International records / OpenAlex research

Public Sector Reform and the Political Settlement in West Africa: A Comparative Reading of Ghana and Nigeria

Public-sector reform has been a near-permanent feature of governance in West Africa since the structural-adjustment period of the 1980s, yet efforts across civil-service restructuring, decentralization, and public financial management remain poorly integrated and unevenly sustained. This paper is a structured comparative political-economy analysis, not a causal study: it evaluates whether documented reform trajectories in two comparable West African cases are consistent with the mechanisms proposed by political settlements theory. Drawing on a theory-guided literature review of English-languag…