Power and Politics in Africa is a five-year programme of research and policy engagement launched in 2007. It brings together research centres and think-tanks in Africa, Europe and the USA with funding from the UK Department for International Development and the Advisory Board of Irish Aid. It is led by staff of the Overseas Development Institute, London.
The programme is dedicated to "discovering institutions that work for poor people". That means exploring the kinds of political, economic and social arrangements that, if adopted, would enable countries of sub-Saharan Africa to make faster progress towards development and the elimination of extreme poverty. We aim to identify ways of ordering politics and regulating power and authority that might work better than those now in place. We want to do that on the basis of a careful and critical look at what has worked well in Africa itself in the recent and not-so-recent past.
Developmental Regimes in Africa (DRA) explores the policies and governance conditions that are needed if Africa is to match the economic and social achievements of Southeast Asia.
DRA brings together Tracking Development, led by the African Studies Centre in Leiden, Netherlands; the University of Leiden’s leading specialists in Southeast Asian studies; and Africa Power and Politics.