Challenges to decentralisation in Ghana: where do citizens seek assistance?

Decentralisation in Ghana, and across sub-Saharan Africa, faces a number of challenges to successful local governance provision because there are a number of formal and informal actors to choose from. Citizens may take problems they want a governance provider to solve to a member of parliament or a district assembly person, a traditional chief or a police officer, a neighbour or an NGO. In this article we report on a four-constituency survey administered to explore and understand how citizens choose between the options of local institutions available to them in order to solve a problem important to their community or themselves. We find that formal national (Parliamentarians) and informal traditional (Chiefs) institutions are where respondents turn for assistance most often instead of constitutionally described local modes of governance (District Assemblies). We consider the implications of this finding in terms of decentralisation in Ghana and the need to build institutions that are context-sensitive and reflect how citizens understand political options.