The Sad Story of Development and Growth: Rules and African Regional Cooperation.

Much has been written about regional cooperation in Africa as a means of achieving development and growth and ending its marginalisation in the world economy. Within the last four decades almost two hundred African regional arrangments have been more or less unsuccessful according to their intended aims. Nowadays, the promises of regional cooperation vary from the best possibility to get fast access to the global market; the chance to preserve partial autonomy; to being the fundament of an alternative hegemonic project. Most approaches try to explain the present economic, political and social African reality with the help of suitable empirical facts that are proving the rightness of their analysis and are giving the sound basis for the knowledge about the right things to do. But this ignores both that there isn’t a world out there which we only have to discover in order to know what is right or wrong as well as the complexity of social arrangements. As a result, at the beginning and at the end of such talks are complaints: surprisingly people don’t do what they are ought to do. In our paper we will focus on some categories of rules and rule which can be found within the international (institutional) environment and the structures of national societies. Alltogether they constitute present forms of regional cooperation in Africa, e.g. the SADC, and choices for their future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]