国际智库中心博享沙龙系列

Global Think Tank Center Academic Activities

复旦发展研究院海外访问学者讲座系列105期

FDDI Overseas Visiting Scholar Seminar (105)

Beyond the Developmental State: 

Toward a Community Developmental 

State (CDS) Paradigm for Africa in the Age of China’s New Era

超越发展型国家：

中国新时代背景下非洲

“扎根地方的发展型国家”范式

Fudan Development Institute

2026年4月21日 9:00-10:30 

 9:00-10:30 am, April 21, 2026

This seminar advances a major conceptual intervention in development studies by arguing that Africa now requires not merely an adaptation of the classical developmental state, but its theoretical reconstruction under contemporary historical conditions. While the developmental state tradition, shaped largely by East Asian experience, remains indispensable for understanding strategic statecraft, industrial policy, and long-term transformation, it does not fully resolve the African question, which is also marked by territorial unevenness, fragile state-society articulation, fractured sovereignty, and the weak institutional integration of local communities into national development projects. In response, the seminar introduces the concept of the Community Developmental State (CDS), defined as a sovereign and strategic state form in which territorially organized communities are institutionally incorporated into the national architecture of accumulation, social reproduction, public accountability, and developmental discipline under the coordinating authority of a planning state. The seminar therefore proposes a decisive conceptual shift: from embedded autonomy toward community-anchored sovereignty. By placing this paradigm in dialogue with the age of China, it offers an original African contribution to comparative political economy and to contemporary global debates on development, state capacity, and transformative governance. It frames Africa not as development's periphery, but as a site of conceptual innovation for the twenty-first century.