Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and conceptualizes the partnership between GIZ and the AU Commission. It focuses on the daily interactions between GIZ advisors and AU staff in Addis Ababa and investigates how GIZ’s consultancy work impacts on visions of African border governance and development.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the partnership between “Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH” (GIZ), a private German development agency, and staff at the African Union Commission’s Department for Political Affairs, Peace and Security (AUC PAPS) in Addis Ababa. It forms part of a slowly growing corpus of critical research on IOs in the Global South and their external partnerships. The role of GIZ as a de facto consultancy that advises the AU and its member states on various governance issue has not been the subject of an academic analysis yet. This paper describes and conceptualizes the daily interactions, interpersonal dynamics, and decision-making processes between GIZ advisors and their counterparts at the AU, using the example of joint knowledge production in the context of the AU Border Programme (AUBP). Perceptions of the respective “other”, diverging career incentives and assumptions about how things should be done differ significantly, leading to a variety of challenges in the partnership on the ground. Informed by organizational anthropology and sociology perspectives that aim to make sense of “Aidland”, this paper is based on extensive field work in Addis Ababa, including interviews with programme staff and consultants, participant observation and document analysis. I argue that this partnership cannot be fully understood through a clear-cut “donor-recipient” lens. Instead, it is fraught with various forms of contestations and pockets of agency. By highlighting the marges de manoeuvre available to both GIZ and the AU Commission, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the debate on agency in international development cooperation.