Chapter 2 Infrastructure, Development and Neoliberalism in Africa: The Concept of Transport Corridors

This archaeological work is all the more important because the term ‘corridor’ is used both by those who think and implement these infrastructures in the expert domain, and by those who are responsible for producing a critical discourse about them in the academic domain. This situation certainly concerns other notions of the development world. However, it is not without its problems, for how can a critical discourse be produced on the physical and institutional achievements designated by the expression ‘corridors’ without distancing itself, at least for a time, from the forms of knowledge and presuppositions that contribute to making this category legitimate? The concept of corridors does not refer to a mere association of infrastructures: it gives it a particular meaning. It entails a certain representation of a territory based on regional, not national, divisions. In addition, the rhetoric around the formation of these transnational spaces, which are intended to be free of any constraints that might hinder the circulation of goods, makes free trade the main vector of development, thereby making transport infrastructure the material support for what is an eminently liberal project.

Rather than on infrastructure itself or the science and technology that enable its construction, this chapter focuses on how the narrative that justifies their existence has developed. This will require us to combine archival material with informal conversations and observations made during an ethnographic immersion among expert networks that advocate for this type of policies.1 This chapter parallels the overview of various territories conducted between 2016 and 2019. It is first of all the product of a compilation of informal interviews, observations and archival work at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. and with European Union personnel in Brussels. It is also the result of observational work at meetings attended by development practitioners devoted to transport infrastructures and trade liberalisation in various West African capitals. To all of this we added the documentary research (reports, publications, documents and projects) we carried out over the course of these three years. It will take us on a journey through scientific and expert publications, summary reports, audit reports, internal correspondences of international organisations (when they are available), and will even follow the work of the individuals and groups who deliver this discourse on the international stage, from one organisation or forum to another. The purpose of this chapter is not to uncover the origin of the notion of ‘corridors’, but rather to identify the starting point(s) of its investment by development practitioners, the variations, hesitations, as well as the contradictions inherent in the elaboration of the discourses with which this category is associated.

When everything is taken together, it reveals the intellectual history of an expression and its uses. It also exposes some of the mechanisms that have enabled the neoliberal agenda to prevail and prosper in the small world of development. Indeed, the rise of the use of the concept of ‘corridors’ has been in fact a response to the exhaustion of the justifications that had surrounded the construction of transport infrastructure in the development field since the post-war period. This made it possible to match the motivations surrounding this type of investment with the neoliberal thought that dominated the intellectual world in the 1970s and made the construction of transport infrastructure a necessary prelude to the creation of transnational free trade zones.2 On the victory of neoliberal ideas during the 1970s, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mount Pelerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, London, 2009. Since the time it was founded, this branch of public policy and the beliefs it conveys have continued their process of institutionalisation at the heart of an ensemble of international actors who still contribute to its existence today. Our review of the various stages of development and dissemination of the notion of corridors further demonstrates that the structures of the market economy, of which transport infrastructures have become the backbone, are the product of an ongoing political effort rather than a spontaneous natural reality.3 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, 1957.

As the developmentalist paradigm gradually spread in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War financing transport infrastructure became a key activity of the international institutions.3 Some recent works have suggested that the idea of ‘development’ was born in the inter-war period, thereby challenging the timeline suggested by Rist. As we are primarily interested in the institutionalisation of this school of thought, however, we adopt the timeline suggested by Rist. Véronique Plata-Stenger, ‘Mission Civilisatrice, Réforme Sociale et Modernisation: L’Oit et le Développement Colonial dans l’Entre-Deux-Guerres’, Relations Internationales, 177:1, 2019, pp. 15–29. The construction of railways, roads and ports is considered to be one of the essential factors – if not the factor – for driving development. In the early 1960s, therefore, the construction of transport infrastructure became one of the World Bank’s main areas of activity. Although Africa remained neglected, the Bank was carrying out important work in this field in Latin America and India. The same was true of the European Economic Community (EEC), which was also already one of six main providers of funds in this sector at the time.4 Wilfred Owen, Strategy for Mobility, Washington, D.C., 1964, p. 171.

