From Aid to Markets ? Technocracy, Governance Reforms, and the Politics of Development in Africa

This paper interrogates the contemporary shift in African development discourse from aid-centred interventionism to market-oriented and technocratically driven governance reforms. Situated within Political Economy and Development Studies, the study argues that the apparent transition “from aid to markets” has not displaced the political foundations of development but has reconfigured them through new institutional, policy, and discursive instruments. Drawing on a dual-theoretical framework that integrates postcolonial political economy and structural political economy, the paper examines how technocracy and governance reforms have reshaped state capacity, policy autonomy, and development strategy across African states. Using qualitative analysis of secondary sources, the study demonstrates that technocratic reforms often depoliticize development, obscure underlying power relations, and reproduce patterns of dependency and uneven development. The findings suggest that sustainable development in Africa depends less on the managerial refinement of policy instruments and more on the reconstruction of state capacity, political coalitions, and strategies of structural transformation..