Multilevel Governance, Media and Development in West Africa

paradigms in (non) convergence?

Abstract

Africa has been appointed as an underdevelopment country where the theoretical paradigms of development formulated and applied in other latitudes didn't met the same empirics correspondence of developed countries. Like this, this article seeks to establish a historic perspective of the development concept and the relations established with the media and governance within the temporal scenario that goes of africans independences to 21st century. Although the concepts of development, media and multilevel governance be phenomenon's inserted in the context of theories formulated in the global level, they don't stop assuming the own specificities and characteries when it´s applied on the african field. There is two principals and opposed periods, either of the point of view politics, either of the point of view social and cultural: the first 20 or 30 years of post-independencies of african countries (in that rise to the idea of african integration) and the changes of paradigms and the politics openness verified since the 90 years of the past century. The evolutions of the two paradigms – the media and the development -, that put the persons in the center on the one side, and provides “time” and “voice”, on the other side, show a reciprocity between the evolution of the own concepts and the evolution of the governance forms. However, in the West Africa case, we constate that in many countries of this under-region, the theoretical evidences of convergence between this paradigms verified in the global level didn't met the same empiric correspondence suggesting that in the majority of african case these paradigms follow opposed paths.

Keywords: Media, Development, Multilevel Governance, West Africa, Cape Verde.