African Governance and Space: Transport Corridors, Border Towns and Port Cities in Transition

Project Information

AFRIGOS

Grant agreement ID: 670851

DOI

10.3030/670851

Project closed

EC signature date 9 November 2015

Start date 1 January 2016

End date 30 June 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 491 364,00

EU contribution

€ 2 491 364,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

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

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

AFRIGOS has investigated the 'respacing' of Africa associated with a drive towards regional and continental integration, on one hand, and the re-casting of Africa's engagement with the global economy, on the other. This has been accompanied by unprecedented levels of investment in road, rail and port infrastructure along designated transport corridors. Eradicating the obstacles to the free flow of people and goods is the stated priority of governments, Regional Economic Communities, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the EU and China.

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.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Under Stream 1, research focused on the lineage of the corridor concept within the World Bank and the reasons for the re-awakened interest in ‘big infrastructure’. Subsequently, there was a greater concentration on China, the EU, RECs and global logistics companies. Attention was also directed to associations that lobby for the removal of barriers to the freedom of movement of people and goods.
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.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project speaks to debates within border studies, multi-level governance and the anthropology of the state and infrastructure. AFRIGOS is distinctive in creating an integrated field of vision within which it is possible to link cognate processes across extended spaces and at very different scales. The comparisons cover continental and regional integration processes, while at an intermediate level they address corridors, border towns and port cities. Homing in further, the project compares the experience of driving a consignment of goods from a port across hundreds of kilometres to the final destination. The project has revealed how truck drivers and transport managers continue to rely on personal networks and their ability to navigate their way around administrative, and actual, pot-holes. AFRIGOS also involves comparisons between Customs work at border crossings, including One-Stop Border Posts. What is apparent is that the new technologies do not simply replace the old ones: paper continues to proliferate alongside electronic documents.

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).

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