Africa: How formal and informal institutions interact in Africa

In Africa, as elsewhere, the path or paths to development and modernity are dependent on historical institutional context, and cannot be imposed from outside. The paper first compares Africa with five alternative models of how development occurred elsewhere.It is argued that African states are ‘outliers’ in that the legacy of recent colonialism and the dominance of external forces have created a peculiar mixture of ‘informal’ values and behaviours with formal institutions, in which the informal are dominant in power relations but not recognised or understood. Hence development policies lack any real traction.