Bridging the Great Divide: A Case Study of Ghana Community Policing as a State-Society Synergetic Developmental Approach

The need for an effective public-private partnership, in which the civil society plays an active role in development agenda, has been stressed upon by researchers and global institutions alike since the 1990. Using the social contract theory and the structural functualist theory, the paper reviews existing literature on statesociety synergy for development and further draws on the concepts of social capital, complementarity and embeddedness as well as coproduction to examine the Ghana Community Policing System (CPS) as a case study. The paper finds that although the Ghana community policing system is diverse in nature, the applications of these strategies are not necessarily conflictual but complementary. The study concludes that efforts to synergize state and civil society must consider local context in order to develop the most appropriate strategy that will address the specific need of the society to enhance an effective developmental agenda. The finding is a significant contribution to the development literature because it identifies a new developmental approach that highlights collaboration between the state and civil society to address the developmental needs of Ghana and developing countries in general. __________________________________________________________________________________________