Transport infrastructure construction was not supported by any official discourse during this period, however. For the bureaucrats, the significance of transport infrastructures in public development policies was a natural consequence. The construction of transport infrastructure has been important element of the actions taken by the Bretton Woods organisations since their creation in the post-war context, where this type of infrastructure was particularly targeted. Also, many of the employees of organisations that were promoting the developmentalist paradigm – whether they belong to the World Bank or the EEC – had come from colonial administrations.5 Véronique Dimier, ‘Politiques Indigènes en France et en Grande-Bretagne dans les Années 1930: Aux Origines Coloniales des Politiques de Développement’, Politique et Sociétés, 24:1, 2005, pp. 73–99. Still, transport was at the heart of the public policy being led by these administrations.6 Hélène d’Almeida-Topor, Chantal Chanson-Jabeur and Monique Lakroum (eds), Les Transports en Afrique XIXe–XXe Siècle, Paris, 1992. There was also a second pool of international civil servants responsible for designing public development policies who had come from national administrations in which transport infrastructure was also seen as an important element of growth.7 See, for example, Hugh S. Norton, National Transportation Policy: Formation and Implementation, Berkeley, 1967, but also, more broadly, works such as John K. Galbraith, Le Nouvel État Industriel: Essai sur le Système Économique Américain, Paris, 1968.

It was not until the early 1960s that what had seemed to be obvious actually took the form of a structured discourse in the development sector. Although the EEC was already one of the largest providers of infrastructure construction, it was not in its immediate environment that this discourse was being developed, but rather in Washington, D.C.8 Until the 1990s, and even later, the European Union did not make its presence felt as a meaningful producer among the players in international aid. See: Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire, Basingstoke, 2014, in particular p. 152. One particular research programme was emblematic of the formation of this discourse: the Transport Research Program, which was financed through a co-operation between the US and the World Bank. It was created in the early 1960s, and distributed its final publication at the end of the 1980s.9 A series was published as part of this project. All the published works were reviewed in the various specialist journals of the time. Strategy for Mobility, by Owen Wilson; Transport Investment and Economic Development, edited by Gary Fromm; Government Controls on Transport: An African Case, by Edwin T. Haefele and Eleanor B. Steinberg; The Impact of Highway Investment on Development, by George W. Wilson, Barbara R. Bergmann, Leon V. Hirsch and Martin S. Klein; Transport and the Economic Integration of South America, by Robert T. Brown; Soviet Transport Experience: Its Lessons for Other Countries, by Holland Hunter; and Distance and Development: Transport and Communications in India, by Wilfred Owen. One of America’s oldest and largest think tanks, the Brookings Institution, was commissioned to carry out the work. In order to do so, it brought together not only its permanent think tank employees but also outside consultants from academia, who were exclusively economists. All together, they exported their conception of transport infrastructure role in economic development forged in the US national context, in the development field.

The arguments that were developed in the various publications associated with this programme are symptomatic of the justifications elaborated during the 1960s and 1970s around the construction of transport infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to understand the emergence of this discourse at that particular moment, we need to look at the history of the institution from which it originated. The birth of the Transport Research Program corresponded to the shift by many Washington think tanks from national policies to development policies. The Brookings Institution belongs to the first wave of American think tanks created in the US in the early twentieth century by forward-thinking philanthropic businessmen.10 Donald E. Abelson, ‘From Policy Research to Political Advocacy: The Changing Role of Think Tanks in American Politics’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 25:1, 1995, pp. 93–126; Gerald Freund, Narcissism and Philanthropy: Ideas and Talent Denied, New York, 1996.

After playing an important role in defining the central elements of US domestic policy, these institutions espoused the immediate post-war movement designed by the US, which was increasingly invested in international affairs.11 See in particular the chronology produced in Donald E. Abelson, Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes, Montreal, 2002, pp. 17–49. The type of discourse think tanks delivered also benefited from the significant status acquired by the expertise gained from legitimising public policy during the war effort. These institutions won numerous foreign policy contracts from the American government and other Washington-based organisations, not just nationally, but also internationally.

