STS in Africa: Macro

Analyses of the economic and legal infrastructures figure heavily in STS scholarship situated in African contexts, especially by those who rely on historical sources. Specific economic and legal infrastructures mentioned include university Institutional Review Board ethics protocols (Biruk 2018); development funding regimes that build and reify “global North” and “global South” inequalities (Biruk 2018; Crane 2010; Coban 2018; Bezuidenhout 2017; Geissler and Tousignant 2016); colonial histories (Tilley 2011; Osseo-Asare 2014; Foster 2017; Breckenridge 2014); economic competitiveness (Tilley 2011) as well as claims to citizenship (von Schnitzler 2013); Bretton Woods structural adjustment programs and the emergence of a neoliberal knowledge economy (Green 2012; Pollock 2014; Okeke 2011); and intellectual property law (Foster 2017; Pollock 2014; Osseo-Asare 2014) (and its overemphasis on individualist notions of authorship).

Global health scholars have noted the global regimes of health governance that impact on local practices (Tichenor 2017; Crane 2010). These two scales of "local" and "global" also figure in much of the macro analysis of science and technology in Africa. Geissler and Tousignant (2016) look at “global” and “local” standards of science while Okeke argues that African and global bio-scientific capacity are tightly imbricated. The co-construction of how legal and economic structures affect local practices and vice versa is noted by several scholars (Breckenridge 2014; Foster 2017). For example, Breckenridge (2014) noted the ways in which the global fingerprinting project created a distinctive state in South Africa and how the events and ideologies produced by the very local struggles of South African history around biometric identification in turn fashioned a global politics.

This angle of co-construction is an important point for Coban (2018) to include in her analysis. Although she importantly noted that after Nairobi became famous (by Ushahidi and m-Pesa) as a site of tech knowlege innovation, development agencies the (international) private sector heavily invested in Nairobi start-ups and co-working spaces, my experience indicates that these initiatives partly emerged because Nairobi was already a hub for development and capital. The  tight coupling between tech innovation and development capital cannot be disentangled. Relatedly, Green (2012) noted that it is important to recognize the entanglement with capital in current state-led approaches to indigenous knowledge in South Africa: “Once that is on the table, it becomes possible to ask different kinds of questions, and to develop a different intellectual project.”

Tousignant (2018) explained that a brief period of growing investment in science as an African(ized), national, collective, and development-oriented enterprise (circa 1940s-1970s) was followed by a generalized drop in public (both national and international) funding for science in Africa from the 1980s, leading to the stagnation of scientific activity and/or to new “entrepreneurial” strategies for capturing foreign, non-governmental, or private resources. This broad history of the public sciences in Africa has also shaped the discourses about it (see meta sub-essay).