Sub-District Structures and Local Governance in Ghana: Role of Unit Committees in Promoting Popular Participation

Regardless of its significance in Ghana’s decentralised governance, the unit committee remains largely invisible in existing research, creating a gap in research on sub-district structures and participation in local governance. Owing to this, the role of unit committees in promoting participation at the grassroots remains least understood. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines the participation agenda by drawing on the experiences of unit committee members sampled from the Bekwai Municipality in the Ashanti region. Through a qualitative approach, the chapter highlights that community participation in local governance manifests in three main forms, namely participation in decisions, project implementation and local level elections. However, we argue that the role of unit committees in these forms of participation has a checkered outlook.