This paper focuses on the relationship between regional integration in the Southern African Development Community and national policies. Review of trade, industrial, agricultural, labour, and related policy areas, indicates that national policies can and do run counter to the regional integration initiatives that are formalized in the legal instruments of this southern African regional economic community.

Regional integration is being pursued as an overarching continental development strategy by member states of the African Union (AU). However, despite the multiplicity of regional integration arrangements in Africa and concerted efforts to harmonize various initiatives of the regional economic communities (RECs), the African market remains highly fragmented (World Bank 2012). Notwithstanding progress made by some RECs to eliminate tariffs on intra-REC trade in line with the Abuja Treaty (1991), there is general consensus that the African market remains fragmented by a range of non-tariff and regulatory barriers to the movement of goods, services, people, and capital across borders. Renewed interest is, however, emerging from recent initiatives such as the Tripartite free trade agreement negotiations, which were launched in June 2011, and the decision of the AU Summit in January 2012 to fast-track the establishment of an African continental free trade area (FTA) by 2017.

Many reasons have been advanced to explain Africa’s poor performance with regional integration arrangements. This paper seeks to provide some insights on the failure of national policies and regulations to support regional integration efforts in Africa. It presents a general analysis of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) market integration experience with respect to select national policies and regulatory frameworks of member states. The selected areas relate to national trade, industrial, agricultural, competition, and labour policies. The paper concludes that most of these policies are underpinned by restrictive measures arising from inadequate implementation of the adopted protocols and policy frameworks at national levels, thereby hindering progress on regional integration in SADC.

Effective mechanisms for strategy development, planning, and especially for monitoring and evaluation of protocols and other core policies, are urgently required in SADC. Such mechanisms need to be underpinned by a rules-based institutional framework that enhances compliance by member states. The current institutional mechanisms remain inadequate to foster greater policy and regulatory convergence among member states.

An emerging debate in analytical work on SADC’s regional integration relates to the nature of the approach to regional integration. The approach adopted at the continental level through the Abuja Treaty (1991), is premised on a linear integration model, as in the case of European integration, with consecutive stages of integration, starting with a free trade area, customs union, common market, monetary union, and economic union with a single currency.

It is vital that the regional integration agenda should pay attention to microeconomic policies that used to be considered the exclusive domain of national economic policy. This approach seeks greater policy and regulatory ‘harmonization’ and adoption of best practices that will not only reduce diversity in the region but also improve the general business environment across borders by reducing costs and levelling the playing field for economic operators.

This debate towards an alternative approach to regional integration in Africa, and in SADC in particular, is urgent. Analytical work to understand how national policies and regulations relate to the regional integration process can assist in building a bottom-up approach to regional integration. This is also likely to generate alternative approaches to tackling on-the-ground policy and regulatory constraints within member states that limit the flow of goods, services, capital, and workers across borders within the region.