The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was launched amidst a great deal of fanfare in late 2001. Its authors described it as a blueprint for a new, African-initiated, development agenda aimed at tackling the continent's development malaise. In brief, the NEPAD base document argues that African countries must improve their international competitiveness via market liberalisation in order to reverse Africa's marginalisation from the global economy. This would enable Africa to reap the potential benefits of globalisation by attracting the foreign investment that is deemed essential to finance and drive development. This book contains a collection of papers which were first presented in 2002 at a conference in Accra, Ghana, jointly organised by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa). Although NEPAD is the primary focus of the collection, it is neatly contextualised within the broader debates surrounding Africa's development.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which contains an assessment of the NEPAD base document with some noteworthy contributions from Adesina and Taylor. Adesina provides a critical assessment of NEPAD's macroeconomic orientation, arguing that NEPAD remains deeply embedded within the neoliberal paradigm promoted by the Bretton Woods institutions for over two decades. Thus, he argues, NEPAD will only serve to deepen the current development crisis. Taylor's contribution argues that NEPAD's heavy reliance on the receptivity of Western capitals has resulted in an extremely restricted, reformist agenda: one that fails to critically address asymmetries of power in global relations that will prevent NEPAD from achieving a drastic reduction in poverty on the continent. By contrast, Maloka's chapter displays a considerably more optimistic appraisal of the NEPAD document and offers an unconvincing attempt at answering some of NEPAD's critics.

The second section looks at some of the major sectoral challenges facing Africa in its quest for sustainable development. It includes contributions from Moyo, Sangare, Don Keet, Ya'u and Chenntouf which tackle the debates surrounding agriculture, industrialisation, trade, the digital divide and education respectively. The contributors are generally critical of NEPAD's market-oriented framework, arguing that it is wholly inadequate for mapping a credible development strategy. Instead, what has resulted is a development plan with an extremely narrow focus on market liberalisation, one that fails to address issues of equity, redistribution and gender. As such, it will only serve to exacerbate Africa's social crises and global patterns of uneven development.

The final section examines some of the challenges of financing Africa's development. Randriamaro provides a thoughtful discussion of the gender issues associated with financing development, arguing that NEPAD's neoliberal prescriptions are essentially ‘gender blind’ because they fail to recognise the damage to women's livelihoods caused by structural adjustment policies in the past. Uche's chapter highlights some of the problems encountered by African countries in previous attempts to finance their own development through regional integration, whilst Anymedu's contribution argues that mobilising internal resources, such as domestic savings, is essential if African countries are to reduce their dependency on external financing and the conditionalities that accompany it.

As the above summary suggests, the contributions in this book are generally critical of NEPAD. Most of the critiques centre around the undemocratic origins of NEPAD and its neoliberal development paradigm, which, it is argued, is based on a flawed understanding of Africa's position within the global economy. Many of the authors see the NEPAD programme as a regressive step because it rehashes the development paradigm propagated by the donor community since the 1980s. A dominant theme of the collection is that NEPAD's dogmatic adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy will exacerbate Africa's social and economic crises whilst simultaneously reinforcing a global system that perpetuates uneven development. The authors call for a major paradigmatic shift, one that privileges state expenditure, inter-sectoral linkages, and regional integration over market liberalisation. They argue for an agenda with a greater focus on issues of equity and social justice that puts people, rather than markets, at the heart of development thinking.

Because of the time that has elapsed between the original conference in Ghana and the publication of this collection, the central arguments will already be familiar to an experienced researcher in this field. However, the book serves as an extremely useful introduction to the NEPAD debate and offers a forceful critique of the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominates the majority of the plan's development prescriptions. The collection provides a thought-provoking analysis of the key issues by some of the eminent intellectuals in this field, which could be complimented by reading the contributors' subsequent works that would offer the researcher a more detailed and up-to-date account of the current debates.