Class Notes 1

Transportation and Society with special reference to Africa
Class notes 1

Introduction to Transportation and Society with special reference to Africa: "the unthinking transfer"

The purpose of today's class is to draw attention to the range of social aspects of transport which require our consideration in the African context. It establishes a caution around the automatic transfer of techniques, methodologies and policy frameworks by external agencies and government agencies advised by external experts (or those trained solely within external models)within the transport domain. David Hilling (1996) has documented and usefully labelled this policy transposition as "the unthinking transfer".

Hilling provides us with our starting overview of the emerging field of Transportation and Society (in our case, with specific reference to Africa):

All too many of the transport projects of developing countries have been based on an unthinking transfer of technologies and strategies with too little regard for the context provided by people, place and time. (Hilling,1996:xv)

Our assumptions about the nature and extent of mobility in the 'globalised world' of our first world experience are much challenged by the reality of developing or third world experience. Hilling (1996) provides us with both transport facts and transport case project evidence which sets us thinking.

Large parts of the Third World are characterised by lack of year round, mechanised transport and movement is by unreliable high cost labour intensive methods.... The majority of the population live in spatially circumscribed local socio-economic sytems and a relatively static state in which immobility and poverty are clearly related. (Hilling, 1996:1). Hilling has already moved us forward to a position where we are faced with considering the relationship between immobility and poverty. Historically, restricted mobility had important consequences for political bargaining - within this course, we will return many time to the issue of mobility and life chances but for the moment, I want to make use of the step prepared by Hilling to move in a slightly different direction. Hilling provides us with an excellent analysis of traditional transport structures in Africa but he does not extend his analysis into thinking about the ways in which new information communication technologies can substitute for traditional transport organisation and also enhance traditional transport structures in Africa. In 1996, the potentials were not yet as evident and information communication technology take up in Africa not so extensive. New information communication technology contains the potential to alter the traditional relationship between immobility and political bargaining. As we move forward on this course, we will see that these new ICT developments aligned with transport can have very important consequences for gender relationships in Africa.

Returning to Hilling, he provides us with detailed information on transport availability in Africa and compares this with other regions of the World. He discusses this in terms of global discrepancies in transport provision. Africa, he points out, emerges overall as an area of serious underprovision of transport.

In the context of this measured serious underprovision of transport, Hilling charts for us the response of the development agencies where for a period transport developments were viewed the key tool in promoting 'economic development'. He warns us against this blunt understanding of transport and development and with good reason: all transport projects will not promote development and the relationship between transport and development is not a simple one.

There is almost daily evidence of the inadequacies of transport systems to deal with the special conditions created by drought, famine and political conflict but also a persistent feeling that a root cause of these conditions is lack of development and therefore the need for better transport. There is clearly a danger that the argument becomes circular.(Hilling, 1996:9).... A more useful response may well be that the transport-development relationship is both time- and place- specific. There can be no universally applicable model but rather a range of local variants deriving from particular conditions of geography, history, politics, economics and culture. (Hilling, 1996:9)

In analysing the relationship between transport and development and transport and society, Hilling indicates strongly the need for caution and a precise understanding of the local gains and losses in transport developments.

It may also be that the directional balance of movement is altered and while better transport allows local people to move their produce to markets it also enables goods from outside to be be brought in more easily - this could be both to the advantage and possibly the disadvantage of the local economy and a factor in the progress of under-development. (hilling, 1996:18) Here Hilling is making the argument that the development of better transport connections (bilateral accessibility) can result in weaker economic areas losing out to stronger more central economic areas and can result in the increased dependency of the weaker local economies. Put simply, the penetration of the periphery by more efficient transport organisation enables the readier extraction of benefit by the centre from the periphery.

In the hierarchical development of transport networks there is implicit a spatial inequality - those near the facility benefit more than those in the surrounding area, those in the city more than those in the town and village.(Hilling, 1996:24)

The consequence of these understandings - which circulate widely these days within sections of the transport expert community - is that policy makers have now become more alert to the need to pay attention to detail and to ensure that projects do indeed benefit their intended targets and not simply provide income for construction companies and other interests. The result is an awareness of the importance of accessibility and the development of accessibility planning. Rather than simply promoting the infrastructure for mobility - services and facilities are being decentralised. As we shall see, new information communication technologies can play an important part in this process. Next week we will begin to unpack these arguments in more depth in the context of the colonial development of transport systems in Africa and their modern legacy of transport boundaries and incomplete infrastructural networks. For the rest of this session, I want to run quickly through the topics identified on the course for discussion over the coming weeks. These topics begin us on a road away from the 'unthinking transfer'.

My own thinking on transport in Africa was shaped by two major events: I was allocated to the Africanist, J Clyde Mitchell as a Ph.D. student at Oxford, albeit my doctoral research was on Scotland. He fed me daily with African social science models of migration and I produced an Oxford PhD which shows the clear markings of that diet. The second event was a request by the Transport Research Laboratory to conduct research on transport and low income households in Accra whilst Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana. This proved to be the most fascinating of research opportunities.

Borrowing from Ghana, I would like to say Akwaaba (Welcome) to this new and emerging field of Transportation and Society in which Africa undoubtedly features.

References:
Hilling, D. (1996) Transport and developing countries. Routledge: London. Cornell Library ref: OLIN HE 148.5. H55X 1996

Prepared by Margaret Grieco, Professor of Transport and Society, Transport Research Institute, Edinburgh and Visiting Professor, Institute for African Development, Cornell University. http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society

e-mail at m.grieco@napier.ac.uk