From Rhetoric to Practice: Governance Pathways for Green Infrastructure in Ghana, with Lessons from African and U.S. Tropical Coastal Cities

Urban flooding persists in Ghana’s rapidly urbanizing cities. Although green infrastructure (GI) is recognized in national and metropolitan policy as a complement to conventional drainage, its translation into financed, owned, maintained and monitored infrastructure remains uneven. Using structured qualitative document analysis and focused cross-case synthesis, this study compares Ghana with Dar es Salaam, Durban, Dakar, Honolulu, Miami–Dade, New Orleans and Houston. A central documentary finding is a custodianship mismatch. The reviewed instruments identify strategic coordination, sectoral authority and selected O&M responsibilities but do not consistently articulate their connection to budgeting, asset ownership, routine O&M and performance accountability. The comparator cases provide context-dependent lessons on participation, institutionalization, mandate alignment and usable guidance, while distinguishing adaptable governance principles from capacity-dependent preconditions. The paper contributes a Barrier → Lever → Stage → Output framework that begins by connecting existing mandates and establishing ownership, finance, O&M and equity safeguards for accountable pilots before conditional integration and scaling. The framework and its four associated relationships are presented as testable propositions rather than a validated implementation model.