Urban Protest in Burkina Faso
* Ernest Harsch (eharsch{at}igc.org) holds a PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York and is a research scholar affiliated with Columbia University's Institute of African Studies. He has researched and written on Burkina Faso since the early 1980s and has published extensively in both news and academic publications.
Burkina Faso has embarked on a course of decentralization in which elected local governments are assuming a share of decision making over a range of services and activities previously under central authority. But many of these municipalities have also become sites and targets of popular contestation, a reality that has rarely been acknowledged in the official discourses of decentralized governance. By employing social movement research methods, this article examines more than 200 public demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, strikes, riots, and other forms of protest over local issues in 31 of Burkina's urban municipalities, from 1995 to 2007. It finds that both local government reactions and the protests themselves are strongly influenced by the national political context. The analysis highlights some of the main grievances raised by protesters, from opposition to police violence and merchants’ frustrations over the management of marketplaces, to residents’ concerns about municipal corruption and resistance to neighbourhood displacement resulting from urban ‘modernization’ schemes. By challenging the performance of Burkina's municipal councils and mayors, ordinary residents are exercising ‘voice’ and seeking to give some real substance to notions of participatory decentralization.