The Commons: A new framework for development policy in Sub-Saharan Africa?

In Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, the public water utility Regideso delegates the management of drinking water mini-networks to user associations. In Senegal, recent legislation facilitates the creation of housing cooperatives. In Tanzania, partnerships with the World Bank have helped make it one of the African countries mapping the largest number of buildings on the collaborative platform OpenStreetMap. Conversely, large-scale land-tenure formalization policies have, in most Sub-Saharan African countries, weakened—or even led to the disappearance of—community-managed land systems.

The Commons: Drivers of Change and Opportunities for Africa, a book published in 2023 in the Africa Development Forum series, highlights these and other contrasting examples, revealing the complex entanglement of commons within public action. Commons never develop in an institutional vacuum. They operate within dense environments composed of public actors, normative frameworks, market mechanisms, and various tools of international cooperation. Depending on the nature of the relationships that emerge among these stakeholders—whether indifference, capture, recognition, or cooperation—commons can be weakened, absorbed, or, on the contrary, strengthened.

In turn, commons impact development. No development project operates in a social or institutional vacuum. It always encounters pre-existing social norms and collective organizations that already shape local action. A project may choose to ignore them—or, on the contrary, to build on what already exists.

In the book we highlight many examples demonstrating the feasibility of a strong relationship between public actors or development practitioners and commons, and also warn of the risks inherent in such engagement. The risk of distortion arises when public or international funding introduces logics that reshape the original local project. Commons-based initiatives may be compelled to reformulate their activities to fit donors’ criteria, prioritizing administrative compliance over their own collective priorities. This external dependency can also introduce a wage-based logic into commons that were initially organized on volunteer principles, fundamentally altering their functioning and underlying philosophy. Furthermore, risks of instrumentalization or capture occur when the state or donors impose normative frameworks or “off-the-shelf” solutions—such as in certain natural resource management schemes where standardized models of participatory governance are applied without considering the complexity of local arrangements. Finally, the risk of shifting state responsibilities onto commons is well documented and is particularly visible in community development and decentralized management policies promoted since the 1990s: under the guise of citizen participation, they transfer to local organizations the obligation to provide essential public services in a context of reduced public spending.

These dynamics show that, far from being neutral, relationships between public actors and commons can undermine local autonomy if they are not grounded in an explicit recognition of the specific characteristics of commons.

In the book we therefore call on public actors and international development partners to adopt what we describe as “a commons-based approach,” encouraging them to reflect on their practices, assumptions and tools. Non-prescriptive in nature, this commons-based approach is presented as a way of “thinking through the commons” that can only be defined by the actors themselves, according to their own frameworks, professions, and constraints.

These reflections have paved the way for new research drawing on the commons as a compass for imagining plural forms of development—rooted in local practices while remaining in dialogue with global dynamics. From a theoretical perspective, research has been conducted on climate governance through the lens of commons literature, defining a commons-based approach around five lines of inquiry: economic rationality, legal rationality, institutional isomorphism, the monoculture of linear time, and the production of knowledge. Likewise, issues such as international migration or gender equality have been the subject of similar reflections.

From a more operational perspective, territorial actors themselves—in Africa and beyond—have adopted this analytical framework to build public–commons partnerships, such as for agro-sylvo-pastoral commons in Senegal, care commons in Bogotá, Colombia, or the Brasil Participativo citizen participation platform in Brazil.

In conclusion, The Commons: Drivers of Change and Opportunities for Africa does not offer ready-made solutions, but it brings to light a wide range of practices—often rendered invisible by public policies, explores the inherent tensions that shape them, and opens pathways for their recognition and support. It conveys a strong message: caring for commons means opening up to living realities, marked by contradictions and innovations—precious resources for informing the actions of international development cooperation.

*The author is a research fellow at Agence Française de Développement. This blog is part of a commemorative series marking 15 years of the Africa Development Forum book series co-published by the World Bank and the Agence Française de Développement.