Neoliberal Hegemony and the Narrowing Discursive Space for Social Policymaking in Africa

Abstract The transformative social policies pursued by the first generation of leaders across independent West Africa were eclipsed in the 1980s by residual social policy based on means testing where social provisioning was subjected to market rationalization. Using an ideational lens to reflect on the influences and shifts in social policymaking in West Africa, we demonstrate how the changes in the sub-region and across the continent were enabled by the ideological convergence between market fundamentalism and state derogation that substantially narrowed the scope for competing development narratives and marginalised actors advocating bolder social policy agendas. At the geopolitical level, this shift was the ultimate expression of Western triumphalism at the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberal hegemony.