Since African countries began adopting political, economic and social reforms to cope with widespread crises during the 1980s, scholars and policymakers have vigorously debated the feasibility, extent, and impact of such reforms. As structural adjustment packages recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank got underway in the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars such as Barry Riddell, Peter Gibbon, and Sayre Schatz raised serious doubts about the suitability of the reforms to the African context. They predicted that the focus on trade liberalization, privatization, balanced budgets, and cost cutting would simply exacerbate the very crises that prompted the reforms.

Other scholars recognized the urgency of reforms, but they highlighted the obstacles to sweeping policy change posed by predatory leaders, political instability, and corrupt bureaucracies. John Ravenhill criticized the value of IMF and World Bank conditionality and called for greater domestic commitment to reforms by political actors in Africa. Robert Bates emphasized the importance of institutions that would reduce political interference in economic policy implementation and equally recommended the creation of interest groups with a stake in the reform.

Even after widespread popular protests brought about democratic transitions and reinvigorated civil-society organizations across much of Africa in the 1990s, Nicolas van de Walle lamented the pervasiveness of partial reform in African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (2001). From Zambia to Côte d'Ivoire, van de Walle attributed half-hearted policy changes to the continued reliance by state elites on public resources to finance rent seeking and maintain power. Political reforms, it seems, were partial, too.

With the passage of nearly three decades of political and economic reform, how do scholars now judge the multiple transitions to democracy and market economies experienced by African countries? What new challenges have transitions produced? Contributions to this volume edited by Ellen Lust and Stephen Ndegwa both engage with the previous literature and explore new theoretical terrain in order to explain the substantial variation in political and economic outcomes across the continent. Relying on Afrobarometer surveys, existing democracy and development indicators, natural experiments, archival research, and case studies, established political scientists with regional and country expertise demonstrate the complexity and uncertainty of Africa's long transition.

Besides focusing on macro-level processes, such as democratization and its interaction with economic liberalization, the relationship between democracy and governance, and the ever-changing role of the state, contributors to the volume also look at micro-level engagements over property rights, governance, family law, religion, and education among multiple social actors. The key theoretical claims that the book advances are subtly expressed but critically important. As the editors acknowledge, simplistic binary constructions of reforms as successes or failures minimize the ways in which transitions are highly iterative, nonlinear, and interrelated processes. They evolve and alter over time, and change in one arena can foster reform in another.

Chapters by Michael Bratton and Peter Lewis illustrate this argument by showing the contradictory effect of democratization on governance and on economic performance. Bratton maintains that although democratization and governance are “mutually constitutive” (p. 41) processes, statistical analysis using Afrobarometer survey data nevertheless indicates that their complementarities are not consistent along every dimension. Using Mali to illustrate his point, he warns that in spite of support for democracy, Mali's elected representatives were quite unresponsive to their constituents. Bratton identifies the lack of contact between representatives and citizens as a “weak link,” and he states that “[a] principal challenge in deepening democratic governance in Africa is to strengthen procedures for ensuring that representatives listen to the populace and respond to their needs between elections” (p. 40). This observation is prescient in light of Mali's coup, which took place following the book's publication.

Similarly, Lewis finds that democratization has generally enhanced economic performance and correlates with improvements in other welfare indicators, such as primary school enrollment and reductions in infant mortality. Nevertheless, the results do not demonstrate unequivocal support for a relationship between democracy and improvements in overall welfare. Variations in the quality of democratic regimes help to explain why. Echoing Bratton's findings, Lewis observes that less democratic regimes (referred to as electoral democracies) are less accountable, more exclusionary, and more likely to direct benefits to those they politically favor. Weak civil-society organizations with limited resources correspondingly hobble efforts to hold governments accountable.

A further claim made by Lust and Ndegwa is that although many governments may have deliberately engaged in partial reform, as van de Walle has argued, nevertheless partial reform may “produce game-altering dynamics” (p. 7). Attempted reform of property rights regimes illustrates this point. Although property rights reform has proceeded in fits and starts, Catherine Boone and Ato Kwamena Onoma dramatically illustrate its impact on rural land regimes by identifying causal mechanisms that explain contestation over land or divergent institutional arrangements. Boone demonstrates that variations in the demographic, environmental, and commercial uses of land, in the patterns of allocative authority over land, and in the rights of potential occupants have conditioned the politics around land regimes in Kenya and Ghana. To explain subnational differences in the enforcement of property rights across Ghana, Onoma shows that elite preferences for weak or strong property rights depend, respectively, on whether elites are directly exploiting land and receiving up-front payments from others to use the land or indirectly exploiting the land by making productive investments that will yield benefits in the future. Both show that whereas institutional ambiguity and the politicization of land issues may heighten contestation and uncertainty for some, they can also create opportunities for others.

Lastly, the editors point out that reforms derive from, as well as spawn, new social actors. Iterative exchanges between these interests and new institutional arrangements engender unintended consequences. Chapters by Susanna D. Wing and Leonardo A. Villalón on gender and family law and on religion, education, and reform in West Africa, respectively, support this observation. Wing shows that more liberal political contexts have emboldened national and international organizations to pressure governments for legal reforms promoting women's empowerment. Greater pluralism, however, provides political spaces for reform opponents to stifle these more liberal initiatives. Villalón traces a similar dynamic in his discussion of vigorous debates around educational reforms and the role of religion in the Sahel. Secular activists may have been instrumental in the democratization process, he notes, but political opening has facilitated the proliferation of religious movements and heightened demands for the formal inclusion of religious education in national educational systems. With respect to gender and educational reforms, then, “organizational strength and access to resources” (p. 147) by emerging social actors may ultimately influence what the new social order will be.

Since most of the chapters draw on central elements of both historical and rational choice institutionalism—such as the role of institutions in shaping preferences, the importance of historical context, the ways in which different social agents try to create or manipulate rules consistent with their interests, and the ambiguity and fluidity of regulations—the editors could have framed Governing Africa's Changing Societies more deliberately within an institutionalist framework. The concluding chapter makes muted references to the role of institutions and the creation of stable equilibria (pp. 207–8) but misses an opportunity to link the book's empirical findings with broader arguments by rational choice institutionalists on how equilibria are established. Moreover, the book could have reinforced its important claims regarding the significance of incomplete or stalled reforms by drawing more explicitly on the theoretical work of historical institutionalists regarding the power of incremental change and the role of institutional reform as a social process. Finally, institutional analysis could have been employed to predict the possible distributive consequences of Africa's rapid urbanization, growing middle class, expanding financial markets, persistent underemployment, and rising inequality. These developments suggest that more complex institutional changes are in store for the continent.