Volume 37 2010 Issue

Review of African Political Economy Vol. 37, No. 126, December 2010, 403–419 Making a liberal state: ‘good governance’ in Ghana David Williams∗ Department of International Politics, City University, London, UK This paper is concerned with the project of constructing a liberal state as evinced through the World Bank’s policies and practices of good governance in Ghana. It argues that this project is an expression of characteristically liberal ways of thinking about the state and its relationship with its economy and society. The construction of a liberal state involves more than simply reducing the scope of state power and constraining state action through forms of accountability – although it does involve these. It is also about the constitution of the state as a governmental agency with the capacity to enact reforms on its society – in other words, the liberal state is one with significant autonomy and agency; and it involves the engineering of that very ‘civil society’ to which the state is to be made accountable. Keywords: liberalism; state; civil society; World Bank; Ghana Introduction That in some way or another the African state has at various times failed developmentally has rarely been contested, although the evident dangers of over-generalising about the extent and causes of this failure are clear (Allen 1995). But right from the start of analyses of the post-colonial state in Africa there were two different kinds of worries about why the state was struggling to fulfil its developmental mandate. The first focused on the emergence of authoritarian and certainly non-democratic tendencies within African politics, be they the one-party state, forms of personalised rule, the incidence of military coups, or the use of coercion and more or less extreme forms of violence to sustain political power (Zolberg 1966, Jackson and Rosberg 1984). To this anxiety was sometimes added a stress on the rapacious quality of African politicians and bureaucrats whose possession of authoritarian power allowed for the development of an elaborate system of rules and regulations enabling significant ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities that were ultimately developmentally catastrophic (Bates 1981, Jeffries 1989). A second set of anxieties, however, focused on the weakness of the African state: its lack of autonomy from society and its inability to exercise anything like effective governance, most importantly in the work of Goran Hyden (1983), but this was also noted by others (Fatton 1988). There is a tension here, because dealing with the latter problem has the obvious implication that the former may be exacerbated – a more effective authoritarianism. The developmental crisis that engulfed many states in the region in the late 1970s and into the 1980s certainly demonstrated to external agencies that something was profoundly ∗Email: [email protected] ISSN 0305-6244 print/ISSN 1740-1720 online # 2010 ROAPE Publications Ltd DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2010.530940 http://www.informaworld.com 404 D. Williams wrong with the way the African states functioned. The kinds of policies pursued by these agencies can be roughly summarised as the construction of liberal forms of politics. The most high profile and contentious of these reforms have been designed to tackle the problems of authoritarianism and ‘rent-seeking’. Structural adjustment through the 1980s was designed to reduce the role of the state (and thus the scope for rent-seeking) and to promote forms of economic freedom. Through the 1990s there was a renewed stress on democracy, civil society and accountability, again as a way of overcoming the authoritarian character of African politics and ensuring the ‘responsiveness’ of the state to the wishes of its society. This is the form of liberal politics that is most familiar. Alongside this, however, has been another less high profile and somewhat less familiar strand of reform focusing on the problem of capacity. Here the purpose has been to try to make the state in Africa more able to govern effectively (Hibou 2006). This is as much a part of the construction of liberal forms of politics as the institutionalisation of democracy and the promotion of civil society. This article is concerned with the project of constructing a liberal state as evinced through the World Bank’s policies and practices of good governance in Ghana. This involves more than simply reducing the scope of state power and constraining state action through forms of accountability – although it does involve these. It is also about the constitution of the state as a governmental agency with the capacity to enact reforms on its society – in other words, the liberal state is one with significant autonomy and agency; and it involves the engineering of that very ‘civil society’ to which the state is to be made accountable. This article traces these issues through a brief review of some of the arguments found in liberal political theory. It then turns to the policies of good governance and finally to the practice of reform in Ghana as illustrated by a number of World Bank projects. The purpose of this is to show the connections between liberal theorising and the policies and practices of the World Bank. That is, the World Bank reproduces in its practices the arguments, concepts and ambiguities found within liberal theory. It is also to show that the view that liberalism is largely about ensuring the conditions for the expression of individual freedom is distinctly one-sided. Liberalism as a body of thought and as expressed in the practices of the World Bank is also about generating the capacity to govern popu- lations in their ‘depths and details’, as Foucault put it, and inserting individuals in new forms of individualised discipline (Foucault 2001b, p. 219). More broadly, this reading of liberalism is inspired by Margaret Canovan’s argument that liberalism is a ‘project to be realised’ (Canovan 1990). In this view liberalism is not simply or even largely a body of theorising; it is also and significantly a political project of transformation. Viewed in this way liberal theorising is not normative philosophy, but an extended reflection on the desirability and possibility of social transformation. What is more, this understanding of liberalism allows us to connect in more systematic ways liberal thought with liberal agency; to see liberal agents as enacting this liberal project. The implications of these arguments for the idea and functioning of forms of democracy are discussed in the conclusion. The theoretical terrain of liberalism The state Liberals have very often been suspicious of the state and anxious about its power and scope; yet, in almost all liberal thought, the state remains the central vehicle for the achievement of liberal ends and arrangements. The primary tension here then is that within liberal thought the state is conceived of as both weak and strong. The state must be weak because it is purely an enabler, little more than a neutral mechanism providing security to allow free Review of African Political Economy 405 and equal individuals to pursue their life projects unhindered by others. This view has been particularly prominent in contemporary liberal political theory (Goodin and Reeve 1989). It is most obviously associated with the work of John Rawls, and following Rawls, Richard Dworkin (Rawls 1972). According to Dworkin, the liberal state must be neutral on the question of the good life for individuals and thus political decisions must be, so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good (Dworkin 1985). But it is quite clear that a strong strand of liberal thought, arguably from Hobbes and Locke onward, has justified the state on the basis that it is ‘neutral’ between competing conceptions of the good (Salkever 1990). Kant, for example, argued that a paternalistic government was the ‘greatest conceivable despotism’ as it imposes a particular morality and a particular view of what makes people happy (Kant 1793/1970). In this view a strong state is a potential threat to free persons. First, the state may attempt to impose some particular social order, which will invariably embody some set of values, that con- strains people’s freedom, and second, that the offices of the state may be abused by their incumbents (and the stronger and more expansive the state the greater the possible abuses). Within liberal thought, these threats are countered by the advocacy of a universal legal code to which state officials are also subject, the establishment of certain political rights which the state cannot transgress (association, free speech and so on), and the institutionalisation of forms of political accountability – usually understood as forms of democracy (Waldron 1984, Paul et al. 2005). These then play a crucial role in constraining the state, both in its power and scope, and help to ensure that the state does not encroach on the legitimate expressions of individual freedoms, including of course economic freedoms. There is an extensive debate over exactly what the basis of the argument for a neutral state is, and liberal thinkers have been characteristically ambivalent on this point (Galston 1982, Kymlicka 1989). On the one hand liberals have appealed simply to the ‘facts’ of pluralism to demonstrate the desirability of a neutral state. As Locke says, ‘men in this world prefer different things and pursue happiness by contrary courses’ (Locke 1742/1976, p. 123). In a related fashion, Rawls has suggested that neutrality is to be understood as a political not a metaphysical principle; the liberal state simply responds to the already exist- ing pluralism that exists in society (Rawls 1985, 1993). At its most basic this is a kind of pragmatic justification, as any attempt to impose a particular moral or political order will inevitably lead to conflict and possibly violence.

Load more