The Impact OF Democratic Backsliding on Grassroots Development: A COMPARATIVE REGIONAL ANALYSIS AFRICAN UNION MEMBER STATES

This book exposes the destructive linkage between macro-political decay and grassroots vulnerability across the African Union. While development theory treats national governance and community survival as separate domains, this work proves how democratic backsliding and executive elite capture actively dismantle local progress. Utilising a pan-African mixed-methods framework, it links macro-quantitative V-Dem and IIAG indices with qualitative data from civil society audits.The findings reveal that institutional erosion predicts an exponential rise in state regulatory barriers (r=-0.79) and local budget starvation (r=-0.72). Regimes weaponise administrative audits and intercept fiscal transfers to cripple community resilience across core sustainability pillars, including poverty reduction, food security, health & climate adaptation (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 15).To counter this, the book introduces the Donor-Insulation Model, a framework designed to decouple local survival from predatory state networks through direct grassroots fiscal pipelines and peer-to-peer tracking. This book provides a critical blueprint for donors to safeguard communities from authoritarian state overreach.