| Author: | Mcwilson, Wilson Kodwo |
| Title: | State restructuring and city regionalism in the Global South : evidence from postcolonial Ghana |
| Advisors: | Sun, Yi (BRE) Chan, Edwin (BRE) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Department: | Department of Building and Real Estate |
| Pages: | xiii, 247 pages : color illustrations, map |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | While the breakdown of Fordism is often cited as the cause of state transformations in Western Europe and North America, the factors driving state transformation in the Global South are distinct. State rescaling in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is a nuanced process which is connected to various external and internal dynamics. The intervention of international actors assumes a pivotal role in restructuring the state’s framework through enforcing conditional aid in the Global South. To meet these conditions, the majority of African countries are compelled to implement comprehensive economic, governance, and institutional reforms, leading to significant changes in the state’s structure and functions. City regions are geographical manifestations of state rescaling but most of the studies focus on the Global North. This presents a significant gap in the literature. To address this, the current research investigates city regionalism in postcolonial Ghana where it is argued that planning is marshaled as an institutional instrument. Planning is leveraged to actualize the state’s vision of reconfiguring national territory and internationalizing the state to create economic or functional spaces that echo the logic of late Keynesianism within a postcolonial context. City regionalism is a political process leveraged by a unique power geometry. The study found that city regionalism in Ghana entails grand visions with weak implementation. Findings reveal the central government’s inclination toward endogenous territorial restructuring, by which city-region development is centrally orchestrated and state-guided. In addition, city regionalism is influenced by the geostrategic ambitions of international capital, especially Chinese capital, which seeks to draw investment into the built environment and infrastructure. The central government’s customization of a regional governance agency, the Northern Development Authority (NDA), and the decentralization of land resources give rise to a “dumbbell” power structure. The concentration of legal and cohesive power in the central government and an overly privatized land ownership regime characterize this “dumbbell” power structure. The operation of the NDA is thus a scaffolding with no substantial power. The central government exercises restrictive fiscal regulation over regional and local states in the NSEZ. These two dimensions hamper the effective implementation of the regional plan. Collaboration between different levels of state administration, traditional authorities, and civil society actors is imperative to address the complexities of city regionalism in postcolonial Ghana. This study makes a significant and impactful contribution to the current discourse on state rescaling and city regionalism by examining the postcolonial context of city region-making in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. The study’s focus on state rescaling and city regionalism in postcolonial Ghana contributes to comparative research, where the African case is benchmarked against the international literature to show how state rescaling processes in African cities are shaped by unique historical, political, and institutional legacies that differ from those in the Global North. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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