Towards a measure of local government performance in Ghana: Conceptual framework, data, and results

In recent decades, decentralization reforms have surged across the Global South, aiming to bring governance closer to citizens. Despite extensive debate on their effectiveness, systematic methods to assess local government performance remain underexplored, particularly in data-constrained contexts like sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Inspired by Putnam et al. (1994), this paper proposes a conceptual framework to measure local government performance, applying it to Ghana—a stable democracy and a leader in decentralization reforms in SSA. Using new data from administrative reports complemented by primary and secondary sources, we construct performance measures for 2016 and 2020. In a data-constrained context, we find that our ‘best possible measure’ is good enough to capture variations in local government performance, despite a restricted list of indicators. Our findings reveal improving administrative reporting quality but generally low subnational institutional performance, with older and larger urban districts outperforming newer, rural ones. Emerging evidence raises questions about the traditional notion of a rigid north–south divide in Ghana’s socio-economic development. Additionally, better-performing local governments tend to be associated with lower poverty outcomes. This study offers a foundation for theorydriven evaluation of local governance with important implications for shaping decentralization reforms.