The Impact of Regionalism on Democracy Building: An Examination of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, the world has witnessed a new wave of regionalism and a mushrooming of regional integration organizations, particularly in the global South. Focusing on Africa, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) ranks among the most promising examples of regionalism on the continent. The SADC explicitly aims at building and advancing democracy in the region and its member states as part of its broader agenda on regional development. From a political science perspective, there is general agreement that regional integration and parallel institution building can be useful measures to promote and strengthen democratic rule, since an appropriate institutional “lock-in” implies committing member countries to specified local norms and practices related to democracy. The example of the European Union (EU) gives sound evidence for the success of this mechanism. However, most of the scientific research that aims to explain the relationship between regionalism and the manifestation or stabilization of democracy in the participant member states has focused on the EU so far. To fill the existing gap in the literature, this chapter turns to the SADC and scrutinizes the organization’s regional agenda and policies on building democracies in its member states. By applying a before-and-after design and methods of rigorous process tracing, it provides a benchmarked evaluation of the organization’s efforts in this respect, and comes to the conclusion that the SADC has so far only been partially successful regarding achieving democracy using regional governance mechanisms.