Challenges to decentralisation in Ghana: where do citizens seek assistance?

ABSTRACT

Decentralisation in Ghana, and across sub-Saharan Africa, faces a number of challenges to successful local governance provision because there are a number of formal and informal actors to choose from. Citizens may take problems they want a governance provider to solve to a member of parliament or a district assembly person, a traditional chief or a police officer, a neighbour or an NGO. In this article we report on a four-constituency survey administered to explore and understand how citizens choose between the options of local institutions available to them in order to solve a problem important to their community or themselves. We find that formal national (Parliamentarians) and informal traditional (Chiefs) institutions are where respondents turn for assistance most often instead of constitutionally described local modes of governance (District Assemblies). We consider the implications of this finding in terms of decentralisation in Ghana and the need to build institutions that are context-sensitive and reflect how citizens understand political options.

KEYWORDS:

• Ghana
• decentralisation
• local governance
• institutions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Surveys were administered in the summers of 2009 and 2010. This was a period of National Democratic Congress (NDC) control of the presidency and legislature but the potential avenues of domestic governance (District Assemblies have been around since 1989 and the Parliament since 1993 for instance) have remained the same under New Patriotic Party (NPP) control. This period is also after the dramatic increases in national wealth Ghana saw between 2000 and 2008 as the country entered the present period more modest but sustained growth.

2. Our approach began by first using ten randomly generated enumeration areas maps situated in each constituency provided by Ghana Statistical Services. The area enumeration maps were used to conduct the 2000 national census and contain between one hundred and five hundred households each. Sketches of the block or village enumerated as well as a written description of its boundaries were included. For each enumeration area ten surveys were collected by randomly selecting ten households and then randomly selecting a survey respondent from within each household. A neighbouring household was substituted only after two failed attempts to survey the randomly selected respondent were made.

3. ‘What is the highest level of schooling you have completed?’

4. ‘Do you come from this area [Nabdam, Bolgatanga, Odododiodio, Ayawaso West] or are you from outside the area?’

5. ‘Ghana has many political parties. Which do you think brings more development to the country?’

6. The careful reader will note that not all institutions are present in every figure. Any institution that is absent from a figure is due directly to that institution not garnering a single response from any of our respondents.

Additional information

Funding

The authors research was supported from a University of Tampa Faculty Research Grant.