Subnational Governance in Africa: The Search for Accountability

Africa's democratic future is increasingly decided below the national level with power in the hands of subnational governments: governors and provincial administrations, county and local authorities, amongst others. How that power is exercised, and whether those who hold it can be made to answer for it, has become one of the defining governance questions on the continent. Yet the mechanisms meant to secure that answerability, formal and informal alike, are weak, uneven and frequently unenforced. Budgets are approved without genuine scrutiny, and the citizens who encounter the state most directly at this level often have the least reliable information about how it governs and spends. Studies of other regions have turned to the subnational as the arena where democratic quality is most sharply tested; African scholarship has been slower to follow, leaving the continent's subnational politics under-examined.
This panel takes the gap between formal accountability and its actual exercise as its organising concern. Its premise is that where subnational accountability fails, the binding constraints are less often legal than political and behavioural. While the legal instruments are sufficient, the incentive, political will, institutional capacity and enabling environment are largely absent. In fact, the conduct of those who govern is as much a part of the puzzle as the design of the institutions meant to check them.
We welcome empirical, comparative and theoretical papers, grounded in African cases. Contributions may address the conduct and accountability of subnational executives; fiscal transparency, budgeting and public procurement; audit institutions and the fate of their findings; the role of courts, media, civil society and citizens in demanding answers; party systems, political competition and electoral incentives at subnational level; legislative and committee oversight; centre-periphery relations and the reach of dominant central governments; and the effects of decentralisation reforms. Papers drawing on original data, whether survey, interview, archival or coded documentary evidence, are particularly encouraged, from scholars and practitioners based within and outside the continent. The panel speaks to the Congress theme by relocating democratic uncertainty from national elections towards the layer of government where citizens meet the state and the office-holders meant to answer to them.