Governance in urban and peri-urban vegetable farming in Tamale, Northern Ghana

This article uses the example of Tamale, Ghana, to examine urban food system governance, with a focus on food production. Urban and peri-urban agriculture is common in West Africa, and supports food security and livelihoods globally. The analysis is grounded in the notion of everyday governance as a process co-performed by governors and subjects. Ideas from the conceptual tools of forum shopping and institutional shopping will be used to explain the dynamics inherent in urban food governance. We focus on data pertaining to land and water, major points of contention in this context. Examples are drawn from a database comprising interviews, focus group discussions, observational records and secondary data. They show how actors take advantage of gaps and ambiguities in governance to make selections between different institutions and the governance modes they represent, for example using administrative law to challenge a chief’s prerogative to sell land. They may also select the forums in which they do this, supporting the forum shopping and institutional shopping models as presented in the literature. Our data also show situations involving partial elements and extensions of forum shopping and institutional shopping. These include institutions shopping for the support of actors; strategic inconsistency, where actors present alternative arguments within an accepted forum, and hybrid governance, where multiple institutions and actor groups co-govern while acknowledging each other. Our work explains the way in which subjects and governors co-construct governance. The confirmation of subjects’ agency, and therefore the potential power of advocacy, is salient for governors as well as governed actor groups. Another relevant implication is that transparency is essential, especially in the co-construction of hybrid governance.