Innover en politique : les acteurs internationaux, régionaux et nationaux en stratégies de développement économique en Afrique

Why, how and when does institutional or political change occur in Africa? By examining the postcolonial African strategies for economic development, and focusing on the evolution of the role of the State—the State as the central actor for development, the attempt to retrench the State, limited interventionism, the return of the State to the economic arena—the present thesis proposes an explanation of institutional change with a special focus on political and institutional innovations. In fact, behind the apparent continuity that most analytical and normative authors critique, there are innovations that the ideational, strategic, temporal and institutional variables allow us to demonstrate in a heuristic manner.  This thesis thus proposes a new comparative analysis of the role of African public institutions (elites, States, public administration: Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Benin, Congo, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Togo,  Senegal), international institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the UNO) and regional organizations (the African Union, the NEPAD) in the emergence and the trajectories of development strategies in Africa. The favorable temporal contexts, the crises of the preceding models, the structuring configurations and institutional heritage, the instrumental strategies of the interested actors, the political learning, the cognitive and normative dimensions of the ideas contribute to explaining the diffusion and institutional sedimentation and conversion as privileged processes of innovation in Africa. The critique of these concepts makes it possible to develop tools better adapted to explain institutional inclusion and intrusion.  Institutional inclusion is a semi-strategic and semi-ideational process through which national or regional actors intentionally include (international) strategies (or solutions) that already exist in a new institution or policy with the aim of increasing the probability of acceptance (recognition, social suitability, real or perceived common values) or success (to ensure their interests) of their strategy within a structured political environment. The ideas are constitutive of the interests in this process.  The institutional intrusion is a semi-strategic and semi-structural process by which national actors are partly forced to adopt new institutions or policies, and agree to do so only because of the asymmetry in power, the structural constraints (structure), or the potential benefits (strategies) of the international actors. In this context, relevant and non-constraining alternatives are quasi inexistent, but national actors still have (limited) room for negotiations. Inspired by specialist like Nicolas van de Walle, Kathleen Thelen, Robert Bates, Barry Weingast, Alexander Wendt, Peter Hall, Theda Skocpol, and Paul Pierson, the concepts of institutional intrusion and inclusion that we propose reconcile many approaches that many scholars considered contradictory. They successfully integrate strategic, structural, temporal and ideational variables to analyze the same scientific object. Empirically speaking, the present thesis explains the emergence of development strategies in Africa, as well as provides a better knowledge of the relationship between the international, regional and national actors in the process of emergence and development of institutions and public policies. A special attention is given to dynamics between numerous actors and variables (ideas, interests, institution, time) to explain the main strategies of the last three decades: national development strategies of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Ivory Coast, Congo, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Togo, the Lagos Plan of Action, the structural adjustment program, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, the New Partnership for Africa Development and some interventions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations.  While being interested in the question of the international, regional and national innovations wrongly forsaken by most of the serious analyses, this dissertation renews the discussion on change, especially political and institutional innovation in Africa, within the international organizations (the IMF, the World Bank, and the United Nations) and in Political Science.

Keyphrases: political and institutional change, political and institutionnal innovation, strategy for economic development, NEPAD, NEPAD, DSRP, PRSP, IMF, World Bank, institutional intrusion and inclusion, State and Public Administration