States at Work

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-90-04-26478-6
Verlag: Koninklijke Brill BV

Buch, Englisch, 442 Seiten, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 707 g

Reihe: Brill

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to the ‘good governance’ discourse and new public management policies; the consequences of these reforms for the daily working of state bureaucracies and for the civil servants’ identities and modes of accountability; and the space that exists for bottom-up micro-reforms that build on local innovations or informal arrangements.

Zielgruppe

Anthropologists and political scientists, PhD students, and all interested in politics and the state in Africa and beyond as well as in the comparative functioning of public services.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bierschenk, Thomas

Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

About the authors

African Bureaucracies in Comparative Perspective
Studying the Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. An Introduction to States at Work
Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Ethnographies of Public Services in Africa: An Emerging Research Paradigm
Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Bureaucrats at Work
Seeing like a State Agent: The Ethnography of Reform in Senegal’s Forestry Services
Giorgio Blundo

Factionalism and Staff Success in a Nigerian University: A Departmental Case Study
Chris Willott

Working in Neopatrimonial Settings: Public Sector Staff Perceptions in Tanzania and Uganda
Ole Therkildsen

“We make do and keep going!” Inventive Practices and Ordered Informality in the Functioning of the District Courts in Niamey and Zinder (Niger)Oumarou Hamani

“I take an oath to the state, not the government”: Career Trajectories and Professional Ethics of Ghanaian Public Servants
Carola Lentz

“We must run while others walk”: African Civil Servants, State Ideologies and Bureaucratic Practices in Tanzania, from the 1950s to the 1970s Andreas Eckert

Sedimentation, Fragmentation and Normative Double-Binds in (West) African Public Services
Thomas Bierschenk

Bureaucracies at Work
The Politics of Reform: A Case Study of Bureaucracy at the Ministry of Basic Education in Cameroon
Hélène Charton

Building State Capacities? The Case of the Poverty Reduction Unit in Mali
Isaline Bergamaschi

A Breeding Ground for Revenue Reliability? Cameroonian Veterinary Agents and Tax Officials in the Face of Reform
José-María Muñoz

Old-school Bureaucrats and Technocrats in Malawi: Civil Service Reform in Practice
Gerhard Anders

Teachers Unions and the Selective Appropriation of Public Service Reforms in Benin
Azizou Chabi Imorou

The State that Works: A ‘Pockets of Effectiveness’ Perspective on Nigeria and Beyond
Michael Roll

The Delivery State in Africa. Interface Bureaucrats, Professional Cultures and the Bureaucratic Mode of Governance
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas Bierschenk is Professor of Anthropology and Modern African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He has published widely on politics, the state and development in West and Central Africa.

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan lives in Niger and works at the Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le Développement Local (LASDEL) on the delivery of public and collective goods in West Africa. He is also emeritus research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and professor of Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France.