teaching

From Ghana to Birmingham: How a Global Learning Network reinvigorated Public Managers

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Shailen Popat

What happens when city managers from Ghana and governance experts from the UK sit around the same table? Ideas spark, assumptions are challenged, and new ways of working begin to take shape. That’s the story behind the Ghana City Managers Community of Practice (CoP) – a bold experiment in international collaboration that’s changing how we think about public management. The full article published in the Education in Practice journal can be found here.

Why This Matters

Public managers everywhere face “wicked problems” – issues like urbanisation, climate resilience, and service delivery that defy simple solutions. Traditional training often falls short because it’s one-off and disconnected from real-world complexity. Enter Communities of Practice: long-term learning networks where practitioners and academics share experiences, co-create solutions, and build trust. They’re not just about knowledge – they’re about relationships and sustained engagement. CoPs are powerful because they bridge the gap between theory and practice. They allow managers to learn from each other, adapt ideas to local contexts, and build confidence in tackling complex challenges. For countries like Ghana, where decentralisation and urban growth create both opportunities and pressures, this approach offers a way to strengthen governance without imposing external models.

The Big Idea

In March 2025, the University of Birmingham hosted 14 senior Ghanaian officials for a week of immersive learning. Backed by the UK’s International Science Partnerships Fund, the visit wasn’t a typical study tour. It was a strategic intervention to launch a transnational CoP – one that blends academic insight with practical experience and positions both Ghana and the UK as partners in governance innovation.

The goals were clear:

  • Forge lasting institutional partnerships
  • Co-design training materials rooted in Ghanaian realities
  • Build capacity through comparative insights
  • Shape future research on urban resilience and inclusive governance

This initiative reflects a broader shift in development practice – moving away from top-down technical assistance towards partnership-based models that prioritise mutual benefit and knowledge reciprocity.

Inside the Week: What We Did

The programme kicked off with a high-energy plenary featuring voices from both sides of the partnership: Prof. Samuel Bonsu (GIMPA), Dr Nana Ato Arthur (former Head of Ghana’s Local Government Service), and Mo Baines (CEO, APSE). Their message was clear – governance challenges may differ, but the principles of collaboration and accountability are universal.

Photograph of the CPD participants and some trainers at the Edgbaston Campus

Workshops tackled decentralisation, participatory planning, and sustainable cities. These weren’t lectures – they were conversations, with Ghanaian managers sharing frontline realities and UK experts offering comparative perspectives. Institutional visits added texture: at the West Midlands Combined Authority, delegates explored regional governance and economic development strategies; at Birmingham’s Lord Mayor’s office, they saw the symbolic power of civic leadership in action. The week ended with a roadmap: virtual meet-ups, annual exchanges, and joint research projects. Participants left not just with ideas, but with commitments to keep the momentum going.

What Changed?

The impact was immediate and tangible:

  • Partnerships Deepened: UoB, GIMPA, and Ghana’s Local Government Service agreed on joint research and staff exchanges
  • Capacity Built: Delegates gained practical insights into governance models they could adapt at home
  • Training Co-Created: New modules blend academic theory with Ghanaian case studies – tools designed by practitioners, for practitioners
  • Policy Influence: Senior officials pledged to embed lessons into local reforms
  • Research Horizons Expanded: Themes like digital governance and urban resilience emerged as priorities for future collaboration

The Head of the Ghanian Local Government Service, Dr Stephen Nana Ato Arthur and the Chief Director of the Office of the Head of the Local Government Service, Madame Felicia Dapaah Agyeman-Boakye, honouring Shailen at the end of the CPD in Edgbaston.

Why It’s Different

This isn’t about exporting UK models or ticking boxes for donor reports. It’s about mutual learning and knowledge democracy – valuing local expertise as much as global frameworks. It’s also about universities stepping up as conveners of global networks, using their resources and credibility to drive real-world change. The co-designed training materials exemplify this ethos. They combine global frameworks with Ghanaian case studies, creating tools that are contextually grounded and practically useful. This approach aligns with calls to decolonise development practice – moving away from prescriptive solutions towards collaborative innovation.

What’s Next?

The Ghana CoP is just the beginning. Plans are underway to bring in managers from other African and UK cities, creating a richer, more diverse learning ecosystem. Future funding bids will build on the success of this pilot, ensuring the network grows and thrives. For INLOGOV, this story is a call to action: let’s champion collaborative governance, not as a buzzword, but as a practice that transforms institutions and communities. The challenges facing public managers are too complex for isolated solutions. By investing in relationships, shared learning, and co-production, we can create governance systems that are adaptive, inclusive, and resilient.

Dr. Shailen Popat works as an Assistant Professor in Public Policy and is the Director of the MSc in Public Management at the University’s Institute of Local Government Studies. He completed his PhD at the University of Oxford and his thesis explored the sensemaking processes of School Principals when enacting a significant new policy. He specialises in supporting public managers to enact policies in a manner that can be effective in their context and is a founding partner of a partnership between the University, GIMPA, and Ghana Local Government. Known for his student-centred approach and ability to explain complex concepts in a comprehensible manner, Shailen is considered to be an outstanding lecturer and tutor and was awarded the accolade of ‘Teacher of the Year’ at the 2022 University of Birmingham Teaching Awards, and in 2023 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the UK Higher Education Academy for his Educational Leadership.

