1. Political IDEAS in Africa
My PhD thesis looked at how politicians and voters engage with one particular normative concept that has been heavily promoted by international development organisations and donors: good governance. Values like accountability and transparency help explain political contestation around the Oyo State gubernatorial elections in 2011 and 2015. However, these core values are conceived of in ways that challenge widespread assumptions both about the nature of 'good governance' and corruption. My book project is provisionally titled 'What Nigeria can teach us about good governance'.
An initial workshop on Normative Politics in Africa was held in LSE in May 2018. The call for papers sets out the core themes: details of participants and papers can be found on the programme and list of abstracts. Two follow-up panels were held at conferences in 2019, convened by myself, Sa'eed Husaini and Dan Paget. At the Political Studies Association conference in Nottingham Trent in April 2019 we hosted "Normative Political Ideas between the Global South and Global North". At the European Conference on African Studies in Edinburgh in June 2019 we hosted a panel on "Normative politics in Africa".
Articles developed in these workshops have since been accepted for publication in the Journal of Development Studies and Critical African Studies, and book manuscripts are in press with Cambridge University Press and Routledge.
Articles developed in these workshops have since been accepted for publication in the Journal of Development Studies and Critical African Studies, and book manuscripts are in press with Cambridge University Press and Routledge.
2. New Frontiers of Privatisation
My new research explores new frontiers of privatisation, looking how new configurations of public and private actors, and states and markets, are shaping governance.
I convened a double panel on Coronavirus and the Privatisation of Governance (details here and here) at the Political Studies Association conference in March 2021. My full length conference paper "Privatisation old and new: stylised narratives versus changing realities of the firm, the profit motive and the state" is available on request.
Empirically, my interests in privatisation focuses on two under-studied themes: public-private partnerships and the role of management consultants in government.
1) Management consultants and governance in Nigeria
The last decade has seen recurrent scandals involving management consulting firms and state actors. However, behind these high-profile incidents of misbehaviour, there has been a quiet but steady growth of management consultants in the heart of government. In 2017 the global revenues of the ‘Big Four’ consultancies - PriceWaterhouseCooper, Deloitte&Touche, Ernst&Young and KPMG from public contracts totalled $7.5bn. Echoing longstanding concerns with corruption and good governance, the phenomenon of management consultants in government raise new questions about the relationship between privately employed actors and the public nature of state bureaucracies. While most research focuses on the West, we know little about the role of management consultants in in emerging economies. In the context of concerns about pervasive corruption, the idea of importing fresh, professionally minded consultants, trained in international ‘best-practice’, into state agencies is attractive. Yet, against a backdrop of blurred public-private boundaries, management consultants present a puzzle: where they act as state agents they in effect occupy public office but are still compelled to advance the private interests of their employer and contribute to a ‘revolving door’ between the state and business. Consultants are typically brought to fill gaps in expertise and capacity, yet, a reliance on consultants further infantilises the state, reducing internal capacity. Similarly, management consultants promise to eliminate leakages, yet governments have struggled to quantify the added value of management consultants. Thus, management consultants simultaneously promise improvements in good governance, whilst ushering in governance arrangements which in some respects echo pre-existing forms of corruption. This research seeks to undertake the first mapping of the role of management consultants in governance in Nigeria.
