Publication

This paper reflects on the proposed African Union (AU) Authority. It argues that the proposed Authority could play a vital role in the integration process, provided its technical and political capacity is improved and some changes are made to the institutional configuration of the AU. How the proposed Authority is going to achieve this is contingent on how it balances intergovernmentalism and supranationalism. Specifically with regard to the decision-making and implementation processes of the AU, the authors propose that the AU Authority should have exclusive policy initiation and implementation capacity in certain domains, while other domains should remain the preserve of the intergovernmental set-up in terms of decision-making and directives.