Austerity in Africa

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2616428
AutoresJ Pfeiffer (0000-0002-7985-9437, University of Washington [email protected], autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume2019
Fascículo83
Páginas51-61
Data de publicação2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFocaal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0920-1297 • E-ISSN: 1558-5263
EditoraBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/fcl.2019.830105
OpenAlexW2921707378
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências 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