States at work : : dynamics of African bureaucracies / / edited by Thomas Bierschenk, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan.

• Superior document: Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies, volume 12
• TeilnehmendeR: Bierschenk, Thomas.; Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre.
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : Brill,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: African-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (Series) ; v. 12.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (454 p.)
• Notes: Includes index.

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focusing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to the ‘good governance’ discourse and new public management policies; the consequences of these reforms for the daily working of state bureaucracies and for the civil servants’ identities and modes of accountability; and the space that exists for bottom-up micro-reforms that build on local innovations or informal arrangements.

Table of Contents

Studying the dynamics of African bureaucracies : an introduction to states at work / Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan -- Ethnographies of public services in Africa : an emerging research paradigm / Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan -- Seeing like a state agent : the ethnography of reform in Senegal's forestry services / Giorgio Blundo -- Factionalism and staff success in a Nigerian university : a departmental case study / Chris Willott -- Working in neopatrimonial settings : public sector staff perceptions in Tanzania and Uganda / Ole Therkildsen -- "We make do and keep going!" Inventive practices and ordered informality in the functioning of the district courts in Niamey snd Zinder (Niger) / Oumarou Hamani -- "I take an oath to the state, not the government" : career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants / Carola Lentz -- "We must run while others walk" : African civil servants, state ideologies and bureaucratic practices in Tanzania, from the 1950s to the 1970s / Andreas Eckert -- Sedimentation, fragmentation and normative double-binds in (West) African public services / Thomas Bierschenk -- The politics of reform: a case study of bureaucracy at the ministry of basic education in Cameroon / Helene Charton -- Building state capacities? The case of the poverty reduction unit in Mali / Isaline Bergamaschi -- A breeding ground for revenue reliability? Cameroonian veterinary agents and tax officials in the face of reform / Jose-Maria Munoz -- Old-school bureaucrats and technocrats in Malawi : civil service reform in practice / Gerhard Anders -- Teachers unions and the selective appropriation of public service reforms in Benin / Azizou Chabi Imorou -- The state that works : a 'pockets of effectiveness' perspective on Nigeria and beyond / Michael Roll -- The delivery state in Africa : interface bureaucrats, professional cultures and the bureaucratic mode of governance / Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan.