Promoting African 'Owned and Operated' Development: A Reflection on The New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)

Abstract

Abstract Though a very recent new African international regime spearheaded by the 'Renaissance' foreign policy of a Post Apartheid African leadership, Africa's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) reflects important departures in 'African Affairs' policy, allowing for more integrated African development as well as for new forms of participation for the continent in the global economy.Nevertheless, while representing in theory and practice a long-standing debate across the continent on issues involving economic development and globalization, in 2001, during the incipient stages of NEPAD's establishment, the general sentiment toward its goal as a continental 'self reliant' path to development – 'owned' by Africans – was heavily criticized by African policy analysts. The criticism charged that because NEPAD followed a development strategy that relied on global capital and dependent development, its objectives were doomed to fail despite the document's pan nationalistic intentions.The current article explores the extent to which NEPAD's ideological vision to combine collective political nationalism ushered in by the African Renaissance with economic globalization is plausible and achievable as a viable and realizable response to the world's poorest continent's millennium development goals. The article further analyzes the intellectual roots of NEPAD's G-8 induced African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) revealing the shortcomings of approaching African development from the global hegemony of democracy and good governance.The article thus concludes alternatively that NEPAD's winning strategy may come from the development blueprint's emerging status as a continental regional institution driven by a renewed pan Africanist ideology.