The career path of Wilfred Owen, the director of the programme, makes this interweaving of national administrations, international administrations and networks of experts that was specific to the US capital easier to understand.12 See also the career path of Albert O. Hirschman, which is retraced in Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, Princeton, 2014. Wilfred Owen was educated as an economist at Harvard in the early 1930s.13 A piece by Graeme Zielinski published in the Washington Post on 6 December 2001 on the death of Wilfred Owen. Immediately after graduating, he joined the Highway Research Board in Washington, a division of the US National Research Council. Created in the early 1920s, the Highway Research Board advised the US administration at a federal level. Throughout the 1940s, he was one of the experts on the National Resources Planning Board, which Roosevelt had created to support his New Deal policy by providing studies on a number of important topics. He then moved into the private sector and joined the Brookings Institution, where he started out producing analyses of US domestic transport policy.14 Charles L. Dearing and Wilfred Owen, National Transportation Policy, Washington, D.C., 1949. When the organisation became increasingly involved in drafting reports on US foreign policy and foreign countries, Wilfred Owen’s career became international. His expertise in transport grew, and he worked on the preparation of reports for the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Asian Development Bank and the Ford Foundation in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The discourse that developed in the various studies from the Transport Research Program was clear. The challenge was to bring the relationship between transport and economic growth up to date, and so transport, and through it the mobility of goods and people, was placed at the heart of the development issue. The construction of transport infrastructure was not the only condition for economic development, but it was a central one. Other intellectual output from organisations on a similar path to the Brookings Institution reinforced this argument, as was the case, for example, with the ‘mobility index’ developed from the statistical work carried out by the International Road Federation. This organisation had played an important role in disseminating road-building standards in the immediate post-war era, and its experts now collaborated with the United Nations, and even the World Bank, in the 1960s.

The index below reproduces the major distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ countries popularised by the American discourse in the immediate post-war period. It introduces another division between ‘mobile’ and ‘immobile’ societies. As a result of this rhetorical work, the discourse on infrastructure is directly superimposed on that on development.

Beyond the simple correlation between development and mobility revealed by the use of numbers, the challenge at the time was to manage the causal link between the two elements in a way that reflected the canons of scientific discourse as closely as possible. Was transport infrastructures a condition or a consequence of development? In the literature produced by expert circles in Washington, proof of this causal link necessitated repeated calls for examples from American history in which roads and, even more, railways, occupied a significant place.15 Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, Baltimore, 1964. In the context of the Cold War, however, the example of communist countries served as a foil. Behind the opposition to it lay criticism of the Soviet Union’s planning policies, and to a lesser extent those of China.16 Ernest W. Williams, Freight Transportation in the Soviet Union, including Comparisons with the United States, Princeton, 1962. The leverage effect on development induced by investment in transport infrastructure was also seen as being closely linked to the forms taken by existing political and social structures. The combination offered by the examples of developed countries – the Soviet Union aside – therefore served to define a path to development through transport.

Wilfred Owen’s adaptation of the famous stages of development of industrial societies, which had been theorised by the economist Walt Whitman Rostow a few years earlier, shows that undeveloped countries corresponded to stages 1 and 2 and communist countries to stage 3, notably due to their emphasis on rail.17 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge, 1960, in particular pp. 4–16. The US corresponded to stages 4 and 5.

We should not over-emphasise the producers’ reasoning in this discussion, however, as the extract suggests, for those who believed in the link between mobility and development, the issue of the specificity of the social, political and economic structures of so-called undeveloped countries raised the question of the relevance of this model outside the West. What was being questioned was not the model to be achieved – which was that of the US – but rather the inescapable nature of the steps required to achieve it. According to the prevailing economic theories of the time, the heavy public investment in transport infrastructure had to enable developing countries to catch up, without repeating the mistakes made by their North American ‘big brother’.

The role of the US, and especially Washington, in creating schools of thought on the place of transport infrastructure in the development process, may seem surprising in view of the other development topics from the same period. It is linked above all to the available sources, which originated in the American capital and its microcosm of experts, think tanks and national and international officials, the main producers of the discourse associating transport infrastructure with development. Representatives of other organisations located in Europe or elsewhere that were involved in financing infrastructure construction did also have their own vision of the role of transport infrastructure in development. During this period, for example, the media division of the Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development of the European Union (Le Courrier Afrique – Caraïbes – Pacifique – Union Européenne) kept track of this thinking in opinion pieces produced by European Union officials.19 Behind these seemingly rational narratives, it would seem that political interests were at the forefront. Infrastructure was used as a way of buying African elites, who were easily able to capitalise on their construction. See Véronique Dimier, Recycling Empire, in particular p. 152. But it was only in the US that we saw a systematic shaping of this belief in the form of research projects, scientific articles, books, indicators and a field of research in its own right.20 See, for example, the birth of the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy in 1967. Over the next few decades, the central importance of Washington only increased, as the World Bank’s dominance in the production of development knowledge became more significant.

