Corporatizing Administrative Law for Economic Constitutionalism in Ghanaan African Legal Study

Laburpena

As the Government of Ghana partners the private sector to promote district industrialization in Ghana under what is locally called “one-district-one factory” (1D1F), this study argues that it is important to foster economic constitutionalism with legal and institutional innovations. One such innovation is this study’s emergent or grounded theory of corporatized administrative law. The study is unique because it contributes to the so-called new administrative law theory with fresh evidence from Ghana on the interface between the public and private sectors under the district industrialization program. The key problem is the challenge that democratic policy discontinuity poses to business protection in Ghana. Hence, the study set out to explore the legal protection of businesses against politics in Ghana by utilizing an embedded single case study qualitative research design. Unsurprisingly, the findings turned out to partly confirm the preliminary idea that Ghana needs to codify its administrative procedure law system. Thus, respondents were evenly divided on the need for an administrative procedure legislation in Ghana. But interestingly, the dissenters, generally gradualist in outlook, did not seem opposed to such a policy supply in the future. And it is evident from the findings that the district industrialization program has brought the private sector to the Ghanaian public sector with some prominence. Therefore, the study logically concludes that Ghana’s privatized public ought to be bolstered with rule-making and adjudicative powers by corporatizing administrative law. To this end, a comparative analysis of administrative law in the US and UK is undertaken to gauge the reality of corporatized administrative law in Anglo-American legal tradition.