Towards a Measure of Local Government Performance in Ghana: Conceptual Framework, Data and Results

In recent decades, decentralization reforms have surged across the Global South, aiming to enhance governance by bringing it closer to citizens. Despite extensive debate on its effectiveness, systematic methods to assess local government performance remain underexplored, particularly in data-constrained contexts like Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper proposes a conceptual framework inspired by Putnam et al. (1994) to measure local government performance, applying it in Ghana—a stable democracy and a leader in decentralization reforms in SSA. Using novel data from administrative reports complemented by primary and secondary sources, we construct performance measures for 2016 and 2020. Our findings reveal improving administrative report quality but generally low subnational institutional performance, with older and larger urban districts outperforming newer, rural ones. In a data-constrained context, we find that our next best measure with a restricted list of indicators is good enough to capture variations in local government performance. Additionally, emerging evidence raises questions about the traditional notion of a rigid north-south divide in Ghana’s socio-economic development. This study offers a foundation for theory-driven evaluation of local governance in SSA and beyond with important implications for shaping decentralization reforms.