Civil servants in Malawi. Everyday life in the shadow of good governance ASC Research Seminar

Gerhard Anders, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich. His most recent publications include ‘Lawyers and Anthropologists: A Legal Pluralist Approach to Global Governance’, in: I. Dekker & W. Werner (eds), Governance and International Legal Theory (2004); ‘Civil Servants in Malawi: Cultural Dualism, Moonlighting and Corruption in the Shadow of Good Governance’ (2005); and ‘Good Governance as Technology – Toward an Ethnography of the Bretton Woods Institutions’, in: D. Mosse & D. Lewis (eds), Anthropology Upstream: Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid (2005).

Discussant: Rein Koelstra, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken 

Good governance has become the central guiding principle for development aid, and any government that seeks financial support from the donor community is required to present a set of specific reforms aimed at transforming its civil service, which is often perceived as being riddled with corruption, into an efficient service provider that is subject to the rule of law and is accountable to the general public. Malawi in Southern Africa is one of the countries where good governance reforms have been implemented since the transition to democracy in 1994. Civil servants, the ‘target population’ of these policy measures, are responsible for the implementation of civil-service reform. This has implications for the implementation of good governance and the civil servants in Malawi have responded in unforeseen ways, trying to manipulate, appropriate and in some cases to resist the implementation of these reforms. The implementation of civil-service reform has deepened already existing fault lines within the civil service, pitting bosses against juniors and old-school officials against technocrats. This presentation draws on fieldwork conducted in 1999, 2000 and 2002 in the urban areas of Lilongwe (the capital) and Zomba, situating the everyday experiences of civil servants in the context of good governance and focusing on mundane tactics of resistance and subversion such as moonlighting, absenteeism and corruption.