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Galamsey, a low-tech, labour-intensive, small-scale mining activity in Ghana, has recently come under intense criticism and state policing despite being an important livelihood source. Based on empirical research, this paper uses discourse analysis to re-examine galamsey politics in Ghana, focusing on why people are engaged in galamsey despite attempts to curtail it. Findings suggest that for most individuals and communities, poverty, displacement from agricultural lands and unemployment explain their initial entry into the industry. However, the legal, regulatory and policing regimes, together with complex, ambivalent relationships between government, large-scale mining companies, traditional authorities and galamsey operators, all help to perpetuate galamsey. These findings provide a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of opportunism and demonisation which often characterises public discussions on Ghana's galamsey industry. Rather than the combative approach taken by the state towards the galamsey phenomenon, urgent legislative and policy reforms are needed in order to streamline the licensing regime and address the drivers of galamsey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Obama's first trip to Africa as US President in July 2009 took him to Ghana. The president used his 2009 trip to articulate his broad and ambitious policy of engagement towards sub-Saharan Africa. His pronouncements during the trip to Ghana generated high expectations for a new dawn in the relationship between the United States and Africa. The U.S. President made Ghana his first stop on the continent because he was probably highly impressed by the institutionalization of democratic processes in the country. While in Ghana, the president highlighted that country's commitment to peaceful democratic transition and establishment of effective governance practices. Obama also called on other African leaders to follow the example of Ghana by creating democratic institutions, embracing good governance practices, and showing respect for the human rights of their citizens. During his second trip to Africa from June 27-July 2, 2013, President Obama and the First Lady traveled to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania to meet with leaders from government, business, and civil society, and to reinforce U.S. commitment to expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; strengthening democratic institutions; and investing in the next generation of African leaders. The U.S.-Africa Summit of August 6-7, 2014, convened by President Obama in Washington, D.C. was no doubt initiated to advance the political agenda of his previous two trips to Africa, and also to establish stronger economic and cultural ties with Africa. The 2014 summit brought together an unprecedented number of African leaders to Washington, D.C. for a two day conference that covered a broad array of topics ranging from health Care, trade and investments, security and terrorism, to good governance, democratic institutions and human rights. His third trip to Africa as President, took Obama to Kenya and Ethiopia from July 24-July 28, 2015.This visit was historic on two levels: it was the first time that a sitting American President had visited each of these countries as well address the African Union. In Kenya, Obama held bilateral meetings with Kenyan officials and attended the 2015 Global Economic/Entrepreneurship summit, an annual conference that brings together entrepreneurs, business leaders, and international organizations to discuss global economic and business issues. This trip built on the success of the August 2014 U.S.-Africa Leader's Summit and continued America's efforts to work with countries in sub-African, including Kenya, to accelerate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions and improve health and security. A partnership between the United States and Africa is as important as it is strategic because both partners must work together in order to function effectively in a complex global environment that is increasingly plagued by terrorism, political instability, devastating public health epidemics, economic inequalities, poor governance and the failure to effect credible administrative reforms in a number of African nations. This paper proposes to examine the content of U.S. support for the establishment of democratic institutions and good governance practices in Africa since the onset of democratic transitions in Africa in the early 1990s. A review of American support for Africa's democratic transitional process is important because the United States was instrumental in supporting and facilitating the political discourse and initial processes that constituted the foundations of many transitional efforts in Africa. This task will be accomplished against the backdrop of the inability, unwillingness, or failure of some African nations to fully embrace the democratic processes and institutions upon which such US support is supposed to be predicated. It is apparent that the Anglophone nations in West, East and South Africa have been more responsive to the political practices advocated by the United States and its western allies and are in fact reforming their political institutions and administrative processes and procedures. By contrast, most Francophone nations in West and Central Africa are content with the status quo. Why is there a discrepancy between the English-speaking and French-speaking African nations toward embracing democratic and good governance practices? It is to answering this question that this paper aspires to accomplish through a comparative analysis of the performance records of a select number of Anglophone and Francophone states in West and Central Africa. How have these English (Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa) and Frenchspeaking (Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) countries fared since President Obama first acknowledged the great strides made by Ghana during his 2009 visit? