Informal institutions and citizenship in rural Africa: risk and reciprocity in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

the divergent patterns of informal institutions and citizenship which have been products of political history spanning across three main periods: the precolonial, the colonial and the post-colonial. First, the pre-colonial relates to a period when these villages had very similar political and cultural institutions. the covers pre-British and pre-French colonialism in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. Third, the post-colonial captures the aftermath effects of the colonial on the precolonial and the resultant divergences in the informal institutions and citizenship. Maclean shows how the process of state formation (re)-constructed informal institutions in the villages. The author defines ‘informal institutions’ as norms of reciprocity, the village residents help and social support with their nuclear and extended family, clan, friends, neighbors, ethnic group, or others.” Furthermore, she articulates ‘citizenship’ as the conceptualizations of duties and rights. Patterns of informal institutions and citizenship are discovered to be different in the villages. While Ghanaians extended their norms of reciprocity to much wider array of social ties, particularly friends,” 2 the Ivorian were limited, members of the immediate nuclear