Last week I was pleased to meet with a delegation of Members of Parliament and staff from the Parliament of Ghana, who were in town as part of a USAID-supported legislative strengthening visit coordinated by the SUNY Center for International Development.While in Albany, NY they spent the week meeting with state legislators, staff from the legislative and executive branches, and scholars of public policy. After their week here they left for Canada, where they are spending a week with the Ontario Legislative Assembly (coordinated by the Parliamentary Centre of Canada). Their meetings focused on learning more about budget processes, budgetary oversight, and the work of finance committees and legislative research offices. Ghana is a hybrid parliamentary-presidential system (although it operates much more like a parliamentary system than its constitution would indicate), so getting a comparative perspective in the US and Canada makes sense, as does doing so on the state/provincial level (which is closer in size to Ghana).
Ghana is doing very well in terms of economic and political development – and it is no accident that President Obama chose to visit Ghana earlier this year and to give a speech in the parliament. But enhancing the capacity of legislatures is a never-ending process that requires patience and persistence. It takes a long time to build the capacity and culture that can support a robust legislature willing and able to carry out some level of oversight of the executive. Also, legislative institutions are not well understood anywhere. As legislatures become more involved in governance things slow down; they are supposed to be deliberative, sometimes adversarial, and their work results in complex compromises rather than definitive solutions. That is the nature of the legislative process – but it can be seen as inefficient and unsatisfying to the public. This is true in Canada and the US as well as in Ghana. But there is much that these visits can teach all involved and the meeting of MPs and staff across borders creates connections that endure. Substantially strengthening a legislature cannot be accomplished is a few years (like the life of a USAID contract) and cannot be taken for granted once real gains have been made. The only solution is to persist in the effort and to create connections between and among legislators and staff that give then the best comparative examples as to how best to enhance their own institutions.