Multidimensional Governance and the Transformation of Relations between the State and Citizen Movements in Africa
The aims of this essay are to demonstrate the failure of the prescriptive discourse held by international regulatory institutions and to point up to the emergence of movements which, under the alter-globalization banner, are contributing to a growing claim for open governance in Africa. Actors from the civil society are actually learning to co-produce public policies with the State. This type of multidimensional governance favour horizontal as well as vertical interactions between different categories of actors and contribute to the reconfiguration of the relations between the State, social movements and the private sector, which were typically based on distrust and avoidance. The author, nevertheless, underlines that even when citizen movements promote ascending dynamics, their counterparts are not ready to give up completely the neoliberal paradigm which is still the backbone of development initiatives projected for Africa. Their limits are discussed in this contribution.