Rethinking Accountability in Government Procurement in Africa Within the Neoliberal Governing Reforms: Some Evidence From Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The paper draws on the “politics of the belly” framework to locate procurement of government contracts within a kind of governing in which often conflicting dynamics are closely intertwined and shape accountability practices differently. By taking a historical view, we show how neoliberal reforms evolved new organizational forms, embedded in the traditional way of doing business in Africa, and “succeeded” in promoting political elite interests in Ghana. Contrary to the neoliberal reforms ideology of promoting accountability, the paper shows how the socialization of individuals through informal political networks and the “politics of the belly culture” incubates corrupt practices and inevitably constrains accountability in public procurement. The paper contributes to scholarship on public sector reform, corruption, and accountability by showing how neoliberal accountability regimes, when introduced into political systems structured by informal power, are reconstituted to serve rather than challenge elite interests. It also offers practical implications for reform agendas that seek to engage with African states on more contextually appropriate terms. The paper argues that accountability in public procurement in Africa reflects the complex interplay of local political practices and informal networks, consistent with the logic of the politics of the belly. The question for policy actors is no longer just “how do we strengthen procurement systems?”—but “whose accountability do these systems serve, and how might reforms be co‐designed to account for, and counteract, embedded political interests?”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".