Ghana's Public Interest and Accountability Committee: an elusive quest for ‘home-grown’ transformation in the oil industry

Abstract

The centrepiece of this paper is Ghana’s Public Interest and Accountability Committee with empirical details of its politics of institutional choice and outcomes. The Committee is hailed as a model of ‘bottom-up’ reform and one of the principal reasons why Ghana is likely to circumvent a ‘resource curse’ situation associated with its petroleum resources. Far from this optimism, this article outlines key technocratic, political and other structural barriers that have undermined the Committee’s profile as a transformative instrument in the oil industry. It draws attention to the limitations of technocratic administrative fixes imposed by in-country and sectoral dynamics.