Explaining conflict outcomes of regionalization in Ghana: A two-step QCA analyses

Why do processes to decentralize governance yield conflict outcomes in some cases and not in others? This puzzle is also noted in Ghana when new regional administrations were created by dividing existing ones. Despite occurring within the same state and under the same institutions, the processes yielded (violent) contentious politics in some cases and not in others. To explain this paradox, this study conducted a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) on seven cases (selected from 1959 and 2019). The analysis was guided by a developed hypothesis suitable for Ghana’s secession-like procedure for creating new regions. The analyses followed a two-step crisp-set QCA approach across seven multiple-theory-informed conditions to identify their contribution to the outcome. Hence separate attention was given to how remote and proximate conditions contributed to the outcome. The outcome was ‘social conflict’, operationalized as contentious political performances. Diverse data sources dated between 1949 and 2020 informed the truth table for the analyses. They included interviews conducted in Ghana (between November 2019 to March 2020) as well as government and non-government reports, statutes, court proceedings, and diverse array of grey literature. Preliminary results of the analyses show causal pathways that highlight three key conditions contributing to the outcome, namely: presence of competing dominant elites, high complexity of transition deliberations and low regional support for the national government. The third condition seems to be a 'context-enabling condition'' within which the first two conditions jointly and sufficiently lead to the outcome. Other expected conditions such as natural resources, inter-group inequality and ethnic distinctiveness seem either less or non-contributory to the outcome. Hence the paper offers interim comments on the contextual limitations of such popularly theorized causes of conflicts in divided multi-ethnic societies. This within-case comparative study of Ghana’s region creation processes offers unique insight because it presents a hybrid feature of decentralization where a 'secessionist' process is used to achieve a 'non-secessionist' end. Hence by using a secessionist lens, the study is grounded in related debates and shows how the implicated conditions help explain the larger puzzle about why demands for territorial autonomy yield conflict outcomes in some cases and not in others. Moreover, it makes nuanced findings by showing the differential potential that proximate conditions such as the actions of elite actors, as well as remote conditions such as partisan regional support, have in either escalating or deescalating processes to restructure sub-national territorial politics. Ultimately, the issues discussed in this study are relevant within the debates about conflict management in multi-level governance systems, the conflict outcomes of state-restructuring in multilevel systems and the conflict outcomes of decentralization efforts, including secession.