Apparently, the World Bank’s use of the term did not just signal the proximity of the sphere of development to the economy, as it had in the immediate post-war period, but also to geography, given that the concept actually appeared in that field in the 1960s. Little is known about the shift of this notion from the scientific to the decision-making sphere. In the best-documented North American context, it seems to have been driven by the increased proximity of certain experts in the field to the federal administration after the Second World War.3 Thomas J. Wilbanks, ‘Geography and Public Policy at the National Scale’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75:1, 1985, pp. 4–10. For a more recent review of these relationships between government and geography, see National Research Council, Rediscovering Geography: New Relevance for Science and Society, Washington, D.C., 2000, pp. 109–37. Jean Debrie and Claude Comtois are the only geographers who have attempted to trace the genealogy of the concept of corridors and, to a lesser extent, the conditions under which it made the shift from the scientific world to government administration. In their view, the notion first appeared in so-called developed countries during the 1970s.4 Jean Debrie and Claude Comtois, ‘Une relecture du concept de corridors de transport: illustration comparée Europe/Amérique du Nord’, Les Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport, 58, 2010, pp. 127–44. The concept of corridors was thus used in the development field as early as the 1970s, and therefore at the same time as in national bureaucracies.5 See, for example, in the case of Latin America: Debrie and Comtois, ‘Une relecture’, pp. 127–44. It was used in a loose sense, however, and the word ‘corridor’ was primarily employed as a synonym for terms like ‘transport system’.6 Yann Alix (ed.), Les corridors de transport, Cormelles-le-Royal, 2012. In fact, the word was applied mainly to refer to a simple chain of different types of transport infrastructure.

As a sign of the progressive empowerment of the development industry, the shift from the notion of US and European national administrations to the development world could no longer be explained by the career path taken by individuals such as Wilfred Owen two decades earlier. The porosity between national and international bureaucracies remained, however, in the form of areas that grouped their representatives together on specific topics. In the case of World Bank personnel, which is the best documented situation, this was manifested by the fact that employees of the organisation participated in numerous international conferences, where they sat alongside officials and experts involved in making policies for Western countries. Similar spaces were also developed within the World Bank itself, where weekly training for the organisation’s staff included North American or European experts, who were expected to provide potential models for public development policies intended for developing countries.7 In particular, the weekly Wednesday seminars at the organisation’s headquarters during a part of the 1980s come to mind.

It was only from the end of the 1980s that the concept of ‘corridor’ became the subject of a true definition and delimitation of studies. This moment in time combined with two important turning points in the development industry. First, this theoretical elaboration was mainly produced by personnel from one organisation, the World Bank. The construction of a discourse that legitimised infrastructure projects no longer took place outside international organisations, as had been the case in the immediate post-war era with think tanks in the US capital, but directly within the bank. This shift in the location of expertise marked the beginning of the international financial institution’s affirmation as a knowledge producer.8 This upheaval is represented by the expression ‘knowledge bank’, which has given rise to a significant body of literature. Teresa Kramarz and Bessma Momani, ‘The World Bank as Knowledge Bank: Analyzing the Limits of a Legitimate Global Knowledge Actor’, Review of Policy Research, 30:4, 2013, pp. 409–31; Goldman, The Birth of a Discipline; Olivier Nay, ‘International Organisations and the Production of Hegemonic Knowledge: How the World Bank and the OECD Helped Invent the Fragile State Concept’, Third World Quarterly, 35:2, 2014, pp. 210–31. Second, while reflections on the link between transport and development had mainly focused on Asia, and to a lesser extent Latin America, the concept of corridors was being developed based on considerations that were germane to the African continent. This change reflected a move in the World Bank’s interests, and with it those of the entire development industry, towards Africa.9 John P. Lewis, Richard C. Webb, and Devesh Kapur (eds), The World Bank: Its First Half Century: History, Vol. 1, Washington, D.C., 1997, in particular pp. 16–21.

