‘In the shadows of autonomy’: Decentralization, municipal decision-makers and local contexts in Ghana and Rwanda

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dieter Neubert
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439734012

Decentralized local authorities in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, are supposed to be responsive to local needs, fight corruption and hold officials to account. This premise is contingent on the autonomy of elected officials to make local decisions. Impliedly, councillors and mayors would take charge of crucial decisions for effective service delivery and the fight against poverty. However, the usually strong focus of current research on the formal structure (viz. the local administration, efficiency and accountability) and its political control overlooks the local context that significantly influences everyday decision processes. In particular, the everyday life in and around the councils as well as their actors remains neglected. Councillors’ incentives and rationale for running for office are largely ignored. The relations between local actors in and outside the administration are hardly considered. This is surprising because decentralization reforms seek to limit semi- and informal ways of decision-making as these are often seen as signs of corruption. Building on a preliminary Ghana study, our aim is to fill this research gap through a comparative study with Rwanda. We contend that everyday life of decentralization is contingent on sets of relations between the state, its local representatives, municipal councillors (as decision-makers), and the local context of decentralization. Our two-fold objective seeks to: firstly, analyse the logics of actors who run for office in municipal councils; secondly, explore how councillors use their political roles and networks to influence decisions in their local contexts and how the councillors themselves need to consider local power structures. We are also interested in the motivation for councillors to run for office as well as their actual influence in local decisions. This includes an assessment of municipal services, according to local understanding. We presume that only the contextualization of decentralization efforts offers the necessary inside view to understand and plan effective decentralized administrative structures. This offers also information on the state’s possible interference with decentralized decision-making.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Alexander Stroh-Steckelberg