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The concept of stakeholder participation has become a critical approach in development policy. The inclusion of relevant stakeholder organizations in the policy process leads to transparency and increases the incentive of political agents to implement policies that reflect the priorities of the society rather than serving vested interests at the expense of the general public. While there is broad agreement regarding the benefits of stakeholder participation, neither a clear concept nor a framework based on micro-political theory have been developed yet that allow for a quantitative assessment of participatory policy processes. In this context, this study develops a theoretical framework that enables the derivation of network-based indicators to quantitatively assess the extent of stakeholder participation in the policy process. The empirical application in the context of the CAADP-reform process using Ghana, Senegal, and Uganda as case studies yields distinct participation patterns in the three case-countries. Interestingly, neither the indicator of Government Accountability nor the indicator of Government Capture appear to be correlated with the political and economic development of the three countries which contradicts the common hypothesis in the Comparative Political Economy literature that poor government performance in developing countries is primarily the result of biased incentives. The indicator of Political Ownership yields the expected results in accordance with the political performance in the three countries. To test the determined network structures and the derived indicators for statistical robustness the application of an ERGM-MCMC framework yields stable results in general. Furthermore, the significant relationship between political communication networks and observed policy beliefs validates the underlying theoretical framework of political belief formation.

Despite the great social, economic and environmental diversity in countries of Africa South of Sahara (SSA), forestry research issues and advances are quite similar. This is partly influenced by historical facts relating to forest resource ownership and management. In most countries, governments own and manage forest resources. Forestry research institutes are in many countries tiny departments or units tucked under huge ministries or agricultural research organisations. Their visibility, much less their effectiveness, is barely significant, because they are poorly staffed and financed. The little available forestry research capacity is poorly managed. The few competent researchers are increasingly involved in administrative functions and looking for greener pastures. Economic policies imposed by global financial institutions constrain the recruitment of young scientists to undertake forestry research now and in the future. Although universities are much better resourced, their efforts are rarely linked with national research issues. They operate independently, far removed from real world issues. Through the intervention of some global stakeholders, some research institutes have developed their research agendas, but these have largely remained on the shelf for lack of implementation resources. Most ongoing work is donor-driven. There is a serious gap between forestry research and development. Research institutes do not have the capacity to extend their findings and are not properly linked with agricultural extension services or NGOs to get their messages to stakeholders, especially farmers. This delimits the usefulness of the little that could trickle from forestry research. This paper briefly discusses these issues and makes some recommendations. It is clear that SA countries and the global community have a role to play to redress the situation. SSA and the world stand to loose the opportunity to benefit from SSA forestry resources unless affirmative action is taken.

Africa seem to have taken centre stage among G20 nations with Germany championing the Marshall plan with Africa which if implemented properly, will witness a shift from donorrecipient relationship to partnership. The African Diaspora contributes annually $34 billion of remittance inflow to Sub-Sahara Africa according to World Bank; figures that outweigh foreign direct investment. Unfortunately, a tiny percentage of the remittances go into entrepreneurship considering the fact that Africa possesses wealth of entrepreneurial opportunities with a young population hence in the best interest of Sub-Sahara Africa to attract more Diaspora Direct Investment. The purpose of this thesis was therefore to examine how the entrepreneurial gap between Africa and the rest of the world could be narrowed with the encouragement of Diaspora Africans interested in entrepreneurship. To achieve that I three groups of entrepreneurs who were interviewed comprising African Diaspora entrepreneurs, Successful African entrepreneur based in Africa and Non-African entrepreneurs with interest in Africa. This exploratory qualitative thesis employed the philosophy of interpretivism in order to answer the research questions and interviewed respondents using semi-structured interviews and observations. Data obtained from 10 interviews painted that only small number of Diaspora and into any productive entrepreneurship and if Diaspora is to have any meaningful effect on Africa the mind set has to change and Governments should more to create the enabling environment and specifically incentivize Diasporas to invest. The findings are by no means exhaustive and represent portion of the under researched area of African Diaspora entrepreneurship. It is envisaged that findings may be of interests to companies, organizations, learning institutions, individuals who might be interested in collaborating, engaging or working with African Diasporas to foster entrepreneurship in Africa.