African studies and Africa policy

A precarious relationship

Since the end of the 1990s, the German government has increasingly laid claim to actively safeguard German interests in the international arena. Germany is in fact now perceived as a global player. We are faced with corresponding foreign expectations not only in the debate on Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in connection with structural issues in North-South relations.

Since the adoption of the HIPC-2 initiative at the G7 summit in Cologne in 1999, Germany has 'discovered' Africa above all as a target for its multilateral policy concept. This is especially clear in the high symbolic support it gives to the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NePAD). Concrete commitments made following the G8's Action Plan for Africa, adopted in Kananaskis in 2002, cover, among other things, support for building up African rapid reaction forces by 2010. The buzzwords for Germany's policy towards African countries are currently poverty reduction, promotion of democracy and crisis prevention. New ones may be added in the foreseeable future.

This debate arouses expectations of a consistent and efficient implementation of the political concepts. However, the German ministries are far from that. True, German implementing organisations are often credited with having the necessary technical expertise. Also, the German Foreign Office has begun to formulate regional concepts. But in the big conceptual debates – on development policy as well as on other ministries' policies – the German decision-makers all too often are only spectators, or themselves are subject to a kind of 'catch-up development'. Can greater cooperation with regional studies, especially Africa centred social sciences, help to remedy this shortcoming?


Politics and academia

The growing complexity of problems and strategies for solutions, as well as the increased need for steering in implementation, imply new demands on development professionals. Politicians, administrations and the implementing organisations in development cooperation depend on internationally competitive, theoretically well versed and culturally sensitive graduates, equally problem-oriented and self-reflective research, and competent, critical and independent advice from academia. Do Germany's African studies, particularly in the socio-economic field, have the potential to meet this expectation? The honest answer is sobering: German African studies have long been unable to give support to the political reappraisal of Africa by means of training, research, consultancy and evaluation.

This is due mainly to the financial crisis of the German education system, which applies to universities and research institutes alike. In the medium term, it will become a problem of German government policy, which in the African sector risks losing its academic and intellectual foundations. Given the meagre human resources available in future for its Africa policy, Germany will hardly be able to hold its own in international discussions on the region. It will increasingly have to go along with what is researched and conceived elsewhere. Germany as a net importer of ideas and trained personnel? Downsizing is also coming in the foreign policy processes. An already existing German trend to multilateralism, pursued not out of conviction and on the basis of purposeful coordination of natio-nal preferences, but due simply to the country lacking its own positions, will inevitably grow.


Challenges for African studies

Observation 1: Social sciences dealing with Africa are increasingly being marginalised in German university education, in systematic disciplines as well as in the so-called regional studies.

In view of chronically strapped public coffers, heavy cuts are also being made at the universities. Regroupings in political science, sociology and economics teaching result in a thinning-out of entire subject structures and cultures. In many places, university staff who specialise in Africa either are not being replaced upon their retirement by other regional experts or the position is axed immediately. Since a generational change at the universities is approaching over the next few years, there are plenty of opportunities for dumping Africa in teaching. This is already beginning to have a negative across-the-board impact on African studies (and other area studies). It can be assumed that by the end of this decade higher education in Germany will largely have to manage without socio-economic competence on Africa.

Things are no better in African Studies in the stricter sense. The German university structure as it grew offers first of all a linguistic interpretation of the term. But in Germany there is only one lecturer position devoted explicitly to the sociology of Africa(Bayreuth), as well as one each for Africa's politics and economics (both in Leipzig). This corresponds to slightly less than 7 per cent of all African Studies posts from associate professorships upwards at German universities.(1)

So the question arises of what kind of graduates and expertise the German university system can provide at present, and above all in future, for policy on Africa. What will be the impacts of the foreseeable reduction of the critical academic mass in the systematic disciplines? Will it suffice to accompany Germany's new Africa policy almost exclusively with generalists, who can acquire a culture- and country-specific expertise only as part of their doctorate? Can this gap be filled with the small number of Africanists from faculties that take a narrow approach and are rather remote from politics (linguistics, ethnology)? Can competence on Africa be produced at all in the necessary disciplinary breadth and geographical depth by the present study courses?


Observation 2: Africa-oriented basic research lacks the funds for ongoing internationally competitive and politically relevant research.

A reorientation has also been taking place for some years in the traditional funding institutions. As a result, the answer even to well-argued African Studies applications is ever more often: "Approved, but not funded". Therefore and given the circumstances of the German universities – reorganisation as part of the Bologna Process, whose aim is to establish a uniform European Higher Education Area, along with simultaneous cost-cutting – the scope for the faculties' own research is becoming ever narrower. The training of doctoral candidates in socio-economiclly oriented African studies is more and more often becoming a financial risk for the students since the study foundations, as well, have had to cut their spending.

