Harrison G. Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (ENG)

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n e o l i b e r a l af r i c a

wing of pragmatism, that derived from Pierre Bourdieu (1977)

and his concept of habitus, but I would not want to deﬁne habit

in a way that is highly structured because this concept tends to

de-emphasise agency (Hodgson 2004; Weiss 2004: 199). Neverthe-

less, habitual practice is in some sense stabilising even if it is not

a structure or inertia. In Dewey’s view, habits emerge as those

who act in a certain realm need to deal with uncertainty and

contingency; in this sense there is a tension in which habits have

to reassert themselves and likely modify themselves in the face of

changes.

The notion of repertoires derives from Dewey’s key question

concerning ideas in action: ‘what determines the selection of opera-

tions to be performed?’ (1929: 123). Thus far, we have speciﬁed a

pragmatist approach as focusing on practices as generative of ideas

and knowledge. We have outlined how practice can be understood

as morally infused and also embedded in precedent, both of which

emphasise Dewey’s concern with reﬂective action – ‘experimental

inquiry or thinking signiﬁes directed activity’ (Dewey 1922: 123)

– which is at the heart of a Deweyan understanding of human

agency. The addition of repertoire to this framework is simply to

recognise that no agency is unconstrained in the choices of action

made – the ‘constraints on the range of solutions that actors per-

ceive and deem useful for solving problems’ (Campbell 2001: 170).

Indeed some courses of action will be a lot more likely than others

as a result of the ways in which people evaluate existing practices,

likely outcomes and senses of good or bad action. This means that

repertoire does not simply connote a toolbox of techniques (for

example, the various ways in which a government might transfer

management of public enterprises to the private sector) but rather

that agents recognise – and to some extent create – a series of

‘realistic’ alternative ways of acting through reﬂection.

That these choices are constrained is precisely why we need to

consider these three terms as working at a ‘meso’ level. The nature

of constraint is not simply internal to a realm of practice; it is

p r ac t i c e s o f ne o l i b e r a l i s m

also, and very importantly, external in the sense that interventions

from elsewhere aim to change practice by changing repertoires.

This is the essence of social engineering: neoliberal intervention

aims to destabilise existing habits (expressed within neoliberal

discourse as a hostility to bureaucracy and a desire for good gov-

ernance, for example) and to produce notions of conduct based

on efﬁciency, transparency and utility. It also aims to destabilise

existing conduct by producing values of efﬁciency, transparency,

value for money, and so on, within states that are likely to work

according to different forms of conduct (Bayart 1993). It also aims

to render some possible actions easier, more rewarding or more

obvious than others.

The argument here is that social practices in Africa have experi-

enced a tangible destabilisation as a result of neoliberal intervention

mainly but not exclusively aimed at the state. As a result, the ‘lived

history’ of neoliberalism – that which is realised through practices

of adaption, adoption, resistance and subterfuge – can be found in

the ways social practice has changed within those many African

states that have undergone decades of neoliberal intervention.

But one ﬁnal question faces us before we move on: how do we

move from the meso to the macro? Or, more speciﬁcally, how do

we relate bundles of practice to the project of global neoliberalism?

The answer is, at best, suggestive, and cannot be more that that

without becoming (in my view at least) excessively deterministic

– a danger that is replete within studies of neoliberalism, as I have

already argued above. The nub of the issue resides in the bundling

itself: the intellectual effort to relate discrete practices in order to

think interpretively about the nature of those practices and the

kinds of change that they usher in. Again, this is a point made

strongly by Dewey in his efforts to distinguish pragmatism from

empiricism, and we can quote him at length:

There are speciﬁc good reasons for the usual attribution of acts to

the person from whom they immediately proceed. But to convert this

special reference into a belief of exclusive ownership is as misleading

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as to suppose that breathing and digesting are complete within the

human body. To get a rational basis for moral discussion we must

begin with recognising that functions … are ways of using and

incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as

surely as the former. (1922: 15)

In essence, ‘moral discussion’ – or perhaps, in more contemporary

language, critical analysis – requires us to ‘think upwards’ towards

the larger systems (‘environments’) within which bundles of prac-

tices are situated. This has been the methodology throughout the

book: to identify practices that have emerged during the neoliberal

period, to think explicitly and heuristically about how they can

be bundled together, and ﬁnally to relate upwards to the generics

of neoliberalism not as a way of determining the importance and

nature of the practices, but rather as determining the importance

and nature of neoliberalism itself.

