The Failure to Learn Lessons from Policy Failures in Developing Countries? The Case of Electricity Privatization in Ghana

ABSTRACT

Do policy makers learn from their failures? The rational and normal expectation would be that they do, but experience shows otherwise. Notwithstanding the valuable and multiply expected learning opportunities presented by such failures, especially in Africa, policy errors continue unabated in both the developed and developing worlds. Even the high-profile nature of the failures across the continent seems insufficient to convince African policy makers of their significance. Focusing on the recent electricity privatization fiasco in Ghana, this paper examines factors that impede or otherwise affect policy makers’ ability to learn from their mistakes. Using interviewing a number of officials involved in the process of electricity privatization, we identified five main factors that continue to affect policy learning from policy failures in Ghana.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy failure
• policy politicisation
• policy diffusion
• policy imposition
• privatization
• Ghana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The organizations where interviews were conducted included: the Ministry of Energy; the Ministry of Finance (MoF); the ECG; the MiDA; the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission; the African Centre for Energy Policy; Imani Africa; the Public Utility Workers Union; the Integrated Social Development Centre; the Third World Network; the Public Service Workers Union; the Trades Union Congress; and the Private Enterprise Foundation.

2. The 51% local ownership was a demand from the TUC, which had originally opposed the deal. This helped to the deal to win their support and also assuage the fear that ECG was been sold to foreigners.