2) PPPs in practice: new configurations of state, society and market
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are being touted as the solution to various developmental problems from expanding public good provision, to filling ‘infrastructure funding gaps’ and mitigating climate breakdown (Bayliss and Waeyenberge 2018). Yet, they sit at the fault-line of fundamental disagreements that persist over the ultimate aims of governance reform, whether in developing countries like Nigeria or the West. The first key debate on PPPs concerns the role of markets in achieving the public good. Where the pro-market good governance camp sees PPPs as a way to harness the efficiency of the private sector for the goal of the public good. Others – for whom democratic institutionalisation is the aim – see private interest as a liability for corruption and its pursuit a disruption to rule-bound decision-making by a Weberian state. Much of the western PPPs literature is based on a rigid binary of public and private. Whether arguing for or against, scholars treat public provision as the default, or ‘traditional’ model of infrastructure construction and service delivery, into which new forms of private sector involvement are more or less “invasive” (Loxley 2013). A second key debate comes out of work on hybrid governance in developing countries. Whilst PPPs presuppose a clearly delineated division between public and private realms, in practice configurations of state and non-state actors and institutions defy these simple dichotomies: diverse actors come together in a patch-work or ‘bricolage’ to deliver services, arbitration and governance. As PPPs take on increasingly complex financial forms – with private water companies functioning as much as an investment vehicle for sovereign wealth funds as utilities providers (Bayliss 2019) - this patchwork nature is taken to new extremes.
Whilst the rise of PPPs is undoubtedly pushed by powerful international institutions and financial actors, it has also been domesticated in diverse ways by developing country governments. Nigerian sub-national governments have enthusiastically embraced the concept of PPPs, with the creation of ‘trust funds’, embodying the tensions between efficiency and institutionalisation discussed above. The most famous, and apparently most successful, was set up by Lagos State Government in 2007 to tap into private funding to upgrade security provision (PERL 2017). Since then states with radically varying institutional environments and economic profiles have adopted the same model of a trust fund: a board of trustees, comprising businessmen and civil servants, fund-raising to secure donations from the private sector for public services. What makes these remarkable is that unlike in traditional PPPs, the resulting relationship between the state and the private sector is not codified in contractual obligations, but remains fluid leading to multiple outcomes from the same ‘on-paper’ institutional arrangements. In Oyo State alone, the trust funds that have been set up for health, education and security each represent a different model of state-society interactions: ranging from philanthropic “old boys” groups competing to out-do each other in donations to their alma maters to highly professionalized collaborations between military staff and private security companies. Elsewhere, trust funds serve as ‘slush funds’ where money for public goods is placed beyond traditional oversight mechanisms.
Through an empirical study of the lived realities of how PPPs play out in complex institutional environments like Nigeria, this project seeks to offer fresh insights on evolving ideas about good governance and corruption.
I convened a double panel on Coronavirus and the Privatisation of Governance (details here and here) at the Political Studies Association conference in March 2021. My full length conference paper "Privatisation old and new: stylised narratives versus changing realities of the firm, the profit motive and the state" is available on request.
Empirically, my interests in privatisation focuses on two under-studied themes: public-private partnerships and the role of management consultants in government.
1) Management consultants and governance in Nigeria
The last decade has seen recurrent scandals involving management consulting firms and state actors. However, behind these high-profile incidents of misbehaviour, there has been a quiet but steady growth of management consultants in the heart of government. In 2017 the global revenues of the ‘Big Four’ consultancies - PriceWaterhouseCooper, Deloitte&Touche, Ernst&Young and KPMG from public contracts totalled $7.5bn. Echoing longstanding concerns with corruption and good governance, the phenomenon of management consultants in government raise new questions about the relationship between privately employed actors and the public nature of state bureaucracies. While most research focuses on the West, we know little about the role of management consultants in in emerging economies. In the context of concerns about pervasive corruption, the idea of importing fresh, professionally minded consultants, trained in international ‘best-practice’, into state agencies is attractive. Yet, against a backdrop of blurred public-private boundaries, management consultants present a puzzle: where they act as state agents they in effect occupy public office but are still compelled to advance the private interests of their employer and contribute to a ‘revolving door’ between the state and business. Consultants are typically brought to fill gaps in expertise and capacity, yet, a reliance on consultants further infantilises the state, reducing internal capacity. Similarly, management consultants promise to eliminate leakages, yet governments have struggled to quantify the added value of management consultants. Thus, management consultants simultaneously promise improvements in good governance, whilst ushering in governance arrangements which in some respects echo pre-existing forms of corruption. This research seeks to undertake the first mapping of the role of management consultants in governance in Nigeria.
