Is the underdevelopment of northern Ghana a case of environmental determinism or governance crisis?

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, the arguably most problematic regions in Ghana—the three northern regions, accounting for half of the country’s landscape yet the least developed—have come under increased academic scrutiny. This article seeks to interrogate some conventional arguments which attempt to attribute the region’s underdevelopment to its physical and climatic challenges, which are no more serious than other West Africa Sahelian countries where greater economic development is visible. Tracing the region’s past policy trajectories, we argue that adopting a rather ubiquitous deterministic lens oversimplifies or overlooks not only the flawed vestiges of colonial and postcolonial administrations but also the policy inconsistencies pursued and still pursued in the Fourth Republic. We conclude that the colonial policy biases, coupled with successive rounds of postindependence policy (dis)continuities, tend to gloss over fundamental problems underpinning the region’s low productivity and underdevelopment. These tendencies conceptually legitimize and constitute a key strategy in explaining the region’s developmental problems. Within such a configuration, a successive blend of failures and limitations in development policy has tended to be (re)inscribed in the region’s governance, ignoring long-established local values and preferences and thereby perpetuating underdevelopment in the region.