The World Bank and Ghana’s resilient development agenda

For over six decades, the World Bank has been a pivotal actor in Ghana’s development, yet the evolution of its role in shaping the country’s resilient development agenda remains underexplored. This paper argues that resilience, while only explicitly adopted in the World Bank’s report following the 2015 Accra floods, has been an implicit and enduring development objective of its interventions in Ghana since the postcolonial era. Tracing the Bank’s portfolios from 1960 to 2023, we demonstrate a significant evolution in its approach: from a focus on economic resilience through large-scale ecological infrastructures like the Akosombo Dam in the 1960s to 1970s; to an emphasis on resilient social systems and governance during the Structural Adjustment era of the 1980s to 1990s; and finally to the current paradigm of integrated resilient development, exemplified by city-wide flood-mitigation projects in Greater Accra. Our findings reveal that this shift represents not a series of disjointed interventions but a coherent, though changing, application of resilience thinking, where the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of resilience have expanded from the national state to encompass entire urban socio-ecological systems. However, the paper concludes that this prevailing integrated model, driven by large-scale infrastructure and complex donor tools like the City Strength Diagnostic, tends to centralise authority and predetermine resilience pathways, often overlooking alternative community-driven forms of ‘resilience from below’. On this basis, the study highlights the need to govern the multi-scalar processes of resilience building itself, ensuring that the pursuit of resilience also fosters equitable and inclusive governance.