Leadership and Sustainable Development in Africa: A Review of Challenges, Precepts and Possibilities

This article examines the connection between leadership and sustainable development, by examining the foundational precepts, key challenges, and future possibilities in Africa. This paper uses integrative review as a research method to generalize different ideas regarding the nexus between leadership and sustainable development in Africa. Integrative review pools and synthesizes facts, information and arguments from a broad range of sources. This review uses extant literature pertaining to the subject matter with an inclusion and exclusion guiding criteria for the selection of materials, usage of relevant and recent materials. High impact data bases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, amongst others were accessed for relevant materials. The theoretical foundation of this research lies within the Institutional Theory, which is a strong analytical tool which transcends the market-based orthodoxy in order to look at the role of formal and informal rules of the game and determine the achievement of sustainable development in Africa. Also, the three pillars of the sociological perspective which are regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive offer a structural framework of how to comprehend stability and change. This review finds that the existing dependence on Western-oriented, individualistic leadership paradigms is inadequate to cope with the unstable, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions of the continent. Relatively, a vital path to social equity and economic resilience requires an adaptive architecture of power that is collective, pluralistic that is well grounded in practices such as Ubuntu, which is one of our indigenous ethical practices. This study concludes by recommending an integrative framework that aligns leadership practices with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), advocating for institutional reforms, interventions for leadership development, and policy coherence as pathways to attaining sustainable development in Africa.