The Southern African Development Community (SADC): An Analytical Overview of Its History, Policies and Institutional Framework

Abstract

Regionalism is not an entirely new phenomenon in Southern Africa despite what some might think. Several countries-and even territories under colonial administration-have engaged in various cross-border regional cooperation projects for more than a century. Some regional institutions date back to the time of colonialism whereas others were established more recently during the time of the Cold War and Apartheid. Some have survived to the present day whereas others became obsolete and were dissolved. Nevertheless, they all belong to the category of the so-called old regionalism whereas the SADC is clearly an example of the new regionalism. This chapter will firstly give a short overview of the history of regional integration in the SADC region and introduce the most important old regionalisms to this end. Secondly, it turns to the new regionalism and highlights central aspects of the SADC as an organisation with respect to its constituent member states, policy agenda and institutional character. The major purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with encompassing , profound information on the general and regional framework conditions in which the SADC operates and in which the organisation's five most important regional cooperation projects (i.e. the selected sub-cases) are located in. In the course of this, the analytical focus shall be on examining the underlying institutional framework conditions in the SADC. Knowledge of these allows one to draw conclusions on the organisational capacity as well as on the room for manoeuvre of the member states-including CHAPTER 3