When Professionalism Clashes with Local Particularities: Ecology, Elections and Procedural Arrangements in Botswana

The characterisation of a bureaucracy as Weberian does not capture the ambiguous developmental implications of relations among bureaucrats and other political entities. Nor do electoral politics guarantee broad representation of social interests in policy-making. Local conditions, informal patterns of social and political organisation at the local and national level, the competitiveness of elections, and national structures of administration all come into play. The interplay of these factors can be seen in the implementation of policies for privatising rangeland in Botswana in the 1990s, where diverse local reactions to privatisation resulted in uniform policy outcomes. Procedural advantages allowed professionals within the bureaucracy to make progress toward policy implementation contingent on their own preferences and on the reactions they anticipated from local political bodies. Intervention in natural resource management appeared to progress furthest in the least likely district precisely because bureaucrats could count on competitive politics to produce the results the majority of bureaucrats desired.