ABSTRACT
The preceding five chapters (comprising Part II of this book) have considered the experience of the urban governance model in relation to addressing the major urban problems in Ghana. In each case – relating to jobs, services, transport, housing and land – it is evident that the urban problems have not been resolved by the turn to ‘urban governance’. It is by looking at this detailed experience in a historically and spatially specific context that we can see the deeper roots of the urban problems and their corresponding resiliance to posited solutions of a neoliberal character. It is now time to turn to a critical consideration of the more explicitly political aspects (democratisation and decentralisation) of urban governance. It is particularly important to consider the mechanisms by which urban citizens hold the actors in urban governance to account. The first section of this chapter considers the role of the state in urban development, particularly how mayors use a discourse of ‘urban decongestion’ as a way to improve urban governance and how citizens, in turn, try to hold the state actors to account. The second section focuses on elections as an additional, but distinctive, mechanism to hold mayors to account. The chapter shows the limitation of the latter mechanism and the need to connect it to the former, and indeed broader avenues of social change, relations, and conditions.
