Abstract

Two years on from the Gleneagles G8: What has been achieved? What has changed? In July 2005 the first edition of Matthew Lockwood’s The State They’re In asked the key questions of the moment: What are the roots of poverty in Africa and what should now be done about it? How can a better understanding of African politics contribute to an entirely new policy agenda for aid, trade, and debt? This new edition continues to investigate these issues, now placing the arguments in the context of the Make Poverty History campaign of 2005, and the outcomes of the G8 summit in Gleneagles in July 2005 and the WTO summit in Hong Kong in December 2005. It broadens the scope of the first edition to address the American approach to aid and the new 'transformational diplomacy' agenda. Finally, with 'governance' now centre stage of policy debates on Africa, this edition clarifies how the arguments in the book differ from the standard approaches to governance, and why those approaches will not work. Lockwood draws on a substantial body of research to argue that much thinking on Africa - from both official donors and from international NGOs alike - is flawed, because that thinking either does not recognize or does not draw out the implications of the central role of politics and the state in Africa’s development problems.