Four years of the Ghana district assemblies in operation: Decentralization,democratization and administrative performance

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 relationships 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 communal, 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 supervision of a deconcentrated civil service to more powerful regional administrations.