Outside the universities, research on Africa that is relevant in political and development terms is carried out at the Institute of African Affairs (Hamburg), at the German Development Institute (Bonn) and – although with less staff – at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Berlin) and the Arnold Bergsträsser Institut (Freiburg im Breisgau). That gives a total of a good dozen research facilities in this field, but these too are not entirely safe from possible cost-cutting plans. Therefore, the scope for ongoing country observations (48 states south of the Sahara), internationally relevant discussion on methods and theories, and the reconstruction of empiricism in research projects is very limited in terms of staff and time. Normally, the funds available are hardly enough for necessary journeys in Germany. There is no continuous provision of third party funding which could enable personnel planning in addition to the regular staff. In contrast to, for example, the funding practice in the UK, the German ministries are only now discovering their own role in this process.


Observation 3: Critical and systematic political consultancy and evaluation capacities are scarce.

That policy in all its forms should today be accompanied academically, questioned and evaluated has finally been registered. The potential benefits for the practice are obvious. However, there can be no talk of a systematic advisory capability for German Africa policy because of the lack of expertise in central subject areas, and equally of comprehensive knowledge of a huge number of regions in which Germany pursues a policy or will have to. Independent evaluation of policy, particularly in development cooperation, is made individually time and again, but simply not in an institutional way.

It remains to be noted that the store of regional expertise has already become very thin. The issue is no lon-ger about criticising individual allocation decisions in what is mostly seen as a zero-sum game. Rather, it is about leaving in jeopardy the minimum human capital and expertise capable of reproducing itself. African studies in Germany are running a dramatic risk of no longer being able to accompany Africa policy soundly at the very moment when the reappraisal of Africa that has long been called for is beginning to be implemented. The universities, in the future, will hardly be able to provide the necessary number of Africanists who are trained in the social sciences.


On the path to solutions

Where are the ways out of this crisis, which certainly affects not only African Studies but also development economics and Latin American Studies, and others? There are no simple answers or quick fixes, but a start can be made at all three levels - training, research and evaluation/political consultancy.

After years of a reform backlog, the German education system is now going through a phase of intensive reform efforts. For these, however, Germany's federal system involves a great danger: debates on university reform are, as a rule, regionally limited and usually do not cross the boundaries of a federal state. There is no discussion on ensuring a necessary critical mass of academic expertise in a field that is relevant to foreign policy, and it would only makes sense in a national perspective. However, there is no body that could focus on the national need for anything such as African studies. In the federal states' present mood to save money, foreign policy and development policy are seen as being secondary.

The first step would be establishing a national dialogue between universities, the federal states' ministries of higher education, institutions for the promotion of research, politicians, administrations and developmental implementing organisations. In the short term, it is essential to create awareness of the problem, to sit down together for discussing possible solutions. Politicians and academia should carry out analyses of needs and get them to tally. In the medium term, ways and means must be found to coordinate the federal states’ higher education policies in such a way that impending staff reductions do not exacerbate the crisis of regional expertise: they must make efforts to find a cross-state balance (which, in some instances, has already been achieved in bilateral negotiations). The same goes for the non-university research institutions. Following years of creeping staff reduction, now cuts are looming which will result in crossing the threshold of minimum capacity.

The issue is not about redistribution in a 'cannibalising' zero-sum game. Rather, it now is at stake what expertise Germany wants to afford in relevant subjects of the present and, even more important, of the future (in view of advancing globalisation, with far-off events having repercussions upon our daily lives). These are subjects, which do not always have day-to-day topicality.

A further strategic issue is promotion of research by public funds. Again, a fresh look must de taken at the question with what knowledge and what human resources Germany is supposed to face its internatio-nal future.

For the time being, the prerequisites for African studies playing a constructive role in Germany vis-à-vis a national Africa policy are poorly met. The trend may get worse. Grown German global responsibility and a new international identity on the one hand, and capabilities in the sectors of training, research and consultancy/evaluation on the other, will in the foreseeable future diverge even more. It is high time to talk about when the point of no return will be reached, and how countermeasures can be taken against it in the well-understood interests of all.

1) Ulf Engel (2003): Gedanken zur Afrikanistik – Zustand und Zukunft einer Regionalwissenschaft in Deutschland, in: Afrika Spectrum 38 (1) 111-123
The debate was continued in Afrika Spectrum 38 (2) 245-253