 My name is Bruce Byers, I'm from ECDPM, which is nothing to do with Eastern Cape, as a couple of people asked me, but it's actually the European Center for Development Policy Management. So maybe just as by way of introduction, maybe I should say that ECDPM is an independent non-partisan think tank based in the Netherlands, but it's been set up since the 80s looking at EU-African relations. So basically we're looking at development policy, but in particular trying to see how European policies, whether it's on trade or aid or external diplomacy, how these then fall on the ground when we're talking about Africa, Caribbean and Pacific, but particularly in Africa. So there's been a lot of experience at ECDPM of working on trade agreements, on regional integration, and as time has gone on, there's been more and more recognition of precisely these political aspects to all these discussions. So Mike just called for more discussion on the political economy, so I'm going to respond to his call by talking precisely about those kind of things. So when we talk about political economy, I think that the point that Mike was beginning to point to was that any kind of policy reform creates winners and losers. And if we don't make an effort to try and understand who those winners and losers are and therefore what sort of policies, sort of responses they might have or non-policy responses, behavioural responses, then we may be barking up the wrong tree and end up sort of frustrated with, as he was talking about, this very institutionalised approach. So today I'm going to talk about two corridors, actually, which I think are important for a number of reasons. One is that these kind of corridor approaches underpin some of the discussions we've been having over the last couple of days about regional industrialisation. So potentially these are ways of linking ports to hinterlands, to spatial development zones, to economic zones, to promoting accompanying investment around corridor infrastructures. So they're already sort of a basis for that. But I think perhaps more importantly, I think hopefully they provide an illustration of where some of these issues that Mike was referring to, sort of where within country politics and between country politics around a regional project basically come out to play. So this has been done actually a couple of years ago, but it's part of a longer process of work at ECDPM where we're now looking at, even currently looking at the political economy of the industrial strategy in Sadek. But that's one that's not quite finished yet, so I need to come back another time to talk about that. So just very briefly where I'm going to go over just a little bit what the context is of this research that we did, a little bit on the approach, some of the findings and of course policy implications. So the starting point basically for this was around the region I don't think it's any secret that the high cost of transport, the relative low formal intra-African trade. So if we're talking about informal trade, of course, that is quite a lot of trade, but when we start looking at formal figures, high costs, high transaction costs, difficult borders, difficulties in trading across borders, all of these things that have led to this long run sort of rhetoric about the need for more regional integration and nowadays more regional industrialization. So this is let, so we can go back far to here, we can go at least as far as the 80 Lagos Plan of Action, the Abuja Treaty, we now have the TFTA, which as was mentioned yesterday was signed, although with very little sort of meaty content within it, we've got the boosting intra-Africa trade. So there's all these sort of long standing commitments or at least statements of commitment to boost intra-Africa trade and boost regional integration. At the same time then we have more and more of these sort of more concrete attempts to actually link economies together through the corridors, which is why we began to focus on this, starting a lot actually with the initiative, the Post-Apartheid South African Spatial Development Initiative, which then got taken up by NEPAD in the Spatial Development Programme, it's then also links into the PIDA, the TFTA with the North-South Corridor, which is what I'm going to discuss, which also links in, there's lots of mention of corridors within the SADEC, the RAISDP, even within the Regional Agricultural Programme. Corridors are there as this instrument to be used to promote integration and to promote trade integration and some of these sort of regional value chains that we're talking about. So, sorry, I missed the last bit, but the frustration with this has always been about implementation deficits, all these commitments over the years, all these plans, all these strategies, all these action plans, but nothing happens, well, not nothing happens, sorry, with frustration at the speed of implementation. The question that's usually asked is why do we not have much more progress in this? Well, one is actually a legitimate one in a sense, is that there's lots of overlapping REC membership, so countries are members of more than one regional community, obviously that then complicates how they do things. What I'm going to suggest is that there's a strong logic for why countries join all these different RECs, so instead of sort of deciding why doesn't everybody just join one and get out of the other ones, you just have to work with the fact that these different interests are being served in different RECs. But the usual suspects that are given then are the overlapping REC membership, lack of finance, lack of capacity, lack of political will, lack of interagency coordination, which was mentioned this morning as well, lack of bankable projects, lack of regulatory frameworks. Now, the point that I'm making is not that these are not legitimate in some sense, but that we need to think more about the politics that then leads to these. So why do we not have these capabilities? Why do we not have this coordination? How come we're not able to come up with these bankable projects? If you look down these long lists of projects that each country and region has, what is it that's missing? So the proposal is to think more about politics within countries and between countries, and the way that I'm going to do it, and I'll come back to that in a minute, is to kind of talk about some of these long-run historical structural factors. Also talk about some of the formal and informal institutions. So these kind of strategies and action plans and agreements are just sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of describing formally what should happen. But if we don't understand what actually happens in the way that actors interact around these agendas, then that's where some of the action is going to happen. And so the rules of the game that are kind of set by the formal setting, but also informally, then influence the different actors in the way that they sort of play out within. And there we're talking about public sector actors, but also private sector actors, regional actors, civil society actors. We also need to understand some of these sexual specificities. We just heard a lot about the water sector, where there is much more of a legitimate argument that you do have these cross-border water resources. Maybe there isn't as much scarcity as some would say, but the logic for cooperation around that is quite different to cooperation around soil value change, which is one of the sessions that we just listened to in the other room. And then, of course, there are external factors. Some of these are very externals, climate change, global terrorism, but also technological. And some of these are also to do with the donor sort of patterns and donor ways of thinking that then also influence the