Building Resilient Organizations for Effective Service Delivery in Developing Countries: The Experience of Ghana Water Company Limited

Abstract

Public organizations in developing countries can only be effective if they are able to develop and implement public policies effectively and efficiently. However, what continues to bother scholars is how to ensure that such bureaucratic organizations are also accountable and democratic. Some have argued that the solution lies with the building of merit-based organizations. Nevertheless, we believe that a critical factor in building efficient organizations in developing countries is the designing and building of resilient organizations. In this article, we provide a theoretical framework for building resilient organizations in developing countries and use it to examine water sector reforms in Ghana.

Keywords:

• developmental state
• Ghana
• resilience
• resilient organization
• service delivery

Notes on contributors

Joshua Jebuntie Zaato is a lecturer and researcher of Public Administration at the University of Ottawa where he has been teaching for about five years. His research interest is in the areas of management reforms, organizational theory, democratic governance, and public private partnerships.

Frank L. K. Ohemeng is an assistant professor of public administration at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. He obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Public Policy and Administration from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. His main research interests are in areas of public management, comparative public administration, development administration and management, and comparative public policy. His research has appeared in a number of international journals, including the International Journal of Public Administration, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Public Management Review, Canadian Public Administration, and others.

Notes

¹The kind of developmental state many people are calling for in Africa is different from that of the Asian Tigers. In Africa, what is being discussed is a democratic developmental state, a state that uses the ethos of democracy to build a strong and capable state that can play active role in national development.

²The concept figures in disciplines as diverse as business, ecology, economics, engineering, health, psychology, and physical sciences, among others.

³Andrews (2013) similarly argues for such a capacity for successful reforms in developing countries. However, he calls this the “problem driven iterative adaptation,” which generally refers to the adapting to challenges by these countries rather than the ‘best-practice’ solution provided by International Financial Institutions. See Rodrik (2008) for problems associated with the ‘best-practice’ approach.

⁴Uganda is considered to be the first country to have tried this model, and Ghana hopes to learn from them. For more on water sector reforms in Uganda, see Mbuvi and Schwartz (2013).

⁵For more on how such patrimonial relations and the spoil system affect or frustrate plans for organizational change and reform, see Goran Hyden (2013).