Sheburah Essien, Rosina;
Amedzro, Kofi Kekeli;
Owusu, George;
Robinson, Jennifer;
(2025)
The agency of national government in negotiating resilient urban infrastructure development: the case of GARID, Accra.
Urban Geography
10.1080/02723638.2025.2502284.
(In press).
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Abstract
Resilient infrastructure is one of the most critical needs of cities, particularly African cities, where rapid urbanization and climate change present daunting challenges to governments and city authorities facing significant resource and capacity constraints. In the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) perennial flooding has drawn a wide range of international donors, agencies, and institutions to finance major urban infrastructure investments, requiring close interaction with political decision-makers. Here we focus on the transcalar politics of such urban developments, through the case of the World Bank-funded Greater Accra Climate Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID). We question assumptions that these investments are reformatting city governments for globally oriented, financialized development. Instead, the process has fostered centralization of decision-making in central government entities while city governments have had little agency. A range of different actors, notably central government ministries, World Bank project officials, consultants and communities, shaped the “landing” and “fixing” of this international investment in Accra, giving rise to emergent transcalar institutional and territorial formations. Rather than a scalar analysis of urban development politics, we argue that the power relations amongst these different actors, drawn together in transcalar territorial networks, should be the focus of analytical attention and policy concern.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The agency of national government in negotiating resilient urban infrastructure development: the case of GARID, Accra |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/02723638.2025.2502284 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2502284 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Accra; GARID; resilience; transcalar territorial networks; urban infrastructure development; national agency |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210592 |
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