Four years of the Ghana district assemblies in operation: Decentralization, democratization and administrative performance
| Date | 02 November 2006 |
| Published date | 02 November 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230140402 |
| Author | Richard C. Crook |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL.
14,339-364 (1994)
Four Years of the Ghana District Assemblies in operation:
decentralization, democratization and
administrative performance
RICHARD
C.
CROOK
University
of
Glasgow
SUMMARY
Ghana’s District Assemblies were created in 1989 as ‘integrated’ decentralised authorities,
combining oversight of deconcentrated line Ministries with the revenue powers and functions
of devolved democratic local government. The frequently invoked but little studied relation-
ships among democratisation, decentralisation and changes in the performance of government
institutions are analysed on the basis of two case-study Districts, defining performance as
output effectiveness, responsiveness and process acceptability. Although development output
did increase after democratisation, it remained inadequate and did not show any significantly
closer responsiveness to popular needs. This was mainly because local accountability was
undermined by continuing central control over staffing and finances, the clash with national
policies of retrenchment and the continued power of central government agents. The com-
munal, non-party basis of representation also had a perverse effect on the ability of elected
representatives to enhance the legitimacy of local taxation, particularly as the system embodied
an unresolved contradiction between notions of community based self-help and representative
district government. One of the lessons of the Ghanaian experience is that genuine local
autonomy in an agreed area-the basic condition for effective accountability-is better based
on more modest, local-level authorities, leaving larger, expensive functions as well as super-
vision of a deconcentrated civil service to more powerful regional administrations.
DEMOCRATIZATION, DECENTRALIZATION AND THE ASSESSMENT
OF
PERFORMANCE
Political and administrative decentralization
of
both governmental and developmen-
tal structures has become a dominant feature
of
reform policies adopted in large
numbers of less developed countries since the mid-1980s. The trend has been particu-
larly marked in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in South Asia and the Pacific and,
as the pages of
Public
Administration and Development
amply demonstrate, has
attracted the attention of both international aid donors, the World Bank, consultants
and researchers alike. Although this movement is in many ways a revival of an
earlier (and failed) fashion in development administration, it has been newly justified
with
a
set of much broader and more ideologically rooted arguments deriving from
current orthodoxies in economic and political development thinking. Thus advocates
of
the policy have justified decentralization
as
a key element in building ‘good govern-
ment’, interpreted as greater accountability, transparency and pluralism. These fea-
tures of good government have in turn been linked to development in
so
far
as
Richard
Crook
is in the Department
of
Politics,
University
of
Glasgow,
Adam Smith Building, The
University,
Glasgow,
GI2
8RT
CCC
027 1-2075/94/040339-26
0
1994 by John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.
340
R.
C.
Crook
they reduce the role of bloated and overstaffed central bureaucracies, and lead to
more efficient, realistic and locally adapted development strategies (World Bank,
1989; Wunsch 1991; Smoke and Olowu, 1992). In reducing central government
responsibilities, decentralization has also been expected to ‘free up’ participation
by the private sector and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs)
in the task of
economic development.
But decentralization was not just a 1980s ‘free marketeers’ enthusiasm. It was
argued by those who attacked dominant development paradigms on equity grounds
that decentralization, by creating more accountable and transparent institutions at
the local level, would respond to demands for more participatory development strate-
gies, and would be more likely to produce policies attuned to the needs of rural
populations and the disadvantaged. Decentralization was thus linked to democratiza-
tion.
Almost without exception, therefore, the African and Asian political decentraliza-
tion programmes implemented in the 1980s were democratic in the sense that they
created elected local government bodies. Of course, there was a wide variation in
the degree to which different countries mixed deconcentrated central agencies with
devolution to semiautonomous local government authorities. But wherever formally
accountable, territorially defined authorities with specified transferred powers were
set up one could speak of genuine governmental decentralization (Smith, 1985).
Many assessments of the 1980s wave of decentralization experiments have begun
to appear in print. In the African field, most have tended to focus either on resource
issues such as fiscal performance, government funding and revenue mobilization
or on development planning (see Thomas, 1987; Sanda
et
al.
1989; Stren and White
1989; de Valk and Wekwete, 1990; Smoke and Olowu, 1992). The attempt by Smoke
and Oluwu and other authors to understand the determinants
of
successful perform-
ance in African local governments
is
typical of this approach in that they define
‘success’ primarily by reference to the capacity to mobilize ‘substantial’ resources,
combined with the consequent ability to provide ‘significant’ and growing levels
of social and infrastructural services (Smoke and Olowu, 1992)’ Others have sought
to test the claim that decentralization improves the performance
of
rural development
programmes or the access of the poor and disadvantaged to government services
(Ogutu, 1989; Maro, 1990; Ingham and Kalam, 1992). But relatively few have set
out to investigate the proposition that there is a connection between democratic
decentralization and improvements in the performance of governmental institutions
of the type described above.2
This study of the Ghana district assemblies forms part
of
a cross-national compara-
tive research project aimed specifically at exploring the connection,
if
any, between
democratic decentralization and changes in institutional perf~rmance.~ The concept
’
In
their case studies, these performance definitions are measured by such factors as growth of per
capita revenues, budget surpluses, ratios of recurrent to capital expenditure and the degree to which
output expenditures are higher than those of average local authorities in the rest of the country (Laleye,
1992; Olowu, 1992; Smoke, 1992).
The exceptions would include the few studies of the Nigerian, Kenyan and Senegalese decentralizations
which have looked at the impact of participation and the political context. (Vengroff and Johnston,
1987; Gboyega,
1989;
Barkan and Chege,
1989).
’
The countries being compared are India (Kamalakaf, Bangladesh, Cote d’hoireand Ghana. Theresearch
is being conducted in collaboration with Professor
J.
Manor
of
the IDS, Sussex, and is funded
by
the
British
ODA,
whose support we gratefully acknowledge.
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