Colonial legacies and institutional persistence in Ghana: a historical institutional analysis

This article examines why successive reform programmes have failed to displace colonial institutional arrangements in Ghana across four domains: public administration, market systems, financial institutions, and education. Drawing on historical institutionalism, path dependency theory, and the institutional logics perspective, the study employs comparative historical analysis across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial phases. It argues that British colonisation constituted a critical juncture whose effects persist through endogenous colonial reproduction: reform actors socialised within colonial institutions reproduce colonial logic even when they formally intend structural change. Colonial inheritance interacted with post-colonial political incentives, neoliberal conditionality, and domestic elite agency to produce domain-specific persistence mechanisms: conversion, drift, and layering. Cross-regime consistency across the 1957–1990 conjuncture constitutes the strongest empirical test of this claim. Four theoretical contributions are developed, with context-sensitive reform implications derived for each domain.