NEW PUBLICATION on African regional cooperation

• Regional organisations have proliferated in Africa over the decades, with different organisations attempting to address similar issues in similar parts of the continent.
• International donors have helped create this overlapping situation by funding new and existing African regional organisations without questioning the downsides of doing so.
• In recent years, these organisations have increasingly sought to concentrate on security issues, contributing to a rise in the use of ‘hard security’ solutions at the expense of ‘people-centred’ approaches.
• This proliferation comes with further costs, such as wasted resources, and ‘forum shopping’ by state leaders.
• Europeans and other international donors should take stock of the situation they have helped create. As a first step they should agree a tacit ‘non-proliferation agreement’ before considering other options.

Long before African countries gained independence, they forged closer integration and cooperation among themselves through the creation of multiple African regional organisations. For most of these organisations, playing a role in peace and security provides their members with more international visibility, and makes it easier for them to receive financial support. They also could in this way benefit from institutional capacity building programmes led by external partners such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.

In a new policy brief and mapping project, author Amandine Gnanguênon traces the recent history of these organisations and identifies two main problems in the African institutional landscape: 
1. the cost of the ‘overlap’ among AROs that has emerged; 

2. and ‘forum shopping’ by African states and their leaders.

International partners should beware their own potential influence by conditioning support on African regional organisations and African states effectively implementing regional coordination mechanisms. This means that where there are attempts to tackle similar problems in the same parts of Africa, these organisations should in the first instance take stock of what they are all doing, consider implementing regular joint regular monitoring and assessment of the coordination mechanism their states are part of, and ultimately provide donors with a better understanding of different organisations’ comparative advantages.