Translating discourses of local economic development: the case of the Ghana decent work programme

This study is situated within the discourse on the prospects of local economic development strategies to address the challenges that confront cities and regions in an era of globalization. Local economic development though long practiced in many regions and cities of the Global North, remains a nascent practice in sub-Saharan Africa particularly Ghana. Its spread into sub-Saharan Africa has mainly been through international development organizations. Their goal has been to make local economic development an alternative or complement to the conventional ‘top-down’ approaches. There has however been scepticism about the impact of these place-based strategies. Among the critiques is the almost space-blind application of these development concepts, norms and procedures from the Global North. At the core of this is the ambivalence in the dominant institutionalist view of the context-specificity of the endogenous factors and institutions responsible for local economic development and the replicability of the emerging strategies into other contexts. How such socio-spatial contexts shape local economic development trajectories in sub-Saharan Africa is however unclear due to the paucity of research. Thus, the calls to extend this knowledge domain through contextually rich theoretical and empirical case studies from sub-Saharan Africa.
The study pursues this goal by examining the logics and processes involved in the translation and adaptation of discourses of local economic development from the Global North into cities and regions in Ghana. Specifically, the study examines the case of the implementation of the first local economic development strategy in Ghana, the local economic development component of the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP). The GDWP was implemented from 2003 to 2009 with assistance from the International Labour Organization (ILO). The goal of the programme was to reduce poverty by tackling the problem of decent work deficits prevalent in the informal economy. The ILO conceptualized decent work deficits as referring to inadequate remuneration, hazardous working conditions, lack of social protection and job security.
The study adopted a multi-sited qualitative case study premised on the Effutu and Ajumako Enyan Essiam districts located in the Central Region of Ghana. These are urban and rural districts respectively and the first to pilot the GDWP with the aim of drawing lessons for future programme upscaling and replication. The theoretical underpinning of the study hinged on a framework that builds on the moments of translation, developed by Michel Callon (1986) by integrating into it the socio-spatial contexts of actors. Data for the study was gathered purposively through in-depth semi-structured interviews, field observations and the review of various publications related to the programme. The units of analysis were institutional and individual actors involved in the implementation of the GDWP. These included the central and local governments and the political and technical actors within the ILO and small business operators in the informal economy and their small business associations among others. While the primary data collected was analysed through content analysis, the secondary data was analysed by means of desk review and Fairclough’s (1993) approach to critical discourse analysis.
The study revealed that the translation and adaptation of international discourses of local economic development into Ghana in the case of the GDWP were shaped by the agency of the diverse actors involved. The actors involved in the participatory space for local economic development setup under the GDWP, in pursuit of diverse interests drew on structural opportunities and constraints emanating from their socio-spatial contexts. These socio-spatial contexts were the international development arena, the informal economy and the local governance system. This manifested as different actors exercising differing levels of power at different moments through different means. The trajectory of the GDWP evolved out of the ensuing negotiations and contestations among the actors involved. This culminated in the break-down of the participatory space for local economic development, the Subcommittee for Productive and Gainful Employment (SPGE) in the two study districts.
The study highlights the key role the identified socio-spatial contexts play in shaping the agency of actors involved in local economic development. From the international development arena, the quest for legitimacy by the ILO determined how it conceived and framed the GDWP. Within a changing global governance architecture where the legitimacy of international organizations is constantly being critically questioned, these organizations adopt both concrete and discursive strategies to shore up their legitimacy. In the quest for legitimacy, they target key constituents including other international organizations and countries on which they are financially dependent. In the case of the ILO, this required both concrete and discursive strategies that aligned with the neoliberal economic ideology espoused by those countries and organizations. It was in this that local economic development became a useful tool for legitimation through the implementation of the GDWP. This quest for legitimacy framed how the development problem was defined, actors implicated and the GDWP designed and implemented. Though this posed challenges to implementation, it nonetheless generated the ‘success’ stories needed to help reposition the ILO as an influential voice in the development arena. A challenge proceeding from this was the lack of coordination with a similar on-going development programme, the Rural Enterprise Programme (REP). First, the lack of development coordination stretched the human, technical, and financial resources of the local governments who played host to these programmes. Secondly, this led to the situation of ‘development cannibalism.’ This was where actors in the private sector involved in the SPGEs were co-opted into the implementation entity of the REP based on their acquired expertise. This further weakened the SPGEs leading to their breakdown.
Again, the informal economy as a context, offered a complex scope of intervention that shaped the implementation of the GDWP in diverse ways. First, the informal economy in contexts such as sub-Saharan Africa due to its size offered a broad scope of eligible ‘beneficiaries.’ This stretched the scarce financial, technical and human resources available for the programme to be effective. Again, operators in the informal economy were driven by economic and non-economic motives, some of which could not be addressed solely by the economic logics or considerations that underpinned the GDWP. Even within the economic motive, operators could be categorized into opportunity-driven and necessity-driven albeit not neatly. These categories of operators responded differently to strategies implemented under the GDWP which seemed better aligned to the concerns of those with an opportunity-driven motive. Added to these was the fact that the informal economy was shaped by issues that were multi-scalar and relational in nature. Hence, some issues confronting the informal economy were beyond the jurisdiction of the GDWP which was not linked up to a broader national development strategy.
Furthermore, the structural underpinnings of the local governance system as the formal institutional context within which the GDWP was embedded conflicted with the neoliberal logic to decentre the state in favour of the market that underpins local economic development. Since the colonial era, the local governance system in Ghana has been structured to support the maintenance of political power. This manifested in the heavy influence of actors within the central state in local governance. Examples of this included the instrumentalization of local governance for political patronage, the central management of local government human resource, the preference for an infrastructure-led approach to local economic development, and the excessive fiscal controls exercised by the central state over the local governments among others. The exercise of these powers by actors within the central state and the local government were inimical to the functioning of an autonomous participatory development space for local economic development.
In conclusion, the findings of the study hold a number of implications for the research and practice of local economic development. First, the notion of the relationality of power among the various actors involved sheds light on the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actor-interests shaping the trajectory of a local economic development strategy. This contrasts with the static notions of power relations which essentialize the role of the supposedly dominant actors such as the government or international development actors. Secondly, unearthing the sources of the structural opportunities and constraints shaping the agency of these actors elucidates the context-specific factors responsible for local economic development. This is key to enabling the design of strategies adapted to the structural opportunities and constraints of actors including those who should be involved but are not. Thus, further studies are needed to unearth other features of the socio-spatial contexts which make the factors responsible for local economic development unique to places. Understanding how these contexts shape the agency of actors involved in translating and adapting international discourses such as local economic development brings us closer to answering the question of what works and where.