Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AFRIGOS (African Governance and Space: Transport Corridors, Border Towns and Port Cities in Transition)
Reporting period: 2020-07-01 to 2022-06-30
Objective 1 was to understand the provenance and reproduction of orthodoxies concerning the nexus between infrastructural development, trade, mobility and border management that converge on the busiest transport corridors in East, West and Southern Africa. By examining the interplay between the competing agendas of actors operating at different scales, we can make sense of the slippage between planning and implementation. Objective 2 was to understand how everyday users of the corridors encounter ‘respacing’ in practice. AFRIGOS has been concerned not merely with the effortless flows that are posited in policy documents, but also with the reality of blockages and stoppages. Objective 3 was to understand the implications for the vitality of port cities, border towns and hubs where livelihoods are deeply rooted in mobility and informality.
The project was pursued through five cross-cutting thematic streams.
Stream 1, Agenda-Setting addressed Objective 1
Stream 2, Peripheral Urbanism, addressing Objective 3, explored why so many of Africa’s fastest growing urban centres are located on or very close to borders, and set out to understand dynamics within port cities.
Stream 3, Border Workers, investigated how livelihoods and work patterns have been reshaped by new infrastructure, IT and spatial configurations such as One-Stop Border Posts. Addressing Objective 2, AFRIGOS considered how border workers seek to increase their margin for manoeuvre
Stream 4, Connective Infrastructure, was concerned with the Objectives 1 and 3, and investigated the financing, construction and operation of corridor infrastructure.
Stream 5, People and Goods in Motion, spoke to Objectives 2 and 3, as it captured the nuances of mobility and stoppage. It targeted the truckers and transport companies that ply the long-distance routes, the petty traders who shuttle across the border, and passengers.
Initial research in Stream 2 traced the demographic patterns of border and hub towns in East (Uganda/Kenya) and West Africa (Ghana/Togo). Subsequent research focused more closely on urban dynamics at Lomé/Aflao and Garoua-Boulai, a Camerounian hub located at the border with Central African Republic. Research also concentrated on the port cities of Kribi, Mombasa and Lamu.
In Stream 3, members of the team investigated the ways in which small-scale traders and local transporters make use of infrastructure, including OSBPs. The team addressed how the implementation of ‘Single-Window’ and the harmonization of Customs systems has affected the work of border agencies in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Cameroun.
In Stream 4, the team looked in detail at how large infrastructure projects are financed, planned and executed, as well as the constellation of interests that underpin them. It has involved studies of the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya, and bridge projects in Southern Africa and Cameroun. Much of the attention has been directed to Chinese financing and construction projects in East Africa.
Under Stream 5, attention was directed to transport companies and truckers. Research centred on corridors between Cameroun and Chad/CAR; Namibia and Zambia; and between Mombasa and Kigali. The team investigated the measures which transporters have attempted to minimize risks. In West Africa, we investigated the ways in which small-scale traders adjust to disincentives to crossing borders by exploiting the corridors in segments. Inevitably, COVID border closures affected actors in different ways and towards the end of the project we sought to capture this unexpected development.
In concrete situations, we can see the ways in which agendas that emanate from very different places – from Beijing and Washington DC to a district capital – play off one another to shape real-time governance. The multi-scalar implications of Chinese infrastructural interventions, in particular, has taken the debate beyond the established Africa-China framing. A key finding is that while overall priorities might be set at a regional or even continental scale, these are often divorced from how bureaucrats interpret priorities at national and local scales. Conversely, economic interest groups coalesce at the national scale, where they often have the capacity to block unwelcome ‘external’ interventions, but they struggle to shape agendas at a regional level. Finally, everyday users of the corridors have little voice, but their capacity to evade and subvert forces local bureaucracies to reach forms of accommodation that further diverge from official plans. Tracking how interventions mutate as they themselves travel across time and space affords a unique optic on what we might call governance-in-motion.
We always aimed to speak to those who formulate policy interventions and implement them across Africa. The outputs included podcasts, blogs and briefings. In its concluding phase, the the project elicited considerable interest amongst those working on the interface between policy and practice, including the European Commission, SADC and the GiZ – as was reflected in their attendance at the final conference and the social media postings that followed the publication of Transport Corridors in Africa (2022).