Abstract
Institutions are often framed as the “rules of the game”, especially because they provide both incentives and constraints that shape human behaviour. Beyond being context specific, institutions consist of both formal and informal rules. Due to Africa’s colonial past and continuing attempts to mimic values and ethos of the colonizer, its public policy context reflects an institutional duality that draws on the realities of the colonial metropolis and its precolonial norms and experiences. Contemporary Africa is neither completely indigenous nor modern in terms of its institutional configurations, and informal institutions loom larger in form and context than formal institutions. Yet development practitioners and policymakers continue to analyse policymaking and performance of governments in Africa in a way that speaks to a universalized view of formal institutions. This ignores the weight of informal institutions in shaping policymaking in African countries. This chapter discusses the public policy context in Africa, drawing attention to Africa’s unique institutional settings to explain why policy contents often generated on the basis of the worldviews of former colonizers have failed to address the vexed issues of human well-being as far as Africa is concerned.
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Kpessa-Whyte, M., Dzisah, J. (2024). The Context and Content of Public Policy in Africa. In: Kpessa-Whyte, M., Dzisah, J. (eds) Public Policy in Ghana. International Series on Public Policy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33005-6_2
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