Recent years have seen considerable advances in the comparative study of federalism and multi-level governance. Our understanding has improved partly due to studies across the developing world, especially Latin America and emerging Asia. There is also a growing literature on decentralization in Africa, but there has been surprisingly little structured comparison of the causes or consequences of African federalism. While a robust literature treats each of Africa's federal countries in isolation (with some comparative checking), scholars have barely begun to leverage cases comparatively. This paper thus offers structured comparison of the three African countries - Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa - where federalism exists as a stable institutional set. The paper argues that an “African variant” of federalism holds across the three countries (to differing degrees), and this variant challenges assumptions about how multi-level governance operates, especially with regards to the vertical separation of powers and robust guarantees of autonomy of SNGs that are implicit in federal designs.
The paper first outlines the centralized variant of “holding together” federalism that prevails in Africa, tracing it to a quest by central states for stability in Africa’s particular context of crisis. Thereafter, I document the political, administrative, and fiscal mechanisms through which centralized federalism operates in Africa. Three variables emerge: dominant parties, limited own-source revenues for subnational governments, and administrative structures of civil service bureaucracies. Each limits one key area of subnational autonomy; these are political, fiscal, and administrative autonomy, respectively. A subsequent section characterizes the limited autonomy of SNGs in dominant-party federations, comparing Ethiopia and South Africa. Nigeria is then used as a shadow case to illustrate both the power and scope conditions of the findings. A concluding section examines how African cases can help further federal theory, and notes both the damaging and salutary aspects of this African variant.
