Retelling Good Governance Narratives on Africa's Economic and Political Predicaments: Continuities and Discontinuities in Legal Outcomes Between Markets and States

Abstract

In this Article, I argue against two premises of the good governance programs of the Bretton Woods institutions, Western governments and Third Word elites. The first of these premises is the overstated promises and hopes of economic recovery and political freedom that are often assumed to be embodied in or to flow from good governance programs. The second of these premises is that good governance programs are a necessary antidote to the egalitarianism that may flow from regulatory controls in the economy aimed at achieving social justice and/or economic growth. This egalitarianism, in my view, was an important aspect of modernizing nationalist development policy, which, notwithstanding its limitations, laid a basis for state regulation of the economy in favor of social justice and economic progress in the pre-good governance era.

Keywords: Democracy, Markets, Africa, States, Good Governance, Human Rights