Policy Learning in African Cooperation Summits: The Role of African Agency

• In Event: Development, Conflict & Cooperation in the Global South: Bayesian Case Studies

Abstract

In 1993, Japan initiated the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD); subsequently in 2000, the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was held in Beijing. Late comers include the Korea-Africa Forum since 2006 and Indian-Africa Forum Summit since 2008. Since 2019, African leaders have received invitations from a dazzling range of summits and forums: Russia–Africa summit 2019 and 2022, UK–Africa summit 2020, Middle East–Africa Summit 2020, Africa–France Summit 2020, Turkey–Africa Summit 2020, in addition to FOCAC-VIII 2021 and TICAD-VIII 2022. Investigating the initiation and evolution of TICAD and FOCAD, this paper seeks to explain the increasing convergence between the two summits in format and themes. We ask: Why did China adopt and institutionalize this Africa+1 conference format in the first place? What explains Japan’s gradual shift of TICAD themes from aid to economic mutual benefit, as well as TICAD’s change of format from initially held every five years in Tokyo and later triennially and in Tokyo and Africa alternatively, which is the format of FOCAC?

Particularly regarding international development policies, conventional forms of development policy learning happen in Paris, New York, or Washington DC, on the discussion tables of OECD-DAC, United Nations, and World Bank headquarters, which are key platforms of policy co-ordination. They also create physical spaces where policy-makers from different countries meet, share, and learn from each other, a club of global public policy networks. Researchers frequently identify development policy entrepreneurs or diffusion agents as international organizations or powerful states. And a favourable condition for policy diffusion is when states are influenced by geographically proximate neighbouring states. A key factor that existing explanations of international development policy learning and development practice fail to consider is the agency of recipient countries, who are important partners in international development.

The paper proposes an innovative trilateral mechanism of policy diffusion between geographically proximate neighbouring Asian states with an emphasis on the agency of African elites. We argue that some African elites, incentivized by increasing bargaining power vis-à-vis Japan or China, became the facilitators of development policy learning between the two Asian neighbours in terms of the adoption of Africa+1 platform and their increasing similarities in format and themes. This African agency hypothesis is evaluated against three other competing hypotheses:

• Multilateral platform hypothesis: The initial idea, format, and themes of Africa+1 were shared in donor meetings where both China and Japan were present, and their increasing similarity in TICAD and FOCAC was facilitated by official meetings in multilateral platforms such as UNDP, OECD, and the World Bank.
• Bilateral hypothesis: Japan and China, the two neighbouring Asian countries directly learned from each other in terms of initiating the summits or changing their summits’ format and themes. Their mutual learning was motivated by witnessing the success of the other and wanting to achieve the same level of impacts. In this process, the two countries had minimal coordination with African elites.
• Independent hypothesis: The convergence of TICAD and FOCAC is a result of structural conditions of globalization and ‘Africa rising,’ drawing on China’s and Japan’s respective historical experience of aid and material interests, and featuring a pattern of increasing similarity in the African policies of countries from the North.

We evaluate the four competing hypotheses through explicit Bayesian process tracing of the initiation and evolution of TICAD and FOCAC respectively, with a particular focus on why and how major shifts took place. We draw empirical evidence primarily from interviews with Japanese, Chinese, and African experts and officials who organized or participated in the TICAD and FOCAC. The paper also uses policy documents and media reports in Japanese, Chinese, and English to triangulate and complement interview data.

Through articulating how African elites facilitated Japan’s and China’s mutual learning of African Cooperation Summits, this paper advances the international development policy diffusion literature by emphasizing the agency of recipient countries, a previously under-studied area. We also seek dialogue with and advance the recent African agency literature by showing the heterogeneity of African agency across the continent. We show that some countries take advantage of it to promote domestic, regional or continental interest, others free-ride or simply care less. Methodologically, this paper applies explicit Bayesian process tracing, joining this panel’s initiative to promote rigorous qualitative methodology in political science.

Authors

• Yuan Wang

• Kenichi Doi, Peking University