Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Homegrown Internationalism? Innovating Epistemic Dialogue in Africa’s Development Cooperation

Homegrown concepts are increasingly viewed as indigenous alternatives to stem development’s longstanding hegemony by inserting non-Western agency into global cooperation. Drawing on two African cases from Ghana and Rwanda, the paper develops a framework to demonstrate the strategic paradoxes characterizing the agency as Global South countries seek influence on the international stage. While the two countries closely follow the existing logic of development cooperation, they challenge its dominant epistemology albeit subtly. Rwanda’s Imihigo-driven donor self-assessment forum and Ghana’s Sankofa-informed diaspora investment forum are two cases typifying a similar but different strategy that involves the innovative coupling of indigenous and cooperation norms for international leverage. Together, the cases highlight the agency and frontiers of homegrown concepts in driving peripheral agency in the international arena of cooperation.

Matthew Sabbi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He holds a doctorate in development sociology and previously worked at the Chair of Development Sociology, and at the Professorship for African Politics and Development Policy, at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is interested in international political sociology and development politics with a particular focus on actors and their strategies in local political reforms in Africa. He has held fellowships at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana, Accra, and the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research appears in Studies in Comparative International Development, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Progress in Development Studies and Canadian Journal of African Studies.