way all these trajectories play out. So the question that we were trying to look at here was when do the key actors, especially political elites, credibly engage and commit to implement regional integration agreements? So it's really trying to say, OK, where does this stuff happen? Really? I thought I had 15 minutes, no? OK, so I'll skip through that. OK, so we look to the Maputo Corridor. We look to the North-South Corridor. We basically run from Dar es Salaam down to Durban, both of which are, or at least Maputo Corridor obviously is a bilateral. The North-South Corridor is done as part of the TFTA, as the tripartite. And the point basically being, well, OK, so this is just highlighting some of the challenges in terms of transport costs and complications. But as soon as you start looking around these corridors and looking at who are the people that are involved, then we have private sector actors like market sellers, fruit producers at a larger scale, informal transporters. We have the storage people, the transporters running along the corridor. We have the mining companies. We have Mozal, we have Sazal. So basically all of these people, if we just take, just looking at the Maputo Corridor, all these different acts have some kind of interest in, A, making it work, B, potentially protecting some kind of interest. Do they really want to have more competition? And this, then, is sort of one of the keys and questions that we need to ask, then. Who are the actors that are involved in these different initiatives? And what is it that they're actually sort of trying to promote in terms of their own interests? And to what degree is this actually sort of just anti-competitive? Incumbent firms sitting in Zambia, are they interested really in having easier flows of goods from South Africa to Zambia? Or actually, are they doing very well? Thank you very much. Serving East DRC, serving East Angola, which is one of the points that, again, also came up from one of the presentations earlier on. So here are the five lenses that we went through, which is the five I talked about before, structural factors, the institutions. And then I'm just going to quickly run through some of the differences between the two corridors. And again, I think the point here is just to highlight the way that there are similarities, but also these big differences. So in the structural factors, we have this. I mean, it's a bit like what Mike was even just talking about, the water flows and who's downflow and who's upflow. So we have Maputo Port linking to this huge industrial heartland in South Africa. We have this long history of minerals out, labor in, running along the same corridor. We have a long political attachment between Freelimo and ANC. We have the timing issue of just post-apartheid South Africa, just post-Civil War Mozambique. Both countries suffering major fiscal constraints, which then led to a common interest in finding a PPP. And then these huge income disparities between the two, which also form a basis for the way that this corridor basically played out. Where were the power relations between the two? If you look at the comparison from the North-South corridor, you're suddenly not talking about two countries, you're talking about eight countries. So I have much wider disparity of interests. Five landlocked countries along there. Extractives are still important. And you do have sort of some common institutions between certain countries. So the Chirundu One-Stop Border Post is commonly flagged as a big success in the North-South corridor. And when you go into that and you look precisely some of these structural factors, the common institutions between Zambia and Zimbabwe facilitated the kind of engagement that could go on, as well as the lack of competition between the two. So Bate Bridge was next in the list for a One-Stop border, but that one's still hanging on a long, long, long time. So maybe just to go down, I'm not going to be able to go through all of these, apparently. But in terms of sort of the formal, informed rules of the game, as I say, light and formal structures in the Maputo case, much heavier involvement of donors, of the TFTA, of NEPAD, of all sorts of other actors along the North-South corridor, where it is really not clear who's actually pushing the agenda beyond this outside influence from donors. And so when you move down to the sort of the key actors that are there, whereas for the Maputo corridor, you had high presidential engagement, we had Shisano and Mandela. There's a close political linkage from before. We had key civil servants that were put within the two different ministries. So there was a political drive. You actually also had the private sector intros, both at the Maputo and through the Mozal investment, and at the South African end, in terms of looking for other options for Richards Bay and Durban ports. You also managed to set up a private sector association, and you even have sort of now a memorandum of understanding between the Maputo corridor logistic initiative and outside chambers of commerce promoting inward investment. So the structures around, the actor interests around Maputo corridor are much clearer than when you go to Zambia, again talking to sort of interviews that were carried out for this. There was much less of a private sector interest in having this, precisely because there's a reasonable manufacturing base and even production of capital goods which are serving the market, and at the moment are basically protected to a degree from South Africa. And also politically, in the previous government, basically under SATA, the big strategy was rural roads. That's the vote winner, not regional integration. So if we become frustrated with these things, then it's because we're ignoring some of these specific factors. So the main message I think then we need to get to is that the capacity constraints and all these previous sort of usual suspects are real, but the political economy factors are at least as important. So I think the point that you come to is that whereas signing up to something like the TFTA does serve a purpose as a kind of political signal, as a long-term ambition, in fact, the reality of implementation always has to come down to these narrower interests. And in order to understand those, we would do well to look at these sort of five different areas, the foundational factors, et cetera, and take all these things into account. So these are just some of the, okay, final one. What can you do with all this? One of the criticisms of political economy analysis is often that, well, it tells a good story about why things don't work, but it doesn't really help you in terms of trying to design a policy for looking forward. So this isn't actually in the paper, but I think maybe one of the things to discuss then is what could you do? And there are sort of four different strategies. One is you can try and alter the interests that are at play, which is what's been done often by donors trying to provide money on condition that, XYZ. Another is to try and adapt to the conditions that are there. So okay, well, if the interests are there, private sector interests are there, why don't we try and work with those guys? Or you can try and avoid, and that's a little bit what Mike's example of the Tennessee River Authority was saying, okay, let's try and just get by-pass some of those interests and do our own thing. And maybe finally, what Maputo Corridor one sort of highlights is timing. Timing is often crucial, so maybe sometimes you just need to await the right time, the right people, and then you'll be able to align the incentives. So I'm sorry, that was very fast, but the paper is in the pack as well, and I'm happy to discuss more of this afterwards. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.