Welcome to video lecture three on the Building Blocks of Federalism and Decentralization. In video lecture one, we looked at the legal foundations of the twin concepts. That is the constitution, courts, and national bill of rights and freedoms. Video lecture two was about the political foundations, particularly ensuring that regions have political representation at the center, but there's also a more fluid and changing part of the picture, the social. That is harder to categorize and neat and symmetrical formal categories of course. Everything can be neatly codified in constitutions and legislation. Often the uncodified, that is, the social, the economic, the demographic, and geographical factors matter a great deal. Having direct influence on the workings of federalism and decentralization. This means that, just looking at the way the constitutions divide power, or looking at the way political institutions are formally organized, or the way the party system functions, is not going to help us understand how things work in practice. Looking at the social structure through a sociological perspective then becomes necessary. Federalism and decentralization provide territorially based communities a degree of autonomy to manage their own affairs. But if ethnic religious cultural communities lack territorial concentration, then there is very little these two territorial principles of known majoritarianism can do to help. In terms of the social foundations, it is the territorially based social distinctiveness, be it ethnic, linguistic, or cultural, that forms the social building blocks of federalism and decentralization. Now it is true that in older established federations such as Austria and Germany, there are no such territorially based distinctiveness. Neither language, nor ethnicity, nor religion, nor culture carry with them territorial characteristics in these countries. For them, federalism is not about managing such territorially based ethnolinguistic diversity. In Africa however, we do not have many ethnolinguistically homogenous countries like Austria, Germany. Most African countries are in fact defined by a bewildering degree of ethnic, linguistic, demographic, and geographic complexity. All this makes it necessary to revisit the work of a preeminent scholar of federalism, William Livingston. As we had seen in the first video lecture of this module, federalism and decentralization were historically often studied under constitutional law. Not surprisingly, the legal angle has remained quite pronounced to this day, especially in the older and established federations of the west. It is where focus is on the formal, the codified, and the institutional and constitutional. This has remained quite influential in the study of older federations. But albeit in the minority, there is also an alternative perspective to federalism that highlights the uncodified aspects of federalism, particularly the social structure, and its influence on federalism. The leading name within this scholarly tradition is William Livingston. Writing in 1952, Livingston deviated from the more legalistic perspectives in federalism studies at the time, and he claimed the following. Institutional devices, both in form and function, are only the surface manifestations of the deeper federal quality of the society that lies beneath the surface. The essence of federalism lies not in the institutional or the constitutional structure, but in the society itself. For Livingston, a federal society was one with territory based diversity, and one where ethnolinguistic territorial patterns were fundamental. Of course, Livingston is not the only scholar emphasizing the social and the informal. Others have also let there names to this scholarly investigation. And more often than not, for most federalism scholars, the concept of federal society denotes territory based ethnolinguistic diversity. But one could also use other politically salient social divisions in the form of a federal society. Economics can matter. Or more precisely, the type of economic activity that divides and pits communities against each other. If one regional community mostly engages in say, sedentary farming, and another in livestock herding, this does create territorial, political patterns in African federalism, that Livingston had hinted at that. Federal society could also capture the different levels of development, among different cultural communities of the country. For example, some of the aboriginal communities, inhabiting the depths of the rain forest of southern Ethiopia, had until recently remained insulated and isolated from the rest of the country. Disadvantaged in terms of political influence, economic power, and education, these aboriginal communities bring in certain asymmetrical political patterns into the workings of federalism and decentralization, and, if you'll give that, a purely legal perspective would overlook. Geography could yet bring another element that feeds into the territorial dynamics of a federal society. Again, to give an example from Ethiopia, the country's imperial history was defined by highlander expansion into the lowlands. The contemporary remnants of this historical geographic process remains an important element in Ethiopian federalism. Nigeria's geographic divisions are also examples of this. Geography plays a role in Nigerian federalism, but this instance it adds to the religious divisions in the country between the mostly Muslim North and the mostly Christian South. Yet another reflection of the territorial dynamics of the federalist society at play. What makes this all potentially important is the historical fluidity that attends the territorial distribution of communities. Ethnic communities, especially in Africa, have had a tradition of migrating and then settling in lands that might not be their ancestral ones. Even when this settlement goes back generations, it often unleashes very divisive opinions on who belongs to the land in question. And when European settlers are added to the picture, as it is the case in South Africa, the number of potentially divisive issues just multiplied. All of these uncodified social factors can influence the way the formal institutions of federalism and decentralization work in practice. Society, politics, law, all seem to matter. None of these academic disciplines on their own could provide a comprehensive and coherent answer, and yet neither do their findings seem to be inherently combinable, that is, adding them on top of each other is not going to provide a successively clearer picture. Quite simply, because of having different starting points and different intellectual foundations, these academic disciplines have different goals and different aspirations that does not always add up to a coherent picture. Their findings do not seamlessly come together, but they still matter. So what are we then do? That is going to be precisely what we reflect on in the next video lecture, concluding Morofree. I'll see you there. Bye.
