Who Pays, Who Maintains, Who Answers? Ghana’s Green Infrastructure Gap Comes Into Focus

Ghana has already accepted the case for green infrastructure as part of its response to urban flooding. Now, the harder task is converting that policy recognition into assets that are financed, owned, maintained and held to measurable standards over time. A new study argues that the key obstacle is not simply a dearth of plans or institutions, but the weak connection between the institutions that plan infrastructure and the systems that must pay for, operate and sustain it.

Published in Sustainability, the study, "From Rhetoric to Practice: Governance Pathways for Green Infrastructure in Ghana, with Lessons from African and U.S. Tropical Coastal Cities," is authored by Selorm Abla Afeke and Brian Deal of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drawing on Ghanaian policy and fiscal documents alongside evidence from African and U.S. coastal cities, the researchers examine why green infrastructure can remain visible in policy while struggling to become a durable part of urban service delivery.

Their diagnosis is a "custodianship mismatch." Ghana has identifiable actors responsible for climate coordination, adaptation planning, spatial development and drainage, but responsibilities are not consistently connected to recurrent budgets, asset ownership, routine operations and maintenance, and performance accountability. The result is a delivery architecture in which important pieces exist without necessarily forming a functioning lifecycle system.

Ghana's gap lies between institutional authority and asset responsibility

Green infrastructure covers measures such as bioswales, permeable surfaces, floodable spaces, ecological networks and other systems that use natural processes to manage stormwater. Ghanaian planning and climate instruments already recognize green space, ecosystem-based adaptation, resilient land use and drainage improvement, meaning the research is not confronting a policy vacuum.

Formal responsibilities are also visible. Accra's Resilience and Sustainability Unit coordinates city climate action, the Environmental Protection Agency has a national adaptation coordination role, the National Development Planning Commission supports mainstreaming, and the Hydrological Services Department operates and manages primary storm drains. However, the study finds no consistently documented chain linking such responsibilities to green-infrastructure-specific recurrent finance, broader asset ownership, maintenance obligations and long-term performance reporting.

Creating another coordinating institution would not necessarily solve a problem caused by poorly connected responsibilities. Afeke and Deal instead direct attention toward the interfaces between agencies: who approves an intervention, who controls the budget, who owns the completed asset, who pays for maintenance and who is accountable when performance declines.

Fiscal evidence reinforces this concern. Accra Metropolitan Assembly records show drainage maintenance activity, including 15.4 kilometres of drains maintained in 2023 and 7.5 kilometres through September 2024, while the 2025 budget included a GH¢50,000 drain-maintenance allocation. GARID records also document substantial funding for drainage operations, desilting, mapping, equipment and institutional development across participating assemblies.

None of this proves an absence of expenditure or activity. What researchers could not identify was a stable, audited and traceable funding stream demonstrating the cost, adequacy and continuity of recurrent green-infrastructure or drainage maintenance. Financing a project and financing its lifecycle are different governance tasks, and the latter remains much harder to demonstrate from the available evidence.

African experience shows why participation and coordination are not enough on their own

The study compares Ghana with Dar es Salaam, Durban and Dakar to examine approaches that have gained traction under institutional and resource constraints. Each city offers a different governance lesson, but none provides a ready-made model.

Dar es Salaam highlights the possibilities and limits of community participation. Residents have been involved in drain clearing and participatory planning, while broader initiatives have explored more integrated flood management and ecological restoration. Community action, however, produced only temporary benefits where waste disposal, land access, financing, maintenance planning and public coordination remained unresolved.

The implication is not that participation is ineffective. Community involvement can improve local knowledge, identify priorities and support maintenance, but it cannot substitute for functioning public services or recurrent finance. Reliance on community labour without resources, compensation, safeguards and clear institutional responsibility can simply relocate the burden of infrastructure management.

Durban provides a stronger example of institutionalization. Its municipal climate and biodiversity work developed through a formal institutional home that supported continuity and learning, yet implementation varied across departments because leadership, authority, skills, staffing and funding remained uneven. An institutional home can preserve momentum, but it cannot automatically align every sector involved in delivery.

