Policy Capacity of the Legislature and Evidence-Informed Policy Making in Ghana: A Comparative Analysis

Based on a broader governance context analysis, this chapter explores legislative policymaking in Ghana as an illustrative case for other African countries. It details the need to discern the role of legislatures and legislators as policy entrepreneurs and agents in evidence-based public policymaking processes. The role of Ghana’s legislature in the public policy process has been understudied, especially with regard to its evidence supply and consumption capacity and brokerage in policymaking process. While implicitly comparative, we seek in this chapter to understand (1) the development of the Ghanaian legislature and its role in policymaking and (2) how the development of the legislature in Ghana shapes public policy processes across time. In so doing, the chapter discusses different phases of legislative development in Africa: the pre-independence phase (the legislatures and their role in the colonial state), the independence phase (the legislatures’ role in state-building between 1960s and 1980s) and the post-independence phase (the role of legislature in the democratization era). It argues that these major evolutionary phases of the legislature in Ghana have occurred in tandem with evolving policy regimes in Africa—a traditional and centralized policy regime of a colonial state, the development state/administration, the adjustment era policy regime, and governance era policy regimes. The chapter concludes by drawing implications for evidence-based legislative policymaking in similar African contexts.