South Africa, Africa and Global Economic Governance Forums

Project description

South Africa’s role as a regional power with a positive outreach throughout the continent entails inter alia the representation of African interest in international governance forums, as e.g. the G20. These forums gain increasing importance, whereby South Africa is in most of the cases the only represented African country. This provides a good opportunity for South Africa to represent African interests; however, so far South Africa is not sufficiently sensitized to do so. Furthermore, African states have little own capacities to pro-actively develop own positions and make their voices heard. Finally, there are few formalized structures on the African continent to feed into South Africa’s participation. These challenges at the domestic level and a limited representation of their interests by South Africa undermine African participation in shaping agendas concerning global economic governance. Therefore African states remain ‘takers’ of rules and norms established outside of the continent rather than shaping them in their own best interests.

The objective of the project was to supplement and enhance government articulation of South African and African interests in the G20 and other global governance initiatives by initiating an African network of governmental institutions, scholars and think-tanks that conduct analytical work and carry-out capacity building measures.

In particular, the research team wanted to achieve following results:

• Qualitative improvement in analysis of and discourse about discrete global economic governance topics and the role of the G20 therein on the part of targeted think-tanks, researchers, and policy-makers;
• Stronger representation of the views of African countries in global economic governance fora; and
• Linkages established and sustained between South African officials and a broad network of African stakeholders

In 2012 DIE contributed a critical assessment of the reflection of African positions in G20 decisions in the area of financial sector development and financial regulation.

The project was approved in September 2011 by the Steering Committee of the TriCo Fund with duration until August 2013.

The Trilateral Cooperation Fund (TriCo Fund) is a mechanism for South Africa and Germany to support the implementation of development programmes of African countries and regional initiatives by using the experiences and knowledge as well as human, institutional and financial resources of South Africa and Germany. The TRI-CO Fund was established through agreement between South Africa and Germany to strengthen South Africa’s contribution towards the development of the continent.

Beneficiaries

We intended to work with a number of African partners with strong links to policy-makers in governments on the continent. The first component of the workplan was to further develop our network with potential partners across Africa. Strong expressions of interest in partnering with us came from: the African Economic Research Consortium (based in Nairobi); United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (based in Addis Ababa) and the African Capacity Building Foundation (based in Harare). UNECA and ACBF are both official multilateral organisations that work closely with governments on the continent. AERC has amongst its members senior finance and planning officials from a wide range of African countries. There were significant opportunities to work with the networks of all three organisations to build capacity amongst African policy makers to engage on issues related to global economic governance. The beneficiaries of this project already undertook some work on related topics but this proposal provided an opportunity for them to be linked directly to the G20 and other bodies through exchanges with South African Government representatives and experts from other countries, including Germany.