This chapter has set out the value of a pragmatist approach to

neoliberal social engineering in the attention it pays to practice as

a political phenomenon. We also set out three aspects of practice

regarding how neoliberalism might infuse social practices through-

out Africa in ways that enable us to identify a global project.

This sets a frame of reference for the next three chapters: to look

at changing practices and to move between the meso and macro

levels. As such, the aim is not so much to present a detailed set

of empirical observations about individuals’ practices but rather

to look at how neoliberal habit, repertoires and conduct have

changed within international institutions, states and other social

groups. The next three chapters look at the international, national

and local levels respectively.

Global neoliberal practice:

institutions and regulation

his chapter considers the global emergence of neoliberal-

ism. It looks at the ways in which neoliberal practice has

emerged, expanded and established for itself ‘paradigmatic’ status.

In other words, it shows how neoliberalism has shifted from an

ambitious and embryonic set of policy interventions to something

resembling a framework or set of premisses within which policy

is articulated. The practices of neoliberalism have been iterated

over such time as to shift the habits, conduct and repertoire of

development practice tout court. The layering of large numbers

of neoliberal policies has not only led to a progressively more

totalising implementation of liberalisation; it has also deﬁned the

terms upon which policy and development are thought about and

articulated per se. This is, of course, not a completed process

(in the last chapter we developed a framework which is anathema

to the idea of completed processes, preferring instead a series of

practices in place of means–ends distinctions), but it has enabled

neoliberal ideas to aspire to ‘meta-development’ status: that is, as

the terms upon which development is discussed rather than solely

as a predominant model of development. At the level of ideas,

this shift or tendency is rather like the analysis of Hay in which

neoliberalism moves from normalising to normative (Hay 2004).

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Thus, this chapter concerns itself with neoliberalism at the

international level – its history of ratcheting up the ambitions of

liberalisation since the late 1970s. But, there is a danger here. As

suggested in chapters 1 and 3, it is this kind of concern that most

tempts writers to endow neoliberalism with agency. After all,

it is at the global-historical level that neoliberalism seems to be

an idea that does shape history. Furthermore, at the global level,

any project to identify the substantially more complex realm of

agency and practice will very quickly produce a certain degree of

bewilderment: neoliberalism has been realised through a nebulous,

formal and semi-formal, and complex series of meetings, rule-

setting, lending mechanisms, research outputs and exertions of

political pressure. In this sense, abstracting an idea-agency called

neoliberalism to encompass the global sweep towards liberalisa-

tion seems very tempting. However, it is not the task of this book

to detail a global history of neoliberal practice. Our focus is on

neoliberal practice in Africa and this necessarily takes us centrally

to African states and questions of development policy practice.

Therefore, what we need to do in this chapter is to narrate the

key developments in the expansion of neoliberalism, but with a

wariness of allowing neoliberalism to ‘take ﬂight’ and become

history in itself.

This chapter will analyse the international construction of

neoliberal regulation in this spirit. It pays particular attention

to institutional change and the emergence of neoliberal norms of

regulation. This serves to foreground vital aspects of the repertoire

of development practice in African states.

Global neoliberalism:

free markets and political power

Persistent practice

The last twenty years have witnessed the globalisation of neo-

liberal economic reform, from speciﬁc electoral victories in the

g l o b a l ne o l i b e r a l p r a c t i c e

United States and Britain to the ‘common sense’ that lies more

or less implicitly behind the thought and action of practically all

states and international organisations (Robison 2006; Demmers et

al. 2004). Through a range of processes, post-communist states,

post-colonial states, the international ﬁnance institutions and UN

agencies have all cleaved to the same neoliberal fundamentals

(Demmers et al. 2004; Fine et al. 2001; Lee and McBride 2007;

Roy et al. 2007). A rough but revealing expression of this can be

found in the narrowing of questions in international development

discourse: no longer questions about the relative merits of market

and non-market forms of economic organisation, but how to make

the expansion of the market work for the poor; no longer questions

about the comparative beneﬁts of public or private ownership, but

how to make privatisation more efﬁcient (McDonald and Ruiters

2005). How did this happen?

