In the northern countryside of Ghana, there is not much evidence of governance in action. There are few paved roads, state buildings or law enforcement officers. It’s easy to think that the state doesn’t have the resources to control much of anything in these places.
“On the rural periphery of the developing world, we tend to think of the state as pretty much absent,” says MIT political scientist Noah Nathan. “You can see that there are not many offices, bureaucrats or policemen. The state has a light footprint. As a result, we believe that the state is weak and unable to change rural politics and society.”
Except, as Nathan’s research shows, governments really can have a profound impact on these situations, and they do, in places like rural Ghana. Far from being a non-factor, the Ghanaian state, through the construction of rural schools with limited access, or the selective enforcement of property rights, has created more inequality and unrest in society.
Nathan explores this territory in a new book, The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland, published by Cambridge University Press. In it, he examines the history of rural interventions in Ghana and their resulting social and political dynamics, while also analyzing related circumstances in Peru and the Philippines.
“What I’m saying with this book is that the state is not out of the picture,” Nathan explains. “The state may not have done much, but the few things it did had enormously important impacts on the politics of this region. Political leaders may retain the power of the state, but that does not mean that the state is incapable of changing society. Quite the opposite.”
The heads, an invented tradition
In the book, Nathan examines three types of state action in rural Ghana: the use of traditional chiefs as surrogates for local government, the placement of public schools, and the selective enforcement of property rights.
Great Britain colonized Ghana in the 19th century. In the early 1900s, the British began installing chiefs as local leaders and substitutes for government. However, as Nathan recounts, in many parts of rural northern Ghana, these heads were simply a British invention. Ghanaian society had existed without them. Still, over a few decades, as British-appointed chiefs were supported by the colonial government, they consolidated and amassed large portions of what local wealth existed.
“We tend to think, based on media stereotypes, that chiefdom is a natural form of government in many African countries,” says Nathan. “But in some parts of this region, it is a complete colonial import. For many communities, this is an institution without indigenous roots. It was arbitrarily proposed by British colonial officials and created new inequality and unequal access to political power “.
The British also began building public primary schools in Ghana, but their distribution was also uneven. In 1954, three years before Ghana gained independence from Britain, the northern region had only 3% of Ghana’s primary schools despite being home to 20% of the population.
These schools were, as Nathan writes in the book, “by far the most present arm of the state.” But access to them was limited. In the early 1960s, only 65 percent of communities in northern Ghana were within about 6 kilometers of a school, and a lack of funding meant that many children could not attend until the 1960s. 1990
Those who could attend, Nathan writes, received “an advantage in access to education of a generation or more compared to the vast majority of the population.” This created a compounding effect: educated people had better jobs and their families were more likely to earn later.
Finally, Ghana’s own post-colonial government made changes to property rights starting in the 1970s, but again on unequal terms. National leaders handed over property rights to local leaders in exchange for political support, meaning these programs once again favored those who had already gained from prior state actions.
In a book that is both quantitative and historical, Nathan compares different regions of Ghana and finds that these rural state interventions in the north “provide unexpected valuables, creating a new stratification between generations,” he writes.
“This has changed society,” says Nathan. “These are societies that were very flat and hadn’t had much economic inequality historically, and it’s the state that came in and created new forms of local government, or that created public education in a really selective way over many decades, which created economic inequality.”
Expanding power at low cost
These limited actions had a clear purpose, both for colonial Britain and for Ghana’s post-colonial rulers: they have been cheap ways of governing the hinterland.
“State leaders want power and they want to conserve as many resources as they can,” says Nathan. “In these regions, they are not incentivized to spend money. They will apply resources to places where they have pressing threats. If there is an opportunity to govern cheaply and get away with it, they will. In northern Ghana, they did.In other parts of Ghana where there were more resources to extract, colonial rule was incredibly intense.
Any improvements in rural governance, Nathan believes, must take these incentives into account. Some policy experts believe that developing countries should strengthen the state; others want NGOs, for example, to play a bigger role. However, says Nathan, “it’s also not necessarily the right tool to solve these problems. If the state doesn’t have political incentives to govern equitably, just giving it more resources could make the problems worse. We can think of interventions that make do the state leaders from the center want to govern the periphery in a practical and more equitable way?”.
Other scholars have praised “The Scarce State.” Margaret Levi, professor of political science at Stanford University, has called it a “theoretically original and empirically rich book” that “reveals the disproportionate impact of rare state interventions on social, economic, and political relations in the interior”.
For his part, while Nathan focuses on Ghana in his own research, he believes that the book will serve its purpose, in part, by stimulating further research into the dynamics of seemingly scarce state governance globally.
“These dilemmas in Africa have been quite similar to those in other areas,” observes Nathan. “I would like to make this a bigger conversation and not leave it isolated as something particular to African politics.”
