Theorizing Developmental Regionalism in Narratives of African Regional Trade Agreement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a gap in the legal scholarship on African regional trade agreements (RTAs) that links law and development to narratives of developmental regionalism. This article undertakes a critical analysis of the ‘developmental regionalism’ paradigm as they have been applied in the study of African RTAs. The article identifies three areas of critical intervention to address the incoherence of developmental regionalism in Africa: limitation in theory; narrow conceptualization; and an insufficient attention to the role of law. First, to address the gap in theorizing the ‘development’ in developmental regionalism, this article makes the case for an explicit linking of Law and Development scholarship and Developmental Regionalism in African regional trade agreements. In so doing, while the article acknowledges the shortcomings of mainstream Law and Development Scholarship, it contends that these critiques do not foreclose the cross-pollination of the fields to offer a theoretical basis for a more rigorous understanding of developmental regionalism in African RTAs. Second, to address the narrow understandings of developmental regionalism, the emphasizes the importance of a robust definition of the concept. It makes the case for rethinking developmental regionalism as an analytical tool that responds to and accommodates the multidimensional character of African RTAs. In turn, the article argues that rethinking developmental regionalism as an analytical tool avoids the need for prescriptive and limiting definitions of the scope of the concept. Thirdly, the article argues for a more rigorous engagement with the role of law in African RTAs. Since these agreements are not strict rules-based regimes; the article pushes back against the failure narratives that are produced by dominant theoretical frameworks that privilege globalized legal thoughts embedded in trade agreements. In conclusion, the article argues that our understanding of African RTAs as ‘flexible legal regimes’ or in anti-formalist terms is deepened by an explicit linkage of the fluid concept of development to the selective implementation of the RTAs based on their priorities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".