ABSTRACT
Academic research on public authority in Africa has mushroomed in recent years, suggesting that governance is no longer primarily viewed through a state-centric lens. For some, this has been a welcome corrective to reductive discourses on neo-patrimonialism and state fragility. For others, it is a worrisome flirtation with alternative forms of rule-making and political ordering that threatens to romanticise and paper over a host of ongoing social ills affecting Africans and their state-building projects. This debate is undoubtedly important and should help shape future research on public authority in Africa and elsewhere. This chapter aims to prepare the ground by exploring the origins of the concept, its intellectual debt to legal pluralism and its approach to statehood. It then delves into some emerging works on the public authority showing why it has much to say about the nature of African states and people’s lives, including nuancing older frameworks that proposed grand theories of underdevelopment or distance from liberal norms. Doing so addresses some of the research critiques on public authority and its contemporary directions. We conclude that public authority concept has now matured, leaving it well prepared to explore new issues and contexts of public policy in Africa.
