ABSTRACT
Does urban governance lead to the provision of better municipal services for all? The provision of schools, hospitals and security are all the responsibility of city authorities. However, it is with the provision of water and sanitation services that proponents of urban governance have made their strongest claims. So, globally, there has been a flurry of interest in the nexus between water, sanitation and urban governance (Bond, 2010; Njoh, 2012). For instance, Review of Radical Political Economics has recently published a special issue on the ‘Political economy of water’ which stresses that water and sanitation are a matter of ‘life and death’ (Barkin, 2010, p. 137). A special issue, which stresses the connections between water, sanitation provision, and the state of health in cities under an urban governance model, has also appeared in Environment and Urbanization (Satterthwaite, 2011). None of these special issues contained research on Ghanaian cities.