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies have documented the existence of the public‐private pay differentials in both developed and developing countries. The implementation of policies aiming to reduce this gap has however been mitigated or inconclusive. This paper exploits the Single Spine Pay Policy (SSPP) in Ghana as a natural experiment to examine the effectiveness of wage policies in developing countries. The SSPP was implemented in 2010 by the Government of Ghana to address the public‐private sector wage gap and improve productivity in the public sector. Using a quantile treatment effect approach based on a difference‐in‐difference estimation, we show that the SSPP has yet to reduce the wage gap between the public and private sectors across the entire distribution of earnings in Ghana. The improvement observed is only at the lower tail of the distribution of earnings. However, the SSPP has a larger effect on the earnings of female workers than that of males in the education and health services sectors while male workers have benefited more in the administration sector, suggesting that the policy was successful in reducing the gender wage gap in the education and health services sectors but has widened this gap in the administration sector. Moreover, the SSPP has decreased the productivity of workers across the distribution of earnings, mainly due to a decrease in the effort of female public sector workers in the education and health sectors and male workers in the administration sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores reactions to election results in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana from the perspectives of the politics of belonging debates – the distinction citizens of the same nation-state make between those who belong and those who belong less in one of Ghana’s highly competitive electoral regions. It argues that multi-party democracy has intensified or given rise to social and political tensions or conflicts in some local communities rather than enhance democratic ideals and peaceful coexistence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most African states, political openness and tolerance is measured by the non-existence of government censorship, and also the ability of the media to operate without fear. In agreement with the debate posited by Wasserman (2013) including other scholars suggests that the media is capable of building democratic structures as it provides a platform for continuous discussion, communication and dialogue amongst various stakeholders within the state. The objectives of this paper is to assess the disadvantages of sensationalism in the media on the democratic development of Ghana [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil Society and many youth activists were elated when the youth, those aged between 21 and 40 years, were given prominence in Ghana’s parliament after the 2012 elections. Indeed, as many as 44 young people were elected during Ghana’s 2012 Parliamentary Elections. Prior to this, the number of young people in Ghana’s parliament was negligible. In view of the demographic advantage of the youth and their invaluable contributions to Ghana’s political history, there have been incessant calls for their representation and an eventual return to the days of the 1950s when politics was dominated by the youth. The outcome of the 2012 Parliamentary Elections was therefore hailed as unprecedented and described by many as a giant step towards youth representation in national decision making. However, a survey of all the young parliamentarians and some 4400 young people carefully selected through purposive sampling provides the basis for this paper’s thesis that the growth in the number of young people in Ghana’s parliament does not necessarily guarantee youth representation in national decision making; rather, it promotes tokenism, exclusivity and co-optation of the youth into decision-making structures of state. The study makes practical recommendations to create a relationship between youth in Ghana’s parliament and youth representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this Debate, I argue that the 2007 discovery of oil in commercial quantities in Ghana is advancing rather than obstructing democratisation. Using the theory of political settlement and the institutional concept of feedback, I show that oil has led to democratic feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses how civil society organizations (CSOs) in Ghana have influenced the election campaigns of emerging political parties. Through parliamentary and presidential debates, CSOs have brought the electorate and the political parties together to discuss the most pertinent socio-economic electoral issues that needed political attention. The 2008 and 2012 election interactions between the electorate and the political parties instigated by CSOs have enhanced the deepening of Ghana's democracy because they and political parties now recognize each other as a partner rather than as an adversary. Nevertheless, government's apprehensions about CSOs as opposition persist. Hence, this paper observes that sustainable CSO electoral interactions with political parties will require CSOs to maintain in the sphere of political neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sub-Saharan Africa, the private media are often considered corrupt and thus incapable of performing critical watchdog functions. Using the Ghanaian case, the objective of this study is to examine how the private media contribute to exposing political corruption and demanding accountability. Based on the media-as-a-watchdog theory and on primary and secondary data, this article argues that private media outlets make significant contributions to the fight against political corruption. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data in Ghana. Relevant secondary data from media reports and scholarly work supplement the primary data. The research findings show that Ghanaian private media address political corruption through investigative reporting, agenda-setting, providing a forum for anti-corruption discussions, and acting as a pressure group for institutional and legal reforms as well as political accountability. This article thus questions the popular claim that in sub-Saharan Africa, the private media cannot contribute meaningfully to combatting corruption involving influential political actors. Policy and future research implications are presented in the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Performance management (PM) has become a key instrument in the quest to ensure optimal operations by organisations in the public sector. Some scholars, though, believe that PM has failed because of employees' negative perception and management's exclusion of employees from its development. Studies on the relationship between employee perception of PM and its effectiveness in the public sector are limited. We argue that management must value employee perception more highly than they do at present because it is unlikely employees would be willing to take an active part in implementing a change with which they disagree or that they see as having no value. This study examines the effect of employees' perception on the institutionalisation and implementation of PM in developing countries, with specific reference to Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Emerging issues from the Bui hydropower project suggest that the experiences of two earlier hydropower projects in Ghana failed to prevent challenges related to resource access and livelihoods. This article examines the nature of the challenges, their causes, why they were not avoided and the role of the Chinese builders. We conducted 43 interviews and 11 focus group discussions and analyzed qualitative data by themes using narrative analysis. Our