When viewed through the World Bank’s archives, the process that led to the reformulation of the link between transport infrastructures and development emerges as being linked to the affirmation of the organisation’s so-called ‘technical’ staff at the end of the 1980s more than to any sort of ideological upheaval.10 S. Cissokho, ‘Reflections on the Washington Consensus: When the World Bank turned to free trade for its transport infrastructure projects’, Politix, 128:4, 2019, 179–205. A study of the correspondence by the infrastructure division personnel, who were mainly engineers, suggests that the commitment to the concept of corridors coincided with a dwindling of the prior justifications for the construction of transport infrastructures in developing countries among this group, and the simultaneous rise of a sense of weariness. The personnel questioned the nature of the projects that had been undertaken up to that point, and the recurring failings of infrastructure construction despite the enormous investments that had been made.

At the same time, an internal reform of unprecedented significance modified the functions of these same individuals, giving them greater reach in the development of projects. The new ‘task team leaders’ were responsible for the composition of their teams, the development of the logic behind their projects, the sourcing of funding within the institution to complete their projects and, of course, the task of convincing the bank’s clients and their superiors of the merits of the project they were taking on.11 For a more detailed explanation of the role currently being played by the TTL, see Lavagnon Ika, ‘Opening the Black Box of Project Management: Does World Bank Project Supervision Influence Project Impact?’, International Journal of Project Management, 33:5, 2015, pp. 1111–23. In other words, they became real promoters of projects within the new reticular organisation of the World Bank, which was unique to the emerging management ideology.12 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme, Paris, 1999, pp. 99–167. The bank’s engineers – who had once been confined to technical expertise – seized this reform and the new roles it created to change the meaning of transport infrastructure projects. This was reflected in the creation of a multi-donor research programme – the Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP) – which was closely controlled by the bank, and brought economists and engineers together to produce an in-depth reflection on public transport policies in Sub-Saharan Africa.13 This situation would lead to a profound crisis at the end of the 1990s and the partial overhaul of the programme. John Bruce Thompson, ‘Africa’s Transport: A Promising Future. A Review of Africa’s Achievements’, SSATP Advocacy Paper, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 12–13. It was notably in this area that work on defining the World Bank’s transport infrastructure policies, as well as that of all donors in Africa throughout the 1990s, was carried out.14 In his foreword to the history of the SSATP, John Bruce Thompson, a former European Commission official, writes: ‘The European Commission, as a leading transport donor in Sub-Saharan Africa with activities covering 30 countries, needed a sectoral approach to sustain its major investments. SSATP policy principles and good practices guided my development of the EC transport sector guidelines. Similarly, SSATP experience was shared with the European Union member states resulting in an EC Communication on promoting sustainable transport in development co-operation. Lately, SSATP transport corridor expertise contributed to the EC Communication on the EU-Africa Infrastructure Partnership, which through a Trust Fund fosters interconnection along the Trans-African transport corridors’: Thompson, Africa’s Transport, p. vii.

There was also a similar expansion in another, more ideological context, however. The end of the 1980s saw the institutionalisation of structural adjustment policies. It emerges from the archives of the bank’s infrastructure division that highlighting these policies and aligning them with those of the World Bank and the objectives it set out jeopardised infrastructure projects as they had previously existed. ‘Corridor’ projects allowed them to be placed in a broader context than before: the promotion of free trade. This enabled the infrastructure division to maintain the size of its budget, which had been endangered during the 1980s, after an unprecedented growth during McNamara’s presidency. In a series of letters to its operating teams, the infrastructure division’s management encouraged corridor projects in the hope that thanks to this type of project it would be able to show that it fully supported the organisation’s joint effort to restore the recipient countries’ trade balances by facilitating interregional trade, thereby benefiting from the lines of credit associated with structural adjustments.

