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Paper short abstract

This paper highlights the centrality of technopols for understanding how and why bureaucratic pockets of effectiveness emerge and persist within Ghana's largely dysfunctional public sector.

Paper long abstract

This paper highlights the centrality of technopols for understanding how and why bureaucratic pockets of effectiveness emerge and persist within Ghana's largely dysfunctional public sector. It focuses on the experiences of the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana, two public sector agencies that have been widely acknowledged to have maintained relatively high levels of performance overtime, although with significant dips in performance both across and within ruling coalitions. Across both case studies, we find that the specific moments of good performance were those characterized by leaders who combined technocratic expertise with significant political influence within the ruling coalition. Unlike pure technocrats, such 'technopols' are often better able to push through relevant but difficult reforms because of the political trust that they wield within ruling coalitions. These findings support recent observations that in contexts of personalised forms of governance as in much of Africa, public sector agencies can enhance their effectiveness, not by isolating themselves from politics, but instead by cultivating 'strong political relations' and engaging in various forms of 'political bargaining' with powerful political and bureaucratic elites.