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This article explains why several decades of decentralisation reforms have had limited impact on improving access to quality basic services in Ghana, with a particular focus on urban areas. Data was gathered through a review of secondary literature, an analysis of primary documents, and a focus group discussion with the budget and planning officers of three Municipal Assemblies in the Greater Accra region. Devolution reduces the discretionary powers of national political elites, and by extension their capacity to resort to the clientelist distribution of resources as a political survival strategy. Consequently, in countries where politicians at the centre are susceptible to a high degree of vulnerability due to intense electoral competition, topdown elite commitment to decentralisation would most likely remain weak, with significant adverse implications for the capacity of sub-national authorities in delivering their mandates. The article concludes that given the importance of the nature of central-local power dynamics in making decentralisation work for the poor, a fuller understanding of the political constraints to service delivery in urban Ghana would require going beyond an exclusive focus on local power dynamics within cities to an examination of the wider structures of power within which subnational authorities are embedded.

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