Engaging Traditional Leaders in Local Governance: Devising a Generalisable Framework for Sub-Saharan Africa

Kanishka Balasuriya

Journal of Development Studies, 2023, vol. 59, issue 5, 637-652

Abstract: In Sub-Saharan Africa, traditional leaders play a significant role in local communities and their cooperation is viewed as mandatory for successful development interventions. However, systematic guidance in engaging them has been scarce due to significant heterogeneity between communities and difficulties in borrowing lessons from other contexts. Outcomes are shaped by many variables relating to the state’s engagement strategy and the community’s inherent characteristics. These variables interact in an ad hoc manner to produce outcomes. This paper demonstrates how the selectorate theory—a political economy framework originally devised to analyse national-level politics—could be adapted to local communities to interpret local power relations. Avoiding a range of indistinct variables, the selectorate theory reduces local political dynamics into two common variables, e.g. ‘selectorate’ and ‘winning coalition’, providing both a logical basis for positive engagement and a structured framework for comparative analysis.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2023.2172332

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