Paper short abstract:

This article analyses key drivers producing electricity crises and undermining ‘good governance’ reform. Ghana has lurched from unprecedented shortages to electricity over-abundance, entailing spiralling debt. I highlight the role of intense electoral competition and high modernist ideology.

Paper long abstract:

The 1990s good governance agenda created the ‘standard reform model’ for the electricity sector involving privatising utilities, creating markets and unbundling electricity-system functions into ‘formally-independent’, regulated units. After widespread adoption over three decades, electricity systems in many developing countries continue to suffer numerous crises. This article analyses key drivers producing such crises and undermining ‘good governance’ reform. It uses evidence from Ghana, chosen given its relatively-keen adoption of the ‘standard reform model’ and the presence of capitalist-democratic conditions identified as supporting such reform. In the last decade, Ghana has lurched from unprecedented shortages to electricity over-abundance, entailing spiralling debt. Rather than understand this through mainstream approaches focusing on formal institutions and democratic pressures, this detailed empirical research demonstrates the value of an alternative, heterodox examination of political power and ideology. Such analysis reveals the deeper structural political and societal roots behind these two recent crises and the limited success of reforms. The paper demonstrates how intense competition entailed an all-consuming short-termist focus on elections. Alongside high modernist ideological beliefs in the power of megawatts to produce industrialisation, this created Ghana’s crises of absence and abundance. This suggests that focusing on democratic institutions, the formal separation of policymaking and market motivations appears hopeless given the strength of countervailing political and ideological rationales that overwhelm reforms. Thus, studying the manifestation of political power is crucial for understanding the electricity sector’s crises and policymaking.