Afterword

Summary

As we prepared to wrap up this book and send all the chapters to our publisher, I had the chance to travel to Africa to test, with a group of local scholars and policy makers, the central argument: that underlying the diversity of forms of organizing set up to develop basic infrastructure and in this way promote socio-economic development lies a duality of building institutions and building technology – two desirable objectives with underlying design attributes that make them organisationally incompatible. The setting was the city of Livingstone, a stone’s throw from the majestic Victoria Falls – two places charged with references to a bygone Western colonial era which, for good and for ill, is part of Africa’s history.