Public procurement implementation and resource distribution in Ghana from 2003-2021: is the winner taking-all?
Creators: name: Owusu Poku, Keskine
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: Procurement
Corruption
Patronage
Winner-takes-all
Clientelism
Political Settlement
Institutions
Politics
Policy and legal framework

description: Globally, public procurement has provided one of the most important spaces for corruption. This has been particularly apparent in Ghana since the return to democratic politics and the intricate nature of clientelist politics since 1992. After the adoption of a new procurement reform in 2003, scholarly effort has focused on understanding the causal mechanisms for outcomes of public procurement with a disproportionate focus on outcomes at the national level. The few that focused on organizations either studied a single organization or adopted a quantitative approach, which is inadequate in untangling the complex linkages and narratives between politics and resource distribution in Ghana. To fill this gap, this thesis explores the variation in the drivers of corruption in public procurement at different levels of the state and across different types of organizations. The study adopts a comparative qualitative approach to explore the variability of corruption in procurement in organizations of varying scales and types. It asks: (1) to what extent does corruption in public procurement in local government organizations and parastatals reflect the power dynamics at the national level? (2) How does the distribution of power in organizations of varying types and scales affect procurement outcomes in the state? The political settlement framework - which emphasizes the holding power of groups - helps to understand how the variability of power distributions in different organizations have varied implications for public procurement. Patronage as a form of corruption is a cardinal part of the clientelist politics of Ghana. The study focuses on the linkages it provides between the state and politicians, politicians and the society, and the state and society. The thesis places public procurement outcomes within the political economy of the state, draws on data from 82 one-on-one interviews in Accra and Kumasi in Ghana, and scholarship on patronage, corruption and party financing. My findings reveal that there are different patterns of public procurement corruption at different levels of the state. These patterns reflect the different distributions of power in organizations. Organizations with monopoly are more likely to reflect the power dynamics in the ruling coalition and more likely to practice exclusive politics. Organizations that are localized and/or in a form of active competition have patterns of distribution that are not limited to the membership of the ruling coalition. Exclusive politics is thus not a given. Executive powers get fragmented as public organizations draw farther from the centre. This fragmentation coupled with the pluralistic nature of stakeholders at the base and the increasing vulnerability of the ruling coalition make exclusive politics less likely at the base. The conventional winner-takes-all model for understanding clientelist politics and party competition is thus simplistic for explaining the linkages between partisan politics and corruption in procurement distribution in Ghana.