Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century

Name: Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century
SKU: 91663
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₦10,000.00

Drawing on original ﬁeldwork in Nigeria, Portia Roelofs argues for an innovative re-conceptualization of good governance. Contributing to debates around technocracy, populism, and the survival of democracy amidst conditions of inequality and mistrust, Roelofs offers a new account of what it means for leaders to be accountable and transparent.

Centered on the rise of the ‘Lagos Model’ in the Yoruba southwest, this book places the voices of roadside traders and small-time market leaders alongside those of local government ofﬁcials, political godfathers, and technocrats. In doing so, it theorizes ‘socially embedded’ good governance. Roelofs demonstrates the value of ﬁeldwork for political theory and the associated possibilities for decolonizing the study of politics. Challenging the long-held assumptions of the World Bank and other international institutions that African political systems are pathologically dysfunctional, Roelofs demonstrates that politics in Nigeria has much to teach us about good governance.

3 in stock

About the Author

Dr Portia Roelofs is a Lecturer in Politics at the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, and a Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She has a PhD from the LSE and has held post-doctoral fellowships at LSE and St Anne’s College Oxford. She has a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from the University of Oxford and a Masters in African Politics from SOAS, University of London. She has spent time as a visiting researcher at the Universities of Ibadan, Maiduguri, and Ifra-Ibadan. Her work has appeared in African Affairs, Governance, Oxford Development Studies, the Review of African Political Economy, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Modern African Studies.