It would be wrong, however, to believe that use of the word ‘corridor’ inside the bank became a fixture as soon as it first appeared. According to the organisation’s official documents, the notion of corridors was first seen as a response to the natural problem of landlocked countries. In the late 1980s, therefore, it was first of all a question of enabling countries with no direct access to the sea to limit their import and export costs by creating road or rail infrastructures with links to one or more ports. At the beginning of the 1990s, the problem of regional integration, which is considered here from the economic point of view alone, became part of the mix. The combination of infrastructures was supposed to enable the creation of new roads, and thus facilitate the formation of regional markets governed by common legislation. Later in the 1990s, what became known as ‘first-generation regional transport and trade projects’ systematically accompanied the regional-scale infrastructure construction of institutional reforms.15 Abel Bove, et al., ‘West and Central Africa Trucking Competitiveness’, SSATP Working Paper 108, Washington, D.C., 2018, p. 52. In this version of corridor projects, infrastructure remained the basis for the projects, but served as a lever to trigger institutional reforms such as the reorganisation of customs services, the harmonisation of laws, or even the creation of public–private partnerships. In addition to the shift in meaning of infrastructure investments, new ‘instruments of government’ emerged.16 Christopher C. Hood, The Tools of Government, London, 1983.

One sign of how the meaning and instruments associated with this solution were solidifying, a ‘toolkit’ of all the reforms tied to this category was published by the bank in 2014.17 Charles Kunaka and Robin C. Carruthers, Trade and Transport Corridor Management Toolkit, Washington, D.C., 2014. This type of document is common in the organisation. It encapsulates solutions that are considered to be part of the bank’s classic repertoire, and includes condensed government instruments that otherwise exist independently, but that together form this category of public policy. Corridors are seen as a set of measures, laws, institutions, customs reforms and infrastructures that combine to facilitate free trade at a regional level. This type of policies within the bank was also crystallised in way the bank was organised, as starting in the 2000s, a working group specifically dedicated to sharing experiences on corridor projects took shape. Rather than by regular meetings alone, this group’s existence was first given substance in mailing lists across which so-called corridor projects circulated so that they could be submitted for a joint review before being examined by the bank’s management. Though intangible, these internal networks helped spread these policies through the organisation beyond Africa and infrastructure departments, and established peer reviews of these applications.

The concept of corridors thus allowed the faith in the links between transport infrastructure and development to continue to thrive in a renewed form at the end of the 1980s. In a context in which neoliberal thinking now dominated the developmentalist discourse, it allowed the World Bank employees responsible for infrastructure projects to create a connection between the achievements of their project, free trade and development. Once again, the centre of gravity of this discursive production seemed to be Washington – or more precisely the World Bank – thereby following a path that resembled the way development knowledge was produced. This discourse has, however, now been taken up on several occasions by a number of international organisations, whose policies it echoes.

The success of this category may, however, be due to how it has been shaped. In a context in which development aid is increasingly subject to measured targets, the turnkey quantification instruments provided with this type of public action facilitate its spread to other national co-operation organisations concerned about being able to quantify their actions and impacts.3 Kevin P. Donovan, ‘The Rise of the Randomistas: On the Experimental Turn in International Aid’, Economy and Society, 47:1, 2018, pp. 27–58; just like international public policies: Patrick Le Galès, ‘Performance Measurement as a Policy Instrument’, Policy Studies, 37:6, 2016, 508–20. See, for example, the standardisation proposed in Kunaka and Carruthers, Trade and Transport Corridor Management Toolkit, pp. 29–69. The malleability of the concept, and even the blurring that surrounds this category, is a ‘catch-all’, making corridors ‘boundary objects’.4 See also the seminal article by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, ‘Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, 19:3, 1989, pp. 387–420. In the development field, see the Camille Al Dabaghy’s work on the Malagasy decentralisation programme: Camille Al Dabaghy, ‘Pour ou Contre les Centres d’Appui aux Communes: Controverse sur les Instruments dans le Tout Petit Monde Transnationalisé de la Décentralisation Malgache’, a presentation at the AFSP congress in Bordeaux in 2019. It unites professionals from different development circles specialising in infrastructure, transport, borders, regional integration and the free movement of goods, all of which can be found in one or more of the components of this type of standard public policy.

