Governance involves engaging citizens and creating policies that prioritise their needs. It is important to understand models that leverage and maximise citizens' engagement and participation in decision-making. FLIA’s work goes beyond state-centric approaches and regularly uses the lens of public authority to understand how governance and power operate in people’s everyday lives across Africa.

Public policy

FLIA research into Misaligned Public Policy looked into the disconnect between popular demands and the orientations of domestic policy-makers in post-revolutionary Sudan. In particular, the role of neighbourhood resistance committees. The project scrutinised how these resistance committees were formed (across neighbourhoods and cities), the motivations of members of these committees, the variations in their understanding of social policy priorities across neighbourhoods and states, and how their environments (both natural and social) shape their priorities and activities. It also built a database of domestic policymakers, specifically capturing data about their education and career backgrounds to uncover how their educational training and professional incentives have contributed to their beliefs and approaches to public policy.

Our work on policymaking capacity in Kenya investigates this process using a public authority lens in Kenya. It expands the ongoing discussions on African public policy discourses mainly confined to executive policymaking models and theories and the role of international development actors in policy change in the African continent. This study investigates the evidence systems, norms and innovations of the legislative policymaking processes and their outcomes in improving different policy designs.

Informal governance

Hundreds of millions of people remain chronically hungry and famines persist worldwide. Extreme hunger does not only threaten life, but it can also remove human dignity from the living and the dead. Vibrant ethnographic work has shown how people living through hunger support each other. However, almost no attention has been paid to the use of legal norms and institutions in times of extreme hunger. Scholarship and policy have ignored the potential for legal norms to shape the relationship between hunger, social responsibility and dignity. This research explored South Sudanese hunger courts; chiefs’ courts that redistribute food to the hungriest people.

Uganda’s first Resistance Councils (RCs) were established in the Luwero Triangle during the National Resistance Army (NRM)'s Bush War from 1981-1986.

After the NRM took power, these RCs were established across the country. Renamed “Local Councils” in 1995, they are now the most basic unit of local government and an important public authority actor in Uganda. However, except for a handful of key studies on the RCs that were created in the Luwero Triangle during the conflict, the process of establishing RCs has received limited scholarly attention.

This study contributed to existing knowledge by documenting how RCs were established across Uganda in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how they interacted with existing authorities to create the well-known systems of local governance in Uganda today.

Capacity building

Datafication can be a source of value for many different actors – states, businesses big and small, civil society organisations and individuals. It is harvested in multiple ways by the devices and platforms people use, fed back into technologies for everyday activities, and informs how digital platforms operate and how we interact with them. Datafication and Digital Rights in East Africa seeks to understand how digitisation and datafication are reshaping public communications and the informal economy in East Africa.

The regime of Omar Al Bashir ruled Sudan from 1989 to 2019 when a popular revolt forced him out of office. A power-sharing government, led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, then sought to re-establish popular moral legitimacy in the eyes of disenchanted citizens while bringing Sudan back into the orbit of external creditors and Western-led development efforts.

While this failed, and the country returned to civil war, this project examined the role of Western donors in shaping this legitimacy re-building within and across two areas of public concern with different class interests: higher education and social protection.

Public Authority

Research on Public Authority and the Governance of Informal Cross-Border Trade in Eastern DRC seeks to highlight the importance of designing good trade policies that take into account informal trade flows, which may allow these trade flows to be brought under the umbrella of regional trade policies. The project focuses on the case study of small-scale cross-border traders in Eastern DRC to explore the challenges faced in the governance of informal cross-border trade in the region.

CPAID research examined how political authority is produced in North and South Kivu in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, areas of chronic violent conflict and political instability. It did so by studying the constitution of basic social contracts and citizenship and investigating the social struggles through which political authority over land, people and resources is made and unmade. More specifically it investigated land conflicts in Kalehe territory, and in the city of Bukavu, the provincial capital of South Kivu. The project contributed to contemporary discussions on the relationship between natural resource governance, political authority, property rights and citizenship in conflict-affected areas.

CPAID investigators also looked at how armed groups position themselves as self-sustaining structures and public authorities in eastern DR Congo. Current research interests include the role of armed groups in Congo’s electoral process, the politics of DDR, and war as social ordering.