Crafting the space to govern: non-state practices of legitimation in Africa

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Jana Hönke
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450525282

African states, under the neoliberalization of the last two decades in particular, have witnessed resurgent non-state intervention. Such intervention, via foreign or foreign-funded companies or organizations, is made manifest through their uptake of service provision and/or public roles that conventionally fell to the state. Such non-state actors, whether companies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), must therefore legitimate essentially private forms of authority in the name of the public, crafting the political space in which to exercise their forms of governance. Legitimation, we argue, is a core problem of contemporary socio-political life but it is one that is generally only partially represented in political science through a focus on the actions of predominantly state elites, hamstrung by outmoded state-based rationalities and methodologies. Rather, ambiguous non-state actors operate in the margins between global and local; national/international; public/private and state/non-state. We therefore seek to examine how non-state actors legitimate their authority to act within contemporary configurations of governance.Specifically, we examine non-state legitimation through the practices of NGOs and corporate actors - typically through Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. We attend to new or shifting rhetorics on African ‘development’ within identified ‘contact zones’, brought into relief through the resurgence of non-Western actors, particularly Chinese actors. The key thrust of our work, however, contrary to most work on legitimation, is that such practices are not unilaterally or instrumentally wielded by external actors but that legitimation efforts are negotiated and contested ‘all the way down’. Therefore, we study practices within two very different African states: Tanzania and Kenya. Conceptually, centring ‘legitimation as practice’, we innovate by breaking with state-based rationalities characteristic of legitimacy debates, circumventing divides between nominally state and non-state; public and private; national and international. Empirically, we innovate in our attention to the multiple dynamics of legitimation practice, historicized and empirically grounded within selected local contexts rather than international boardrooms and forums. Methodologically, our approach is bottom-up, bringing ‘ethnographic sensibility’ to expound fully the situated, iterative nature of contemporary legitimation, with Africans central, rather than incidental, to its making.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Kenya
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Omar Egesah, Ph.D.