Local State Institutional Reforms in Ghana: Actors, Legitimacy and the Unfulfilled Promise of Participatory Development

Cover -- 1. Introduction: Institution-Building and Change -- 1.1 Institution-Building in the International Development System -- 1.2 The Context and Problem: Local State Institutional Reforms in Ghana -- 1.3 Propositions in the Study -- 1.4 Objective of the Study -- 1.5 Research Questions -- 1.6 Rationale: Why Study Local State Institution- Building in Ghana? -- 1.7 Delimitations of the Study -- 1.8 Organization of the Sections of the Study -- 1.9 Concluding Remarks -- 2. Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis of Institution- Building and Change -- 2.1 The Rules and Players of Institutional Change -- 2.1.1 The agency-structure question -- 2.1.2 Defining institutions and organizations -- 2.2 Sociological Institutionalism and Change Programmes -- 2.2.1 Neo-institutionalism and the diffusion of change ideas -- 2.2.2 Entrepreneurs and institutional ideas -- 2.2.3 Research in neo-institutional analysis of change -- 2.2.4 Critique of the neo-institutional approach -- 2.3 Actor-Centered Institutionalism -- 2.3.1 Actor-centered institutionalism and local political reforms -- 2.3.2 Synthesizing the sociological and actor-centered institutionalisms -- 2.4 Conceptual Framework for Analysing Local Institutional Change -- 2.4.1 Constructed legitimacy within institutional reform programmes -- 2.4.2 Legitimacy rhetoric and institution-building enticements -- 2.4.3 Levels of analysis in the framework -- 2.5 Concluding Remarks -- 3. Methodology: The Empirical Study Design and Data -- 3.1 Framing the Basis of Knowledge in the Study -- 3.2 The Multi-Methods Design for the Study -- 3.3 Contextualizing the Study: Multi-Level and Multi-Site Locations -- 3.3.1 Study organizations and unit of analysis -- 3.3.2 Sources of evidence -- 3.4 Study Actors and their Characteristics -- 3.4.1 The sample and selection strategy