Strategies for African Development in the 21st Century Beyond the East Asian Model: Integrating Markets and the Enabling Developmental State

Sustainability, freedom, equity and inclusion are increasingly becoming global interests in the twenty-first century. The main purpose of this chapter is to explore a fairly comprehensive strategy for development as freedom for Africa. Accordingly, I try to find a way to integrate useful markets with the key characteristics of the Enabling Developmental State for the 21st Century in order to build a growing ecologically sustainable economy with equity in terms of capabilities. This is both for theoretical clarification and for aiding the strategies of popular democratic movements. A few tentative steps are taken here to serve this dual purpose. Proceeding from a critical capabilities perspective that is fully grounded in social reality of deepening structural and ecological crises of the world capitalist system (WCS), I discover that such a perspective leads to the need to include among the characteristics of the Enabling Developmental State for the 21st Century its capacity to build an ecologically sustainable egalitarian development strategy from the beginning. The specific theoretical approach I follow has been developed during the last few decades by ecological scientists and social scientists. My own particular version can be called Evolutionary Ecological Global Political Economy or EEGPE for short. In addition, democracy must be deepened from the beginning. For Africa in particular, a new cooperative community of African nations following their own rhythm to reach their own dynamic trajectories towards development as freedom will be possible if they cooperate regionally on the basis of equal sovereignty and mutual respect. One precondition is to pragmatically unite for a common economic strategy. For this a decolonization of the African mind is also necessary. I conclude with some further thoughts on extending the model to an information theoretic-based fractal model of development. A mathematical model of integrated financial and real sectors on abstract function space is presented in the Appendix that can be extended for this purpose for Africa and other developing countries.