Dakar illustrates another route by linking green and hybrid measures to an established flood-management program supported by national coordination and external finance. Retention areas, drainage and related interventions gained an implementation pathway because they were embedded within a recognized public mandate. Long-term operations and maintenance responsibilities, however, were not fully resolved, showing how project delivery can advance more quickly than lifecycle governance.

High-capacity cities offer functions Ghana can adapt, not systems it can copy

Honolulu, Miami–Dade, New Orleans and Houston enter the study for a different reason. Their regulatory, financial and administrative capacities are significantly stronger, so the authors use them to distinguish potentially adaptable governance principles from institutional conditions that cannot simply be transferred.

Honolulu demonstrates the value of clear technical and maintenance guidance supported by post-construction review. Miami–Dade shows how communities can participate in identifying potential green-infrastructure locations. New Orleans combines municipal guidance with household-level incentives, while Houston illustrates incentive design and coordination across government, civil society and other partners.

The researchers deliberately separate these useful functions from the systems supporting them. Mature permitting rules, inspection capacity, specialist staffing, recurrent funding and regional administrative machinery cannot be assumed in Ghana. Importing a policy instrument without the capacity that allows it to function could create compliance on paper without producing equivalent outcomes.

This principle-versus-precondition approach gives the study wider relevance for developing countries. Policy transfer frequently focuses on visible interventions, an ordinance, incentive program, planning standard or technical manual, while paying less attention to the institutional machinery behind them. Afeke and Deal argue for testing the underlying governance function instead of reproducing the institutional form.

Ghana could consequently experiment with simplified design and maintenance guidance, community-led site identification, modest incentives or stronger inter-agency coordination without attempting to reconstruct the administrative scale of wealthier jurisdictions. Success would depend on whether existing Ghanaian institutions, or credible substitutes, can supply the authority, resources and accountability each function requires.

Build the governance chain before scaling the infrastructure

The study proposes a Barrier–Lever–Stage–Output framework that turns governance diagnosis into a sequence for experimentation. It begins with mandate clarification, requiring authorities to map strategic, sectoral, fiscal and asset-level responsibilities and identify an accountable coordinating function.

A second stage focuses on bounded pilots. Before construction, projects would need secure site control, technical feasibility, named ownership, committed capital and recurrent finance, written maintenance responsibilities, equity safeguards and monitoring arrangements. Community participation would also need clearer protections, including compensation where labour is expected and mechanisms for grievance redress.

Pilot experience would then inform practical design and operations guidance, asset registration and identifiable budget classifications. Only after those systems begin functioning would tested standards and incentives move into development approvals, spatial planning, procurement and public-works procedures. Wider expansion would depend on evidence about hydrological performance, maintenance, cost and distributional outcomes.

Such sequencing is still a proposition rather than a demonstrated causal model. The study is desk-based, its comparative cases were selected purposively, and differences in jurisdictional scale and institutional capacity rule out claims that one arrangement caused better outcomes than another. Documentary evidence also cannot fully capture informal practices, enforcement behaviour, political bargaining or the actual condition of infrastructure assets.

Fiscal evidence presents another limitation. The research identifies revenues, grants and maintenance activities but lacks an audited Accra-specific breakdown of recurrent green-infrastructure or drainage expenditure by function and funding source. It therefore cannot determine whether maintenance financing is adequate, locally controlled or sustainable over the long term.

Empirical testing is consequently central to the paper's argument. Ghanaian pilots would need to track budget execution, maintenance completion, asset condition, service performance and the distribution of benefits and burdens over time. Interviews, land and tenure records, disaggregated financial data and longitudinal observation would also be necessary to understand how formal governance arrangements operate in practice.

Ghana's experience exposes a wider challenge across rapidly urbanizing countries: environmental policy can advance faster than the public systems required to implement it. The study's value lies in moving the debate away from whether green infrastructure belongs in urban policy and toward the harder questions of who owns it, who maintains it, who pays for it and who is answerable for its performance.