The global economic slowdown of the 1970s, accompanied by

increasing instability and the heightened class tensions within

many national contexts, created an enabling environment for politi-

cians, intellectuals and policymakers to develop the foundations

of neoliberal ideas and practices – what might retrospectively

be called ﬁrst-generation neoliberalism (circa 1979–95) (see, for

example, the reﬂections of Williamson 2000).

First-generation neoliberalism was prosecuted by a group of

intellectuals who had espoused critiques of the pre-existing ideas

of regulation, social democracy and statist development. These

critiques had persisted throughout the post-war period (Bauer

1972), and indeed many staff in the IMF cleaved to notions of

monetarism, economic liberalism and anti-statism. What emerged

in the early 1980s was an enabling of neoliberal ideas (Brett

2008: 340). The IMF attained an increasingly dominant and

aggressive role as macroeconomic keeper of economies in in-

creasingly dire straits (Havnevik 1987). The party ideological

atmosphere in many economically powerful Western states moved

to the right, lending the ‘free market’ a revived ideological cachet

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(Turner 2008). Economic recession created a context in which

development orthodoxies looked increasingly fragile and alterna-

tive – even radical – solutions became increasingly thinkable.

This was because the global slowdown and instability of the

late 1970s could be readily shaped as a crisis of Keynesian and

developmental approaches (whatever the precise linkages between

social democratic or statist-nationalist paradigms and ‘crisis’) and

alternative approaches advocated.

We can readily see that the early 1980s was a period of ten-

sions and mismatches between political institutions, class relations

and patterns of socio-economic interaction. Duménil and Lévy

(2001, 2004) demonstrate how the 1970s had produced a fall in

rates of proﬁt, which put pressure on capital and states to dis-

empower workers and reduce labour’s inﬂuence over government,

particularly in favour of ﬁnance capital. Kotz (2008) also focuses

on the shifting institutional forms that neoliberal regimes produce,

arguing that governments attempted to address economic decline

and proﬁt squeeze by removing controls on capital, adjusting ﬁscal

policy in favour of capital, and putting the state more forcefully to

work to support ﬁnance, property and capital mobility.

What these analyses show us is how structural shifts in the

global economy were realised through a series of interrelated

debates and policy changes in many states and international or-

ganisations that enabled advocates of economic liberalisation to

shape the direction of economic orthodoxy towards the practices

and premisses of neoliberalism. This was not an inevitability;

it was a piecemeal and contested project. The 1980s proved to

be an extremely turbulent decade, characterised by attempts to

liberalise, resistance against the latter, reform ‘slippage’ and indeed

in some cases social collapse, not only in Africa but in myriad ways

throughout the world (Kozul-Wright and Rayment 2007; Bond

2004; Fisher and Ponniah 2003).

Within an enduring state of economic sluggishness and social

turbulence, the persistence of the intellectuals and practitioners of

g l o b a l ne o l i b e r a l p r a c t i c e

liberalisation maintained an open ﬁeld for neoliberal practice. In the

absence of a powerful rival set of practices and ideas, neoliberalism

became in this strict sense ‘necessary’, and its repeated failure to

stabilise societies or reinvigorate the global economy did not so

much disempower the advocates of neoliberalism (whose numbers

were growing) as much as harden and recapitulate neoliberal prac-

tice. This is perhaps the historic import of Margaret Thatcher’s

apocryphal phrase ‘there is no alternative’. Neoliberal practice was

endlessly asserted despite its inability to produce stable growth

and social peace (Chapter 2) because it had no alternatives that

so effectively conjoined ideology and policy practice.

