Description:

Abstract:

The past fifteen years have seen a surge in basic public goods access in sub-Saharan Africa, in large part spurred on by an influx of funds and attention from the Millennium Development Goals. But despite the fact that these goals aimed, in part, to reach the most under-served, the literature on public goods delivery in Africa abounds with reasons why expectations of their success should be tempered. Examining public goods construction in decentralized, rural Senegal during the 2000s, this project breaks from the traditional emphasis on partisan or ethnic factors as drivers of public goods delivery in the region to argue that the local politics of public goods delivery is intimately structured by precolonial political geography. I advance a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutions and informal collective identities, rooted in the past, improves the ability of rural elites to overcome local collective action problems. Drawing on interviews with over 300 local elected officials and elites, I illustrate how cross-village feelings of ‘groupness’ in historically centralized areas incentivize rural elites to coordinate, while such encompassing ties are largely absent in acephalous regions. Quantitative evidence from a village-level dataset supports the claim that historically centralized areas of the country distribute goods more broadly across space. The project thus identifies a socio-political legacy for historic institutions and calls attention to the important sub-national variation that decentralization reforms are engendering in the region.

Bio:
Martha Wilfahrt is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Science department at Northwestern. Her research focuses on the political economy of development and state-society relations, with a focus on Francophone West Africa. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the historical legacies of pre-colonial statehood on the contemporary politics of public goods delivery in rural Senegal. Side projects include papers looking at how receiving new social services impacts citizens evaluations of the state and central government transfers to local governments in West Africa. Martha received her PhD from Cornell's Government department in 2015.