State politics and public policy in Africa:a state transformation perspective

This chapter crafts a state transformation perspective. It conceptualises three kinds of state politics: politics of domination, politics of consolidation and politics of participation. While these forms of state politics may be associated with different phases during the state’s political institutionalisation, they operate simultaneously in Africa’s political landscape. The result is the emergence of complex but functional or hybrid political and administrative systems. In this manner, the public policy as optimal means and ends or the matching of political objectives to the public interest remains unclear as governments struggle to realise structures and norms that leverage their legitimacy and popular participation at the same time. A state transformation analysis essentially puts into context the African state’s colonial legacies and its journey towards optimising bureaucratic rationality, national integration and democratisation as pillars of the modern state. This chapter’s discussion draws on different cases, historical analyses and secondary data to contextualise this perspective in Eastern Africa.