ROAPE on Aid, Development and Regime Change in Africa

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) remains one of the most important venues for structural analysis of African development, foreign aid, class formation, and state transformation. Its recent shift away from a conventional commercial publishing model toward open-access circulation gives renewed relevance to its long-standing critique of donor-led development knowledge.

Aid, poverty reduction, and the limits of donor policy

Rick Rowden’s “Poverty Reduction Is Not Development” argues that the post-Washington Consensus focus on poverty metrics and basic service delivery has often displaced the harder questions of industrial capability, infrastructure, technological learning, and sovereign economic strategy. In this reading, ODA can become politically modest: it treats poverty as a set of welfare deficits rather than a symptom of weak productive capacity and unequal global integration.

Joel Samoff’s earlier analysis of the “intellectual/financial complex of foreign aid” adds a second warning. Aid is not only a financial transfer. It also shapes policy language, research agendas, consultancy markets, and the boundaries of what recipient governments are encouraged to imagine as feasible. Development assistance therefore works through institutions of knowledge as well as budgets.

Regime change and the Sahel coup wave

Bettina Engels’s work on coups and neo-colonialism in the Sahel helps explain why recent changes of government in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger cannot be reduced to a simple story of democratic backsliding. Military rule should not be romanticized, but the popular resonance of anti-French and anti-neocolonial slogans reflects real grievances: security failure, unequal partnerships, monetary dependency, and the perception that external actors have protected elite bargains rather than social transformation.

The policy implication is uncomfortable but necessary. Development organizations that ignore sovereignty, productive capacity, and historically rooted political resentment risk misreading the societies they intend to support. A more serious ODA strategy has to move beyond short project cycles and technocratic governance indicators, and toward institutional capacity that local actors can control, finance, and adapt after external consultants leave.

Sources for further reading

• Rick Rowden, “Poverty Reduction Is Not Development,” Review of African Political Economy, 37(126), 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2010.510631
• Joel Samoff, “The Intellectual/Financial Complex of Foreign Aid,” Review of African Political Economy, 19(53), 1992.
• Bettina Engels, “Coups and Neo-Colonialism,” Review of African Political Economy, 50(176), 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2023.2215443
• ROAPE journal archive and open-access platform: https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/ROAPE