The seminar introduces the concept of the Community Developmental State, 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.
Prof Jimmy Yab
Fudan Development Institute -Shanghai