Resistance and Change: A Multiple Streams Approach to Understanding Health Policy Making in Ghana

Owuraku Kusi-Ampofo is a second-year PhD student in political science (comparative politics) at the University of Alberta. He holds a master's degree in political science (public policy) from Brock University. His research interests are in the areas of comparative health systems, tobacco control policy, global health structure, and international policy response to microbial threat. His doctoral research seeks to investigate and explain the ways that institutional properties, policy ideas, and material interest affect the processes through which tobacco control policies are made in three African countries: Kenya, South Africa, and Mauritius.

John Church is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. His research interests revolve around the role of institutions, ideas, and interests in health care policy making. He has worked with international, national, provincial, and regional health agencies in the evaluation of health care reforms. Recently, he appeared as an expert witness before the Alberta Health Services Preferential Access Inquiry. He is the coeditor of and a contributing author to Paradigm Freeze: Why It Is So Hard to Reform Health-Care Policy in Canada (2013).

Charles Conteh is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of comparative public policy, public management, political economy, and governance. His current research focuses on governance structures and processes in complex and dynamic policy systems, particularly collaborative and strategic policy formulation and implementation. He currently investigates how local, regional, and national policy systems are reinventing themselves in the face of seismic global economic changes.

B. Timothy Heinmiller is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre at Brock University, where he teaches public policy, public administration, environmental politics, and research methods. His research articles have been published in Politics and Policy, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Public Administration, and Governance. He is also a contributor to and (along with Mark Sproule-Jones and Carolyn Johns) coeditor of Canadian Water Politics: Conflicts and Institutions (2008).