What’s it like studying at INLOGOV?

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Drs. Max Lempriere, Abena Dadze-Arthur and Karin Bottom

It is perhaps a little cliché to say that there’s never been a better time to study public management, whether in the context of local government or otherwise. The fact that local government has undergone significant reform over the years – a process that shows little sign of abating – is well known. Indeed, the political world is shifting before our eyes into something new, some would say exciting and certainly worthy of study. Clichés abound, life as a student of public management and local governance certainly won’t be dull.

Avoiding cliché then, perhaps its more apt to say that there’s never been a better time to study at The University of Birmingham’s Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV). The University’s reputation is well recognized; it was 2013-2014 University of the Year, sits 13th in the 2017 Guardian University Guide and is among the top 100 best Universities in the world. As the UK’s leading centre for the study of local government and strategic public management, INLOGOV is well placed to make sense of what looks to many to be a chaotic system. Our research directly informs contemporary debates and legislative activity and the work we do with local authorities across the world is highly respected.

What is it like to study here, though? We offer a number of courses, taught by some of the leading authorities in the field, all of which are specifically designed to further your career in public administration, wherever in the world you choose to work. Whether you’re interested in a Masters degree, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate and can commit full time or part time, we offer courses in Public Management, Public Service Commissioning and Social Research. It doesn’t even matter if you’re unable to physically come to the Birmingham campus; whilst INLOGOV offers courses in the form of a traditional brick-and-mortar degree, whereby students attend classes on campus, it also offers an internationally acclaimed Masters of Public Administration (MPA) online degree, whereby students do all their classroom activities outside the traditional classroom, at a distance from the University of Birmingham, and supported by technology-based tools.

For those looking for a more focused, research driven learning experience you can choose instead to undertake doctoral research, whether as part of an integrated learning package with a focus on public policy or a traditional research-driven doctorate (offered both on campus and through distance learning). Have a look at our website for an outline of our research interests.

In both the on-campus and distance learning courses, our students are very mixed in terms of their age, where they come from, and their experience of the public sector.  Typically, in INLOGOV’s master courses, students with backgrounds as mid-career public servants are rubbing shoulders with course participants who just graduated from their undergraduate studies.  For example, a fifty-eight-year-old minister in Jamaica’s government took our Masters in Public Administration a 25 year old who recently completed his undergraduate studies in social care in China.  This makes for a fantastic learning community, where the pedagogical focus remains on the learners and how they connect their varied experiences of public management to the theoretical concepts explored during the course.

In both our on-campus and online courses, we use high-quality learning resources, which also feature animated videos and interactive diagrams and theoretical models.  Mindful of the international nature of the student group who register for our masters programmes, we always add new literature on international public management and governance in the reading lists; we include a variety of contemporary case studies and examples of public management from around the world; we ask students to watch a series of short, BBC-documentary-style videos featuring practitioners and researchers from across the globe who discuss their particular experiences of public management and governance in their respective home countries; and we use an array of photo images to portray global diversity in public service delivery.

Although we use the same high-quality and interactive learning resources for on-campus and distance learning courses, there are of course important differences in terms of the learning environment, which meet different student needs.  Campus-based classes require students to attend classes in person and at specific times.  Online classes are free from the constraints of space, pace and time, and give students the flexibility to do their work in their own time and at their own pace, but require students to be very self-motivated, disciplined and comfortable with working independently.

Wherever you choose to take your degree – and students take it far and wide, whether as public servants, journalists, consultants, academics and so on – a degree from INLOGOV will serve you well.

For more information on the courses we offer and to find out about upcoming open days (whether virtual or on campus) please visit http://www.inlogov.bham.ac.uk. Alternatively, to keep up to date with the latest research and discussions from the department check out our blog at www.inlogov.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter@INLOGOV.

 

lempriereMax is an INLOGOV Associate and has a PhD in political science from the University of Birmingham. He has taught for a number of years on many aspects of politics, public administration, research methods and academic skills. Prior to that he read political economy at the University of Birmingham and Stockholm University. His research interests include institutional theory, environmental politics, local government innovation and policy entrepreneurship.

abenaAbena has taught on a variety of INLOGOV courses on various aspects of public management and governance to a) international distance learners, who complete the programme wholly online; b) in-house local government participants, and c) ‘on-campus’ students comprising a mix of full-time and part-time-registered practitioner students Abena’s research mainly focuses on non-western and post-western public management approaches that are rooted in local subject positions, indigenous norms and values, locally embedded representational and performative practices, and mirror local history, culture, and religious or philosophical traditions, while promoting public engagement, accountability and effective public services.

bottom-karin-20151113Karin is INLOGOV’s Director of Teaching and Learning and directs INLOGOV’s MSc in Public Management and lectures on modules concerned with 1) party politics; democracy and  public management; 2) research methods.