The scale of regional actions this category embraces has a certain resonance among a number of international organisations that lack recognition. Representatives of the RECs and the African Union see promotion of the regional level as a means of asserting their authority by strengthening the regional integration process and providing their respective administrations with the resources they lack. They enable representatives of the continent’s regional organisations to rely on the influence of donors to make their respective organisations’ regulatory production effective at a national level. In addition, we see the production and dissemination of idealised representations of the continent in the formulation of projects such as the Trans-African Highway, NEPAD, PIDA and more recently the AfCFTA.

The notion has also been established in advocacy speeches by interest groups representing the economic world, with the support of national co-operation agencies in both West and East Africa. Over the years since 2010, organisations like the Borderless Alliance in West Africa and the East African Business Council in East Africa have seized on the notion in order to pressure national governments and RECs and advocate for lower export taxes. The sensitivity of national administrations to the discourse of business-oriented interest groups has also been reinforced by the increasing importance of indicators such as the ‘Doing Business Index’, which is directly based on business perceptions, as well as by the new conditionalities associated with International Monetary Fund funding and the ‘improvement of the business climate’.5 Timothy Besley, ‘Law, Regulation, and the Business Climate: The Nature and Influence of the World Bank Doing Business Project’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29:3, 2015, pp. 99–120.

According to our observations,7 Cissokho, S., ‘Fabriquer son “accès” à l’État: Ethnographie d’un espace de rencontre international entre représentants du secteur privé et public (Afrique de l’Ouest)’, Anthropologie et Développement, 51/2021 (to be released). these social spaces are undoubtedly areas of confrontation between different visions of what corridors are or, more broadly, the general level of interest in them. This includes opposition between representatives of the private and public sectors, between the different areas of the national administration, between regional and national administrations, and even between competing regional bureaucracies such as between representatives of WAEMU and ECOWAS in West Africa. However, they are also – and perhaps above all – places where there it is possible to disseminate ideas and good practices associated with this category policy. Against the backdrop of PowerPoint presentations or less formal discussions in reception rooms or hotel buffets, the same arguments are repeated, the same examples circulate, and the same people meet. The spread of this type of policy also flows from a certain type of elite sociability that is re-created in these forums, akin to that of clubs, and common to representatives of the private sector and the internationalised public sector.8 Dominique Connan, ‘Une Réinvention de la Différence Élitaire: Un Rotary Club dans le Kenya de Mwai Kibaki’, Critique Internationale, 73:4, 2016, pp. 133–55. This community is further reinforced by the existence of other similar spaces at national and regional levels, where presentations are held and debates are organised on related themes in the meeting rooms of the same hotels, and bring together representatives of the same national administrations, the same international organisations and the same interest groups. These sociabilities are further perpetuated in the management organisations that embody most corridors today.9 These organisations exist for the Abidjan-Lagos, North, Central, Walvis Bay, Maputo and Dar es Salaam corridors. For more information, see: Yao Adzigbey, Charles Kunaka and Tesfamichael Nahusenay Mitiku, ‘Mécanismes Institutionnels de Gestion des Corridors en Afrique Subsaharienne’, SSATP Working Paper 86, Washington, D.C., 2007; or John Arnold, Gerald Ollivier and Jean-Francois Arvis, Best Practices in Corridor Management, Washington, D.C., 2005.

These spaces embrace certain skills and resources that enable the movement of individuals from one organisation to another. National administrations thus serve as a reservoir not only for international organisations, but also for expert firms with which national co-operation organisations contract in order to set up their programmes. This is the case with the most senior customs officers, who are particularly envied for the networks of officers they have at various border crossings and for their knowledge of the complex rules governing the movement of goods. They can thus be found in large numbers in both RECs and organisations representing the interests of business communities at a national and regional level, such as the Borderless Alliance in West Africa, or in funds that bring together donors of all kinds, such as TradeMark East Africa.10 See, for example, the recent ECOWAS Task Force project. These forums are therefore also, and sometimes first and foremost, places where national administrative staff seeking to internationalise are recruited, as well as places for discussion. As in other areas of public development policy, this situation cannot exist without generating professionalisation, once again making a contribution if not to the spread, then at least to the maintenance of this category, which is now associated with the interests of a specific social group.11 See, for example, the work on transitional justice by Sandrine Lefranc and Frédéric Vairel, ‘The Emergence of transitional justice as a professional international practice’, ECPR International Congress, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 2011.