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- Convenors:
-
Vasudha Chhotray
(University of East Anglia)
Anindita Adhikari (Brown University)
Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai (University of Ghana Business School)
Badru Bukenya (Makerere University)
Chiara Cazzuffi (Universidad Mayor)
Cristian Leyton (RIMISP - Latin American Center for Rural Development)
- Stream:
- K: Uneven urban and sub-national development
- Location:
- G5
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to collect new evidence on (a) the magnitude of spatial inequality across and within developing countries and regions; (b) the local and aggregate costs that spatial inequality generates; c) the political economy drivers of spatial inequality including critical political junctures; (d) examples of successful policies to address spatial inequality.
Long Abstract:
Amidst growing attention to inequalities in recent years, spatial inequalities have been of particular concern not only because of the conflicts they often engender, but also because they constitute a large component of overall inequality in many developing countries. The persistence of spatial inequalities within countries is a particularly important dimension of this research and has focused attention on the subnational political unit as a basis for uncovering the most significant drivers of difference.
This panel seeks to collect new evidence on (a) the magnitude of spatial inequality across and within developing countries and regions; (b) the local and aggregate costs that spatial inequality generates, including (but not limited to) in terms of conflict and slower growth and poverty reduction; (c) the political economy drivers of spatial inequality, and d) examples of successful policies that have addressed spatial inequality. On c), we are particularly interested in political economy factors such as critical political junctures (territorial reorganization and institutional shifts for instance) which interact and transform the pre-existing political context, social configurations and institutional capacities to produce unequal development outcomes
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that after a period of regional convergence in educational attainment in the early independence era in sub-Saharan Africa, the economic slowdown in the 1980s and university reforms of the 1990s have contributed to a substantial rise in regional inequality in university attainment.
Paper long abstract:
In the first decades of independence university education in Sub-Saharan Africa was a narrow, state-financed preserve that benefitted only the most promising secondary school graduates. In the face of severe resource constraints, growing demand for higher education and under pressure from international donors, most governments liberalized their tertiary education systems in the 1990s. User fees were introduced or increased and private provision expanded alongside a rapid growth in enrolment within the older public universities. Attainment levels increased sharply as privately-funded students entered universities and colleges in large numbers. How has the regional and ethnic composition of university graduates changed over successive cohorts in the face of these changes to the university sector? Using census data to trace the sub-national origins of the university educated populations in six Anglophone African countries over successive birth cohorts, this paper shows that prior to the crisis decades, university student bodies were growing increasingly regionally and ethnically representative of the national population, owing largely to improvements in equity in secondary school access. Since the 1980s, regional and ethnic inequalities have increased again, with a growing attainment gap between people born in the main urban metropolises and the remaining population. This new urban bias is changing the composition of the university educated population, and possibly, by extension, the contours of Africa's future economic elites.
Paper short abstract:
How do states govern unequal spatial orders? This paper underlines one Political Economy driver of spatial inequality: the strategic electrification of long-neglected African peripheries. The analysis traces the co-evolution of access and provision nationwide and in northern Ghana from 1989 to 2012.
Paper long abstract:
How do contemporary states govern unequal spatial orders? This interrogation has haunted Political Geography since long. One plausible answer underlines the strategic and uneven institutional choices by African states. Regrettably, Catherine Boone's exploration of 'unevenness by design' in post-independence Africa has prompted few translations to the present. To redress this neglect, this paper explores the thriving fortunes of peripheral electrification in Africa and, especially, of the National Electrification Scheme in its deployment across Northern Ghana from 1989 through 2012. Peripheral electrification is particularly prone to strategies of purposeful unevenness. Not only is the process spatially selective and commonly delivered by state-owned centralised agencies. Also, the frail economic case inevitably attracts political calculations. The inquiry makes three findings. First, there exists some degree of correlation between uneven access across urban and rural areas and narrow electoral gains in pivotal districts of Northern Ghana. Second, electrification in the region stubbornly remains at odds with the distributional outcomes resulting from the national electric settlement. The analysis, however, also reveals a tightening room for manoeuvre for state rulers induced by policies of full-cost recovery and their implications upon distributional outcomes. Therefore, the conclusion regarding Boone's argument is mixed. Overall, her model holds, yet her black-boxing of central rulers' quintessential motivations and degrees of freedom may be problematic for contemporary African hybrid regimes. Accordingly, this paper advocates a further specification of the contentious dynamics of the national electric settlement and of its intimate connections with politico-geographical strategies toward peripheries.