Reconciling Africa's fragmented institutions of governance: a new approach to institution building: report on the first planning workshop

Abstract

Institutional systems in Africa remain fragmented, despite over four decades of institution building, resulting in de-linking the state from society, failure to coordinate resources with broad social interests and exclusionary policies and practices. The current project "Reconciling Africa's fragmented institutions of governance" aims to explain such fragmentations and their sources, analyse their impact on state building and democratisation, and to determine attributes of both traditional institutions and modern ones. Ultimately the project will examine how traditional institutions and modern ones can be reconciled or fused in order to promote democratic governance and improve the plight of vulnerable segments of society. In this way the project aims to contribute to existing studies on the limitations of informal institutions, legitimacy of chieftainship in democratic states, and legal pluralism in African countries.