Suchergebnisse

This study examines local institutional reforms frequently conceived as a panacea for accountable and responsive local institutions that engender change and prosperity in Ghana. Currently, this assumption is often made without recourse to how policymakers pursue these institutional changes in everyday situations. While the link between local democracy and poverty reduction remains largely rhetorical, it still persists because no clear distinction is made between local political reforms, local autonomy and local socio-economic change. Using an actor-centered institutional framework, this study offers critical insights into how local policymakers take advantage of institutional reforms to advance their own interests at the expense of specific local priorities and socio-economic change.Matthew Sabbi is a Fritz Thyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair of Development Sociology, University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research focuses on the analysis of local political reforms and local public policy in the Global South particularly in Ghana.

A thematic gap in decentralization research is how rural councillors with limited political scope assert agency in rural transformation processes. Analysis of councillors' strategic interfaces with local organisations and international agencies outside the elected councils explores how they construct access to resources for rural development. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Ghana, the article demonstrates how creative boundary-spanning links councillors to different structures of rural governance and development intervention outside the remit of the district council. Clearly emergent from this study is that the cross-boundary collaborations create privileged access to outside resources and support for local political action but with significant political and economic consequences for councillors. These collaborative engagements offer a wider framework to understand councillors' individual agency for rural transformation beyond conventional analyses of state-led or bottom-up development planning and the dominant critique of external intervention.