2) PPPs in practice: new configurations of state, society and market
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are being touted as the solution to various developmental problems from expanding public good provision, to filling ‘infrastructure funding gaps’ and mitigating climate breakdown (Bayliss and Waeyenberge 2018). Yet, they sit at the fault-line of fundamental disagreements that persist over the ultimate aims of governance reform, whether in developing countries like Nigeria or the West. The first key debate on PPPs concerns the role of markets in achieving the public good. Where the pro-market good governance camp sees PPPs as a way to harness the efficiency of the private sector for the goal of the public good. Others – for whom democratic institutionalisation is the aim – see private interest as a liability for corruption and its pursuit a disruption to rule-bound decision-making by a Weberian state. Much of the western PPPs literature is based on a rigid binary of public and private. Whether arguing for or against, scholars treat public provision as the default, or ‘traditional’ model of infrastructure construction and service delivery, into which new forms of private sector involvement are more or less “invasive” (Loxley 2013). A second key debate comes out of work on hybrid governance in developing countries. Whilst PPPs presuppose a clearly delineated division between public and private realms, in practice configurations of state and non-state actors and institutions defy these simple dichotomies: diverse actors come together in a patch-work or ‘bricolage’ to deliver services, arbitration and governance. As PPPs take on increasingly complex financial forms – with private water companies functioning as much as an investment vehicle for sovereign wealth funds as utilities providers (Bayliss 2019) - this patchwork nature is taken to new extremes.
Whilst the rise of PPPs is undoubtedly pushed by powerful international institutions and financial actors, it has also been domesticated in diverse ways by developing country governments. Nigerian sub-national governments have enthusiastically embraced the concept of PPPs, with the creation of ‘trust funds’, embodying the tensions between efficiency and institutionalisation discussed above. The most famous, and apparently most successful, was set up by Lagos State Government in 2007 to tap into private funding to upgrade security provision (PERL 2017). Since then states with radically varying institutional environments and economic profiles have adopted the same model of a trust fund: a board of trustees, comprising businessmen and civil servants, fund-raising to secure donations from the private sector for public services. What makes these remarkable is that unlike in traditional PPPs, the resulting relationship between the state and the private sector is not codified in contractual obligations, but remains fluid leading to multiple outcomes from the same ‘on-paper’ institutional arrangements. In Oyo State alone, the trust funds that have been set up for health, education and security each represent a different model of state-society interactions: ranging from philanthropic “old boys” groups competing to out-do each other in donations to their alma maters to highly professionalized collaborations between military staff and private security companies. Elsewhere, trust funds serve as ‘slush funds’ where money for public goods is placed beyond traditional oversight mechanisms.
Through an empirical study of the lived realities of how PPPs play out in complex institutional environments like Nigeria, this project seeks to offer fresh insights on evolving ideas about good governance and corruption.
3. Northeast Nigeria
Click on the image to download the report
I also have a sustained research interest in the politics of Northeast Nigeria. I have published on the dynamics of the Boko Haram insurgency and the state's response (see Framing and blaming: Discourse analysis of the Boko Haram uprising, July 2009).
In November 2017 I authored a report "Civil Society, Religion and the State: Mapping of Borno and Adamawa". The report was conducted for the GIZ programme Support to strengthening resilience in North East Nigeria which focuses on governance, livelihoods and infrastructure in areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency. It is based on fieldwork conducted in July-August 2017 in Maiduguri, Yola and Mubi.
My article "Contesting localisation in interfaith peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria" was published in Oxford Development Studies in 2020.
In November 2017 I authored a report "Civil Society, Religion and the State: Mapping of Borno and Adamawa". The report was conducted for the GIZ programme Support to strengthening resilience in North East Nigeria which focuses on governance, livelihoods and infrastructure in areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency. It is based on fieldwork conducted in July-August 2017 in Maiduguri, Yola and Mubi.
My article "Contesting localisation in interfaith peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria" was published in Oxford Development Studies in 2020.
Copyright 2019