III. Thematic Overview: Context
From TrustAfrica wiki - African Regional Organizations
An overview of the five themes underpinning this survey calls for a brief review of the institutional and policy landscape. As highlighted in the introduction to this report, regional approaches are gaining in currency in Africa as an important dimension of the quest for sustainable development. This trend is evident in efforts by AROs to reconfigure the continental institutional landscape and forge new collaboration arrangements.
At the pinnacle of the emerging continental architecture is the Constitutive Act establishing the African Union—which provides for a host of new institutions that include the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) and the Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC). The demise of the OAU and emergence of the AU marks the end of non-interference and non-aggression, and the beginning of an era marked by collective responsibility for regional peace and security. The AU’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) and its sub-organs represent this new commitment.
Regional economic communities (RECs) accept this continental architecture as providing a common framework around which they can coordinate and synergize their efforts. Nevertheless, progress varies. While some RECs have forged ahead in establishing arrangements such as free-trade zones and fast-track energy sharing initiatives, the institutional landscape is characterized by overlapping arrangements and competing agendas. These developments have not occurred in a vacuum. The increasing globalization of development has posed new challenges as well as opportunities for Africa, cementing the importance of regional approaches and unity of purpose at a time when other regional blocs are moving towards economic, political and cultural union. AROs have begun to use their convening power more strategically to incubate common African positions on key development issues. Positions developed by African trade ministers are emblematic of Africa’s increasing assertiveness and confidence in its own development path.
The recognition of the centrality of citizen participation to the success of development efforts has led to the exponential growth of non-state actors and the emergence of transnational civil society in Africa. Civil society is increasingly seen by AROs and individual governments as an important partner in these global engagements, and multiple spaces have opened up for CSO participation. Yet while civil society has rallied around this new regionalism, institutional arrangements remain a work in progress. CSOs themselves fall short in a number of critical areas, including capacity, governance and overall ability to register impact.
CSOs working on the five themes surveyed here are at best fragmented. By and large, they tend to be reactive rather than proactive. This is in part because agendas related to peace and security, governance, environment and population arise out of inter-governmental processes, while the implementation of policies emanating from these processes has tended to be led by treaty-based organizations. This top-down tendency is also reflected in the funding of inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) implementing these agendas, which comes chiefly from bilateral and multilateral donors.
Consequently, the responsibility to help build the capacity of CSOs and think tanks has fallen largely on the shoulders of private foundations. While these foundations have been pivotal in ensuring sustained and effective non-governmental engagement in some areas—notably human rights—the overall lack of strategic, coordinated, predictable and coherent support has helped contribute to the slow growth in the field. Non-state actor engagement around issues of governance, for example, is largely residual and invited by IGOs—although this is beginning to change as the implications of a statist governance agenda become clear across civil society.
While human rights remains ascendant, other themes are becoming less relevant. Population, for example, is losing currency, at least as it was originally conceptualized and exported to the developing world as a concern by U.S. foundations and think tanks after World War II. Long-standing organizations are no longer attracting the support of their benefactors—in part because the contraction of available funding after the 2001 stock market collapse reduced money supply, but also because the population agenda was radically redefined at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994.
In light of all this, the timing is right for private foundations to rethink their support to AROs and CSOs working on these themes. Sustained and well-coordinated efforts to strengthen regional approaches to addressing challenges related to these and other themes are likely to lead to a significantly stronger field over the next 10 to 15 years.
With this critical context in mind, an overview of each of the five themes in this survey follows. The objective of this overview is to identify the key issues within each theme, to situate the current focus in historical perspective and to highlight important future trends in relation to these themes and the organizations that focus on them.
