The State, Technology and Industrialization in Africa

Industrialization in Africa has relied heavily on state institutions of various kinds and on the inflow of foreign capital, especially foreign aid. With particular reference to technology and on the basis of a wide range of case-studies, this book explains how these features of the African experience have jointly contributed not only to the many cases of failure in the public sector, but also to a number of exceptional cases that can be regarded as success stories. The explanatory framework that is used for this purpose is guided by their cognition of two ideas. The first is that technological behaviour in the public sector cannot be understood with reference to the existing literature on technology and development and that it requires instead a very different model of how the bureaucracy in Africa really functions. The second is that any such model needs to incorporate the political aspects of this behaviour, especially those aspects that have to do with the size of public sector institutions.