Peri-Urban Water Governance in Ghana’s 2024 National Water Policy

Peri-urban areas have increasingly emerged as dynamic yet institutionally underserved spaces within rapidly urbanizing African cities. Despite their centrality to urban sprawl and the significant water access challenges (in diverse forms), such transitional zones remain predominately unrecognized and poorly framed in national policy frameworks. Drawing on document analysis, peri-urban water governance scholarship, and critical institutionalism, this paper examines Ghana’s 2024 National Water Policy (NWP) through the lens of the Walt and Gilson Policy Analysis Triangle. The findings point out that although the policy promotes progressive commitments to climate resilience and integrated water resources management, it extends a constant rural-urban divide. In short, there is a policy failure to intensively engage with the socio-spatial, institutional, and infrastructural complexities of peri-urban areas. The revised NWP, although broad, is inhibited further in its ability to promote equitable and inclusive water governance on the grounds of limited consideration of the political, institutional and everyday dimensions of water access within transitional zones. Given that such limitations exist, I argue in this paper for a reorientation of Ghana’s revised NWP to explicitly recognize and critically frame peri-urban areas, promote cross-scalar governance arrangements, and incorporate the informal and hybrid systems through which water access is negotiated within rapidly transforming urban peripheries.