Dark victories

At the time when Walden Bello used the phrase ‘dark victories’

(Bello 1993), there was a sense that neoliberalism was being

imposed on suffering societies in ways that were nothing short of

coercive. That this neoliberal project brought much hardship and

political turbulence is both evident and unsurprising. However,

efforts to implement neoliberalism have endured the 1980s, bring-

ing in new policies and modes of intervention. This has led some

to speak of a twofold sequencing of neoliberal implementation:

ﬁrst- and second-generation reform. First generation-reform (FGR)

is characterised as being a period of compulsory adjustment to

market ‘realities’; second-generation reform (SGR) is seen as a

subsequent and less troubled period in which the ‘basics’ (some

version of the Washington Consensus) are in place and it remains

to use these basics as the guidelines for broader projects of social

engineering – within both states (Chapter 5) and societies (Chapter

6). The notions of ﬁrst- and second-generation reform are in a

sense misleading: this stadial account of neoliberal implementation

gives a sense of a completed ﬁrst stage followed by a more sophisti-

cated second stage. This leads us to a teleology, functionalism and

consequentialism again. For those advocating neoliberalism, the

presence of second-generation reform is evidence that a state has

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‘graduated’ beyond the basics of ﬁscal discipline and liberalised

prices. It enables bolder and more expansive neoliberal practice

under the assumption that a ‘critical velocity’ or ‘fundamentals’

have been attained, in which resistance and recidivism against

neoliberalism have been bypassed.

However, there is a way in which the distinction between ﬁrst-

and second-generation reform is analytically useful. This is to

highlight the process already sketched in the section above: a ten-

dency for neoliberal ideas not only to produce powerful models of

development but also to produce development itself. As an expand-

ing bundle of practices, neoliberalism’s second-generation status is

premissed on the political consolidation of a ‘common sense’. The

common sense that SGR requires is that ﬁrst-generation reforms

are both in place and uncontested. This is aptly encapsulated by

the World Bank in its millennial Development Report:

Supporting good policies is important but it is not enough. We

learned in the 1990s that process is as important as policy.… The

way donors and recipients interact strongly inﬂuences the effective-

ness of development co-operation. Relationships have tended to

follow the preferences of donor countries, leaving recipients with

little sense of ownership.… If development co-operation is to attack

poverty effectively and efﬁciently, donors will need to … provide

sustained support for policy and institutional environments. (World

Bank 2000/2001: 191–2)

In the World Development Report of 1997, the World Bank sets out

a model of ﬁrst- and second-generation reforms in which the latter

are seen as constituted in ‘deep institutional reforms’, moving out

of ‘enclaves’ of reform to entire public institutions (World Bank

1997: 152–3).

This section maps out this movement, from persistent and

combative practice towards (but never completing) consensual

paradigm. The section is nothing more than a sketch; more detail

will be provided in following sections that look more closely at

institutional practice and interaction.

g l o b a l ne o l i b e r a l p r a c t i c e

Despite the unstable condition of neoliberal policies throughout

the world, the 1980s witnessed a profusion of more-or-less short-

lived neoliberal experiments. As argued in Chapter 1, this African

experience represents an extreme image of a global process of

purposeful neoliberal implementation. In Chapter 2 we saw how

fragile the evidence was of ‘success’ during the ﬁrst decade of

neoliberal reform. This allowed us to highlight the persistence

and determination of largely Western advocates of neoliberal-

ism. But ‘success’ and ‘failure’ premiss themselves on a simplistic

means–ends distinction which removes our focus on the develop-

ment of reform habits constituted by practices. In this sense, what

the 1980s show are iterations: repeated and modiﬁed exactions to

liberalise and reconﬁgure development management. Thus, the

profusion of SAP produced increasingly integrated and institution-

ally complex practices of implementation regardless of the fragile

and unstable economic growth that characterised the decade. So,

how did the institutions of neoliberal implementation emerge?

In spite of some distinctions and differences between the two

Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank and the IMF ac-

customed themselves to working in close coordination throughout

the 1980s (Taylor 1997). The consolidation of neoliberalism has

been effected through the growth of a powerful and nebulous

international structure of publicly constituted regulative authority.

The World Bank, largely due to the implementation of a regime

of structural adjustment in the global South, transformed itself

from a project-lending international bank to a key inﬂuence within

policymaking and macroeconomic management throughout the

developing world (Please 1984). The IMF moved from short-term

exchange-rate creditor to policy-based lender as well, and has also

acted to lend large tranches of conditional dollars to emerging

market economies experiencing currency crashes.

We will come back to these developments in more detail in the

next section. The point here is to signal that the global rise of

neoliberalism has involved the elaboration of a new international