Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on divergence between state institutions related to sustainable wastewater solutions in urban Ghana. Findings suggest the inability of state actors to overcome organisational challenges to pursue ambitious policy results in the informalisation of wastewater management.

Paper long abstract:

There are many different state actors and institutions involved in urban wastewater management. Sustainable solutions demand coherent and effective operations across a variety of different state actors that go beyond increasing resource levels, training, or introducing technological know-how. State stakeholders with often competing interests and agendas include locally elected government officials, central government appointed ministerial figures, policy making professionals and bureaucrats, officials in land planning commissions, and environmental protection agencies. This paper focuses on social processes of state actors around wastewater management and identifies political and institutional stumbling blocks for sustainable solutions in urban Ghana. The paper suggests that the relative inability of state actors to satisfactorily overcome such challenges and pursue ambitious policy results in the informalisation of wastewater management, which, in turn, may result in effective, context specific solutions, and which as rationalisation processes may also reproduce the territorial jurisdictions of individual state institutions. Still, the practical norms of different actors may also undermine more broader objectives of coherent, and rational, city-wide solutions. In a wider perspective, the paper contributes to studies looking at how the everyday actions and practices of state actors allow and hinder the making of sustainable cities. Here we see how the (re)production of state actors’ practical norms in everyday urban governance are products of compromises and contests with more powerful organisational forces, including the political cultures of the individual state institutions actors work for, and which may be challenged by new and far-reaching sustainability objectives.