With current neo-liberal, state-centred development policies failing spectacularly to reduce inequalities and provide better living standards for the poor across southern Africa, what alternative ideas about development might be envisioned and implemented to change the status quo? This is the basic question that Stefan Andreasson addresses in Africa's Development Impasse. Under the subtitle rethinking the political economy of transformation, this describes and analyses the ‘foundations’ of the ‘elusive developmental nexus’ in southern Africa, sets out a broad conceptual framework through which to understand development and post-development thinking, and applies this to three country cases: Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Africa's Development Impasse is commendable above all for its willingness to engage with ideas about the radical transformations necessary to come to ‘genuinely broad-based and sustainable development’ in an ‘African post-colonial order’ (p. 5), and the informative case-study descriptions in which these engagements are applied. However, after reading the book I was left with a slightly uneasy feeling. This was chiefly because the main chapters of the book do not deliver on all of the promises made in the introduction with respect to the conceptual framing that Andreasson employs and the conclusions that he derives from it.

The introduction sets up three very interesting ‘theses’: namely that development needs a genuinely ‘communal effort at reinventing, or reimagining, societal goals and aspirations’; that ‘two types of alienation (between humans, and between humans and nature) ‘must be resolved’; and that ‘modern civilisation’ is incompatible with genuinely broad-based sustainable development. While he delivers quite well on the first thesis (engaging with the concept of Ubuntu among others), the problem lies with the latter two. First, it never becomes fully clear what the author understands ‘genuinely broad-based sustainable development’ to entail. At times, he takes current trajectories at face value and denotes these as ‘successful’, while they are also said to have failed, or need to be ‘transcended’. This often makes the country chapters a rather ‘standard’ read in the light of the author's own objectives (see for example pp. 105–7, 144, 166).

Second, the issues around alienation of man–nature and humans–humans are not explored at all in the chapters, and as a result it is not clear how the author arrived at these concepts. A very surprising omission in this respect is that the CAMPFIRE programme is not mentioned at all in the chapter on Zimbabwe, although it was the most famous community conservation effort that attempted to deal with the man–nature issue, and was supposed to promise a more developmental road for local people. Had the book dealt more carefully and consistently with these issues throughout the text and especially in the country case-study chapters, it would have done more justice to its subtitle.