dismal African condition is a phase in the historical development of Africa, this volume does not see any golden age in the past to which Africa aspires to return. There is clearly a continuation and persistence of crisis, with an absence of good governance, personalisation of state power, widespread disease, and policy failure in education, economy and infrastructural development. Although endowed with abundant human and natural resources, Africa remains the least developed and most indebted continent. Whither then the African Renaissance? The methodologies that underpin the contributions in this book are as diverse as the specialisations of the contributors. The collection questions ideologically protected assumptions and presumptions, presenting Africa as it is, because it is only by knowing where Africa truly stands that a proper direction can be charted for it.

Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development

Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development PDF

Author: Lwazi Lushaba

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782869782525

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book analyses the impact of the Western idea of 'modernity' on development and underdevelopment in Africa. It traces the genealogy of the Western idea of modernity from European Enlightenment concepts of the universal nature of human history and development, and shows how this idea was used to justify the Western exploitation and oppression of Africa. It argues that contemporary development, theory and practice is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and that Africa can only achieve real development by rejecting Western modernity and inventing its own forms of modernity. The book is divided into four sections. The first section provides an outline of the theory of modernity in the Enlightenment project. In the second section, an attempt is made to trace the genealogy of the idea of development as modernity and how the African development process gets entangled with it. Here, its evolution is mapped through three periods: early modernity, capitalist modernity and late modernity. Zeroing in on the current era of late or hypermodernity, the book contests the idea that there is something new in globalisation and its neo-liberal development paradigm. The third section turns to the complex but pertinent question of how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa can transcend the impasse of modernity. The fourth and final section sums up the argument and points the way forward.

The Environmental Crunch in Africa

The Environmental Crunch in Africa PDF

Author: Jon Abbink

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3319771310

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book discusses the problems and challenges of environmental–ecological conditions in Africa, amidst the current craze of economic growth and ‘development’. Africa’s significant economic dynamics and growth trajectories are marked by neglect of the environment, reinforcing ecological crises. Unless environmental–ecological and population growth problems are addressed as an integral part of developmental strategies and growth models, the crises will accelerate and lead to huge costs in later years. Chapters examine multiple emerging tension points all across the continent, including the potential benefits and harm of growing urban-based ecotourism, the trajectory of labour-saving technologies and the problems facing agro-pastoralism. Although environmental management and sustainability features of African rural societies should not be idealized, functional 'traditional' economies, interests and management practices are often bypassed, seen by state elites as inefficient and inhibiting 'growth'. In many regions the seeds are now sown for lasting environmental crises that will affect local societies that have rarely been given opportunity to claim accountability from the state regimes and donors driving these changes.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes