Austerity in Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2616428
AutoresJ Pfeiffer (0000-0002-7985-9437, University of Washington [email protected], autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen2019
Número83
Páginas51-61
Fecha de publicación2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFocaal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0920-1297 • E-ISSN: 1558-5263
EditorialBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/fcl.2019.830105
OpenAlexW2921707378
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas26

Austerity across Africa has been operationalized through World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs since the 1980s, later rebranded euphemistically as poverty reduction strategies in the late 1990s. Austerity's constraints on public spending led donors to a "civil society" focus in which NGOs would fill gaps in basic social services created by public sector contraction. One consequence was large-scale redirection of growing foreign aid flows away from public services to international NGOs. Austerity in Africa coincides with the emergence of what some anthropologists call "audit cultures" among donors. Extraordinary data collection infrastructures are demanded from recipient organizations in the name of transparency. However, the Mozambique experience described here reveals that these intensive audit cultures serve to obscure the destructive effects of NGO proliferation on public health systems

Audit · Austerity · Civil society · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Management · Operationalization · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Public sector · International Development and Aid · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare