SADC Integration and poverty eradication in Southern Africa: An appraisal

Abstract

While regional schemes in Southern Africa espouse developmental regionalism, until recently they have retained a particularly strong emphasis on traditional political and security considerations. When it was born, in the early 1990s, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) embodied the resurgence of the doctrine of development in the aftermath of Cold War over-securitization of the global agenda. Of particular concern for the SADC were a relatively strong South African economy and the grave effects on countries in the region of the structural adjustment programmes of the Bretton Woods Institutions. But whether the SADC practices the developmental integration gospel it preaches is debatable.