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This thesis examines the phenomenon of regionalism as it occurs in the northern portion of the West African state of Ghana. For purposes of political analysis, a region is defined as an area whose inhabitants feel themselves or their area to be different in some significant way from the rest of the state in which they live. An attempt is made to view the question of regionalism from the perspective of both the people of the region and the national government, and to define basic strategies which regional leaders and movements might adopt towards the rest of the country. Northern Ghana, which comprises about two-fifths of Ghana's area and between one-quarter and one-fifth of its population, is distinguished from the rest of the country by climate, vegetation, natural resources, and ethnic distribution, including languages, customs, religious influences, social and political organisation, and historical experience. The nature of British colonial rule over the North, beginning about 1900, tended to reinforce certain aspects of North-South differences. The North was treated as a separate administrative unit, and different policies were pursued in sudiareas as education and local administration. By and large, the British did little to develop the North or to promote North-South integration.

This thesis examines the role of chiefs and chieftaincy in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. It focuses on the interactions between chieftaincy, the state apparatus and society in areas of local government, land administration and democratic politics, using Hohoe and Kumasi as case studies. The central objective is to explore the legitimation processes of chiefs and chieftaincy, especially how chiefs in both areas seek to assert authority with respect to the state and society. By taking a closer look at how chiefs negotiate the modern political order, this research takes a position between those who see chieftaincy as an indigenous institution deserving recognition and protection, and those who view it as incompatible with the modern political dispensation. The research describes how a network of legal and informal strategies has influenced the ways in which state and chiefs interact. By focusing on this interaction, the thesis also reveals the on‐going legitimation processes at the local and national levels in Ghana with respect to chiefs and chieftaincy. The thesis reveals that even though both state actors and chiefs want, and are constitutionally obliged, to exercise political control in certain distinct ways, the reality is that neither is able to do so completely. To remain relevant, both the state and chieftaincy asserted a hybrid authority in their relation with society, thereby blurring the boundaries between their primary identities. Thus rather than establishing a ‘bifurcated state’, these processes revealed a ‘syncretic’ authority relations overlapping in ways that blend political norms, processes and rules associated with each.

The discovery of commercial quantities of oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Guinea and parts of East Africa has once again raised expectations that sustained development will emerge in one of the world’s poorest regions. At the same time there is great concern that Africa’s new resource-rich countries will succumb to the so-called resource curse phenomenon because of their generally weak governance institutions. In response to this challenge, the international community has intensified its efforts to promote good governance mechanisms in such countries, focused on transparency and accountability, and informed by a dominant institutionalist literature which argues that the differences in resource governance outcomes can be explained by the differences in institutional design and performance. A recent turn to politics in both the development and resource curse literature has begun to move the research agenda beyond the primacy of institutions to look at the politics that underpin the emergence and performance of institutions. This is particularly evidenced in the emerging literature on political settlements that emphasise the distribution of power amongst social groups in society and how these power relations shape institutions and in turn development outcomes. This new political lens is helping to deepen analysis of how and why resource-rich countries prevent or succumb to the resource curse and provides an opportunity to interrogate the inclusive development prospects of Africa’s new oil-rich countries. In this thesis, I apply and extend the political settlement approaches by incorporating ideational and spatial dynamics, to analyse the prospect of inclusive development outcomes in Ghana where oil and gas resources were discovered in 2007. Focusing on the power relations between and amongst national elites and elites in the oil producing Western Region, I interrogate the ways in which the spatial dynamics of Ghana’s prevailing competitive clientelist political settlement is shaping the governance of the oil sector, and the implications it has for inclusive development. I find that at the onset of a resource boom, the dynamics of local politics, and the dominant incentives and ideas generated by the political settlement has strongly shaped the content and enforcement of Ghana’s foundation institutions to manage the oil sector, in ways that reinforces the pre-oil settlement around the governance of natural resources and undermines the long-term prospects for inclusive development. At the same time, the oil boom has also been accompanied by the increased use of formal institutions and suggests that Ghana may be moving away from personalised to more programmatic forms of clientelism.