Thus Michael Edwards...

Thus Michael Edwards, British, director of the Global Governance and Civil Society Program of the Ford Foundation, argues that populism as a term has been too discredited to be truly useful as a descriptor of new forms of democracy (personal correspondence, 5 January, 2007).

For his views on agency, see Edwards, “Looking back from 2046: Thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of the Institute for Revolutionary Social Science,” Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex, IDS Bulletin, March 2007. In contrast, as noted above, Mangcu and Edigheji believe that populism may turn out to be an effective way of describing citizen-centered politics in Africa, about which they have both written a great deal.

For instance, Omano Edigheji, research director at the Centre for Policy Studies, argued in a paper for a 2006 seminar with staff from the President’s office for a “society-centric approach to development and government.” He proposed that “The success of the developmental state “will be dependent on its ability to promote a people’s contract in an empowering way”, coming to rely less on service delivery and much more on the ingenuity and creativity of communities and citizens.

“This [means] an emphasis on cooperative work and deliberative traditions bringing people together across lines of different parties, racial backgrounds, class divides and other differences for the common good”.

Omano Edigheji, “The Emerging South African Democratic Developmental State and the People’s Contract ,” Paper developed for the Democratic Develoment State in Africa Project, Centre for Policy Studies, presented at the seminar by Peter Evans and Omano Edigheji on the Developmental State with the Office of the President, August, 2006.

See also footnotes 11 and 16, for the arguments of Gianna Pomata and Vladimir Khoros that a distinctive populist politics emerged globally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [^5] On Idasa’s work, see Harry C Boyte, Marie-Louise Ström and Bennitto Motitsoe, “Democracy as Social Responsibility: Debating the Role of the State,” Cape Times August 28, 2006; and Marie-Louise Ström, Citizens at the Centre (Cape Town: IDASA, 2005).

[^6] Peter Levine, “Three forms of populism in the 2008 campaign,” February 7, 2007(www.peterlevine.ws/mt/); Obama quoted from Ibid., and also Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zelney, “Obama Formally Enters Presidental Race with Calls for Generational Change,” New York Times February 11, 2007, p.