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Lantern on the Stern: Policy Analysis, Historical Research, and Pax Britannica in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Emery M. Roe
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Extract

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

Coleridge

A contradiction hitherto not adequately examined exists between historical research and policy analysis in modern African studies. The more familiar difficulty between policy-makers, who want answers, and historians and social scientists, who find instead complexity and uncertainty, has been much discussed and is not pursued here. Rather, a more subtle tension operates in the work of those policy analysts who use historical research in their work, particularly when these analysts are government advisors in Africa.

History has always had an equivocal role in policy analysis. On one side, an important part of the profession embraces project evaluation and implementation analysis, both of which can involve historical research. In the former, the analyst tries to understand the impact of a project in terms of its past performance, while the latter uses past performance as the basis for improved design of future projects. On the other side, historical research is not considered an essential part of the analyst's graduate training, at least in the United States. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an American public policy school that required history alongside core courses in statistics, microeconomics, law, and political science. This ambivalence over the role of historical research is best illustrated by the unheeded calls analysts themselves have made and continue to make for more historical research in their own profession. In an essay on policy analysis familiar to many U.S.-trained analysts, the author opines “historical genesis is a much underplayed aspect of the analysis of social programs” and recommends that a more overtly historical perspective should inform policy analysis generally (Nelson, 1977: 152; Chapter 8).

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 45 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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