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Impact of the Commonwealth: Need for Investigation

One reason why the Commonwealth is marginal to the concern of its 54 governments is that few know what it does that has impact. What does it do that succeeds, what doesn’t? This could begin to change, over the next few years, if its work and strategies are exposed to more rigorous analysis, with published results. An opportunity now arises with the launch of annual Commonwealth Studies Studentships for PhD researchers by the Round Table journal, supported by our publisher, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. It is now 23 years since the Commission on Commonwealth Studies, chaired by Professor Tom Symons of Trent University, Canada, published ‘Learning from Each Other: Commonwealth Studies for the 21 century’. The inquiry was launched at the request of Chief Emeka Anyaoku, then Secretary-General, but so far the 21 century has proved deaf to its proposals. An Association of Commonwealth Studies, founded afterwards, petered out. But the opportunities for graduate researchers to inquire into the reality of the Commonwealth are manifold, and exciting. There is encouragement here to interrogate what happens when governments or civil societies try to collaborate voluntarily, under the umbrella of a non-treaty organisation. Do volunteers achieve more than ‘pressed men’ or those required to work together by treaty? How much can ‘coalitions of the willing’ achieve, when others remain obstinately unwilling? Ever since I headed the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit (CPSU) at the London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies from 1999–2005 I have wanted to know more about the effectiveness of Commonwealth cooperation. The Commonwealth Secretariat, and Commonwealth unofficial organisations, have developed a battery of interventions designed to help governments and partners whom they do not have the right to compel: benchmarks, action plans, toolkits, best practice exchanges and workshops. Some of these go out over the internet, like bottled messages thrown overboard by nineteenth century sailors, with totally unknown results. Did anyone act on the action plan? Was the toolkit any use, either in preventing some policy breakdown, or in fixing it when officials were tearing their hair out? What we do know divides between the optimistic and the pessimistic. The last Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma used to quote the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance for the mysterious benefits of Commonwealth membership. It is true that the 2018 index shows seven out of the top ten African countries as members –