Presentation by Leena Hoffmann, CILSS, at the 2017 European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Basel, Switzerland. The presentation took place on 30 June during the special presentation of the SWAC/OECD publication "Cross-border Co-operation and Policy Networks in West Africa".

1. TOWARDS MULTI-LEVEL
GOVERNANCE?
Basel, 30 June 2017
Leena Hoffmann PhD
Technical Advisor, CILSS Ouagadougou

2. How do we evaluate potential for cross-border co-operation?
Regional Integration Indicators:
• Population
• Surface and ground water resources
• Agricultural and pastoral resources
• Languages
• Legal status of international borders
• Political stability
• Poverty

3. Population Potential: The Role of Border Markets
The number of people that can be reached from border regions varies
widely across between different parts of West Africa.
Population contrasts:
• Densely, well-connected population areas e.g. between Accra and
Lagos.
• Expansive, sparsely-populated areas along the Mali-Mauritania
frontier.

4. Population Potential: The Role of Border Markets
Border markets are key hubs of social and business exchange in
border regions, with very particular characteristics owing to their
specific location at the crossroads of the major trade flows in West
Africa and on to the rest od the world (Dobler, 2016; Walther, 2014,
2015).

5. Population potential of West African border markets

6. Population potential of Lake Chad and northeast Nigeria

7. Growing together? Agriculture and Pastoralism
In West Africa, agricultural and pastoral activities are often practiced
together due to the following factors:
• Same populations tending both land and livestock
• The terrain sustains crops and herds at different times of the year
• The main agricultural basins and transhumance routes cross national
borders.

8. Exports crops and pastoralism

9. Grain production basins

10. Vernacular, Vehicular and Colonial Languages
• In West Africa, like other regions of the world, cross border
cooperation relies on the ability of people separated by national
borders to understand one another.
• There are 886 spoken languages in West Africa; 501 are used
regularly by all age groups.
• The region’s linguistic list include vehicular languages – lingua
franca – which play an important role because of the
fragmentation of vernacular languages between regions.

11. Vernacular languages in West Africa

12. Borders, demarcation and cross-border cooperation
• The legal status of borders is a strong factor in determining
the nature and degree of cross-border cooperation between
states.
• Tensions have arose where the status and location of
colonial borders are vague.
• The African Union Border Programme (AUBP), created in
2007, has sought to unite and integrate Africa through
peaceful and open borders while protecting and promoting
the interests of the people living in these zones.

13. Poverty and cross-border co-operation
• Cross-border cooperation benefits when poverty gaps are
average, rather than very high or very low, which can
promote synergies between regions.
• West Africa’s regional poverty rate is above 80%.
• High poverty rates are numerous in the northern parts of
Ghana, Togo, as well as Niger, Sierra Leone, Liberia and
Senegambia.
• Comparably low poverty rates are found along the Gulf of
Guinea as well as the Saharan regions of Northern African
countries.

14. Regional poverty rates and border discontinuities

15. Network of West African border regions

16. A Regional Vision of Cross-border Co-operation Potential
• A region’s potential for cross-border co-operation is the result of a
combination of social, economic and political factors which taken
together, provide information about the opportunities for developing
co-operative relations at the regional level.
• Calculating co-operation potential is a vital first step in studying the
geography of cross-border co-operation in West Africa, but it is not
entirely enough on its own.
• Analyzing current cross-border initiatives that have been developed in
the region and how political decision makers view the regional
development of West Africa is equally important.

17. Mental maps of the region

18. Mental maps by locality

19. Strategic areas for cross-border co-operation at the regional level

20. Strategic areas for cross-border co-operation at the local level

21. Towards multi-level governance?
Relations between subnational and and central government
may take the form of multi-level governance in which state
power is supplemented from the top by supranational
organisations, from the bottom by local and regional
entities, and laterally by actors in the private sector and civil
society.