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Abstract

Botswana has garnered analytic attention in the past few decades as Africa's developmental miracle. Being among the poorest countries in the world upon its independence in 1966, it catapulted itself to one of the fastest growing economies in the world for a period of four decades. What made the Botswana experience all the more outstanding, was that within the context of its company among other non-renewable natural resource dependent countries, it stood as an anomaly. This is because these resource endowed countries generally suffered or were susceptible to the "resource curse." This paper identifies legitimacy as having important value in explaining both Botswana's political and economic development as well as its escape of the resource curse. It argues that Botswana's experience can best be illuminated and understood through exploring its sources of political and state legitimacy which were carried from pre-colonial, through colonial into the post-colonial era, and not disrupted to the same extent as elsewhere on the continent and in other natural resource exporting countries. Adopting a Weberian understanding of legitimacy, it argues that legitimacy in Botswana stemmed from the low levels of arbitrariness in its colonialism that facilitated the continuation of legitimate norms and justifications of authority; from the traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority of its elites; from the horizontal legitimacy of its society fostered by largely voluntary precolonial and post-colonial mechanisms of assimilation; as well as legitimacy from its autonomy against external disruptive forces. The paper concludes by stating that research on regional variation on developmental outcomes particularly in Africa as well as research on the "resource curse" should pay closer attention to political legitimacy as an explanatory value beyond the traditional structural and institutional explanations.

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