Public Service Provision in Clientelistic Political Settlements: Lessons from Ghana's Urban Water Sector

The politics of public-service delivery continues to be neglected under the supposedly more context-sensitive post-Washington Consensus. Using interviews and documentary evidence from Ghana, this article provides an account of the networks of political interference and informal practices in Ghana's public water utility. It argues that, in order to understand why private-sector participation succeeds or fails and why similar arrangements have different outcomes across developing countries, we need to examine the effects of the informal institutional context, particularly the country-specific political settlement in which public-service provision operates.