Committeefication of African urban development:The case of Ghana’s Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID)

Abstract

The World Bank and other international development organizations are increasingly gravitating towards the idea of resilience. The inherent idea of inclusivity as part of urban development processes requires a bottom-up, participatory, and community-based approach to achieving resilience which encourages what Caroline Archambault and David Ehrhardt call ‘committeefication’– a process through which committees are set to oversee community-based interventions – as an institutional vehicle for managing projects, particularly those in African cities. The World Bank-funded GARID project is no exception because it acknowledges multiple producers of resilience, which has led to the creation of several committees on the project to oversee its implementation. Using the qualitative approach, this paper interrogates the context within which committeefication occurs in this Ghanaian/World Bank case, who occupies this space, what they negotiate and what challenges arise working with/or in committees. To do this, we distinguish State Development Committees (SDCs) from Community Development Committees (CDCs) in order to argue that CDCs, unlike SDCs, may not necessarily be able to fulfil their roles because of the nature of state-community committee relations, which is often characterized by micro/macro politics and unequal patterns of participation.