Confronting the development dilemma: Decentralized cooperation, governance and local responses to neoliberal reform in rural Senegal

This dissertation explores the implications of political and economic reform for local scale governance, defined primarily in terms of conflict management. A decade of neoliberal reform in Africa has revealed a fundamental dilemma; regime threatening conflict is associated with, and perhaps made more difficult to manage by, the very reforms deemed essential to sustained political and economic development. My research in Senegal demonstrates that some resolution of this dilemma involves local-international linkages which provide resources for the constitution of power essential to effective governance. More often, however, the required linkages are not established and local actors decry reforms intended to transfer power to newly designed local institutions as akin to having received an ""empty envelope."" Indigenous governance structures, presumed to be part of the solution to problems caused by the state's withdrawal, often prove inadequate. The work begins with an analysis of Senegal's 2000 presidential election, which constitutes the capstone of one of Africa's most celebrated cases of democratic capitalist transition. Following that, I draw on fieldwork in two rural sites to construct a decentralized cooperative model for local governance. The dynamics between political and economic reform, local resource-based conflict and the weakness of local self-governance all have profound implications for the constellation of local identities and conflicts associated with them. The type of conflict I explore in this research is that between herders and farmers, one well known throughout Sahelian Africa Subnational variation in the ability of local actors to execute greater mandates for self governance, and thus manage herder-farmer conflicts, is explained by the varied presence of international actors, and their resources, at the local level. This variation across locale is, partly at least, a function of historical processes of state development that have been characterized by their unevenness.