findings show that the livelihoods of the resettled communities are, on balance, negatively impacted by the construction of the dam. While Chinese dam‐builders played a major role in financing and enabling the dam's construction, the Ghanaian governance arrangements were found to be more important in addressing the livelihood challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid urbanisation in African democracies is changing the way that political parties engage with their constituents, shifting relations between hosts and migrants. This article examines the strategies that parties use to maintain and build electoral support in increasingly diverse contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research in Accra, Ghana, we find that some urban political parties rely on inclusive forms of mobilisation, promoting images of cosmopolitanism and unity to incorporate a broad grassroots coalition. Yet in nearby constituencies, parties respond to changing demographics through exclusive forms of mobilisation, using narratives of indigeneity and coercion to intimidate voters who ‘do not belong’. Two factors help explain this variation in mobilisation: incumbency advantage and indigene dominance. In contrast to most scholarship on ethnicity and electoral politics in Africa, we find that these varying mobilisation strategies emerge from very local neighbourhood-level logics and motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As colonial and nationalist governments pursued small-scale development in mid-century northern Ghana, so-called ‘voluntary’, &#x2018.communal’, or ‘self-help’ labor became a key determinant of funding. District records and oral histories show how colonial officials, chiefs, and party politicians alternately cast unpaid labor as a way to cut costs, a catalyst for new forms of politics, and an expression of local cohesion. This article extends analysis of ‘self-help’ beyond articulations of and debates about national policy, examining daily negotiations over budgeting and building. It follows two chiefs who used their ability to raise labor to navigate a rapidly changing political landscape. The line between coercion and voluntarism was rarely clear, nor were the meanings of labor fixed for administrators, chiefs, or their constituents. These local actors created the circumstances for successive governments to frame unpaid labor as a legitimate demand on rural citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens in Ghana have a host of options when it comes to local governance provision as a result of the government’s decentralization policies. We undertake to explore and understand how Ghanaians navigate the constellation of local institutions, both formal and traditional, to solve an array of common problems. A four-constituency survey was administered during the summer of 2009 and asked respondents about their experiences interacting with four formal institutions and one traditional institution. We find that formal institutions are by and large working effectively and are enhanced by the presence of a traditional institution. We consider the implications of our results with respect to both democratization and decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although Ghana has made significant progress in the establishment and consolidation of democratic politics since 1992, the vexatious issue of the use of scarce public resources to support political party activities remained unresolved. Using quantitative data an attempt is made in this study to examine the views of Ghanaians on the arguments for and against state funding of political parties. The data for the study was obtained through survey of 1600 self-declared cardholding and 200 self-declared non-card holding members of the seven political parties that contested the 2012 general elections. Convenience and stratified sampling procedures were deployed for the selection of the respondents. The study results indicated that rich individuals with a mean score of 4.41 and standard deviation (SD) of 0.77 form the most predominant funding source for political parties in Ghana. Again, the least funding sources were the state or government funds and dues from ordinary party members which obtained a mean score of 2.71 and SD of 1.71; and a mean of 2.93 and SD of 1.38, respectively. The study conclusions were that, in Ghana, few rich individuals are the major financiers of political parties. Ghanaians are divided and ambivalent on the question of state funding and, those who oppose across-the-board state funding policy outnumber those who support the idea. Likewise, support for state funding of political parties in Ghana is predominant and strongest among party executives and the smaller political parties. It is recommended that funding from both private and state sources require strong and effective regulation regime by the establishment and implementation of disclosure and transparency policies and laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new theoretical and empirical insights into democratization in Africa, using the typology developed by John Higley and Michael Burton to understand elite interaction in Ghana. Social network analysis (SNA) is used to test the main proposition of the Higley/Burton theory, namely that a 'liberal democracy is impossible without a consensually united elite'. Empirical evidence is provided from a unique data set that maps the interaction patterns between Members of Parliament elected to the Ghanaian legislature in 2012. The article shows that MPs in Ghana form a dense and strongly interconnected network bridging ethnic and party cleavages, and that MPs from different parties have developed a measure of trust in one another. These findings not only support Higley and Burton's claim that elite integration is conducive to stable democracy, but also point to new directions in African Studies by demonstrating the capacity of actor-centric approaches to explain processes of democratization in countries that lack the classic structural preconditions for consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines calls for the introduction of partisan politics into the District Assemblies system, which is the core institution in Ghana’s democratic decentralization program. I argue that in spite of constitutional provisions and an enabling legislation on the need for a ‘politically neutral’ District Assemblies system, this has not been the case, ironically partly due to the composition of the membership of the Assemblies as provided for in the 1992 Constitution and the unnecessary interferences by governments. This situation, the article notes, has undermined the effectiveness of the District Assemblies system. The article concludes by recommending certain measures that must be put in place if the situation is to be arrested and ensure the attainment of the goals of the District Assemblies system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]