Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah
Biographic Data
| ID | 105774 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emmanuel Frimpong |
| FAMILY NAME | Boamah |
| SIGNATURE | BOAMAH E F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Buffalo, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6608-9170 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
From Spectators to Co‐Managers: Understanding Smallholder Farmers' Climate Adaptation Through Bounded Rationality and Institutional Logics
Smallholder farmers in the Guinea Savannah region of Ghana face multiple climate stressors, including droughts and floods. Farmers navigate these climate stressors by making adaptation decisions based on limited information, cognitive constraints, and time pressures, circumstances that reflect bounded rationality. The study moves beyond traditional “rational choice” models to explain how farmers make “satisficing,” practical, and context‐specific…
Contextual integrity in Africa's plural-legal contexts: Fintech, privacy, and informational norms in Ghana
Questions of data privacy in Africa are imbued with complexity. We examine a slice of this complexity by putting the concept of contextual integrity into dialogue with Africa's plural-legal contexts to explore data privacy within Africa's emerging digital landscape. The conceptual insights are empirically illustrated based on a case study in Ghana, involving content analysis of policy documents and interviews with a sample of residents, cultural …
Envisioning Healthy Soil Futures: Planning and Policy Inertia in Addressing Soil Contamination in a Postindustrial City
Soil health is critical for healthy cities, yet little is known about how communities experience and address soil contamination. Contamination of soils can expose residents to heavy metals, which may have detrimental health effects. This study focuses on Buffalo, NY, using a mixed-methods approach to understand community experiences surrounding soil contaminants, planning, and policy. Findings reveal that spatial patterns of lead contaminants mir…
Infrastructural violence and urban development in African cities: The case of Takoradi Central Market in Ghana
Above All, Look at Your Own Reality: Patsy Healey and the Future of Planning African Cities
Inspirations in Planning: Edited by John Forester
The State-reinforced self-governance framework: Conceptualizing and Diagnosing Legal and Other Institutional Foundations of Adaptive and Transformative Environmental Governance
Governance of complex social-ecological dilemmas requires institutional innovation, adaptive decision making, and cooperation to address integrative, multi-scale problems. Governments can facilitate such adaptive and transformative governance (ATG) by enabling stakeholder capacity for self-organization and cooperation. However, the complexity of most governance systems makes it difficult to diagnose the ATG capacity of existing systems for instit…
State-mandated decentralized irrigation reforms: (Re)thinking Africa's irrigation commons using the state-reinforced self-governance framework
The prospects and challenges of decentralized irrigation governance reforms are widely discussed. Less discussed, however, is the institutional design of these reforms and how and why it matters to our diagnosis of their successes or otherwise. We used and tested the state-reinforced self-governance (SRSG) framework to examine the institutional design of Ghana’s decentralized irrigation reform and whether self-governance capacities were granted t…
State-reinforced co-provision of community-governed greenspace in racially marginalized neighborhoods: Lessons from Chicago's innovative NeighborSpace Land Trust and Partnership
Racially marginalized neighborhoods lack public goods, such as greenspace, because of civic disenfranchisement and failed provisioning by local governments. The governance systems and adaptive and/or transformative capacities needed to overcome these dilemmas are poorly understood. We used the State-Reinforced Self-Governance (SRSG) Framework to examine an innovative solution to the greenspace problem. In 1996, Chicago’s Mayor, Park District, and…
Maladaptive state reinforcement of greenspace in racially marginalized neighborhoods: Lessons from Louisville, Kentucky's failed cooperative extension partnership
Racially marginalized neighborhoods often lack equitable access to greenspace, despite government programs designed to provide this vital public good. We used the State-Reinforced Self-Governance (SRSG) Framework to evaluate and critique a failed greenspace decentralization program involving public–private partnership and community-based greenspace governance in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. State-reinforced self-governance involves decentralizing d…
Calls and Neighborhood Attributes: A panel study of housing prices
This article aims to incorporate social relations into panel hedonic price modeling analyses, examining how the social conditions of neighborhoods are integrated into local housing markets. To achieve this, we utilize Jefferson County, Kentucky, as a case study and decompose publicly available 311 data, which consist of nonemergency concerns and requests reported by residents, into subcategories to proxy the diverse aspects of social relations. O…
The long journey to equity: A comparative policy analysis of US electric micromobility programs
Mapping the invisible: Bridging and trusting networks in sustaining the urban food system
This article makes visible the social network infrastructure of people sustaining the urban food system in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY. It does so by probing how networks are launched and sustained over time, who is responsible for the networks, and to what end. The authors employ a survey to collect data on social networks among actors within the city's food system. The findings suggest that Buffalo's urban food system is a constella…
Planning as polycentric: Institutionalist lessons for communicative and collaborative planning in Global South contexts
This article puts the ‘communicative turn’ in planning into conversation with polycentric governance to offer three lessons for communicative and collaborative planning. These lessons probe the nexus of institutional-cultural contexts and (1) stakeholders’ agency to initiate, enter, and exit discursive arenas, (2) incentives and interactions among actors, and (3) information and power (a)symmetries within communicative-action-based planning proce…
Planning and Food Sovereignty in Conflict Cities: Insights From Urban Growers in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir
Problem, research strategy, and findings Protracted political conflicts disrupt people's lives, including their ability to feed themselves. Urban planning, operating within the ambit of the state, impacts food systems in conflict cities. We examine the confluence of planning and political misgovernance on food sovereignty in conflict cities. We do so by documenting the experiences of urban growers who cultivate, eat, and distribute indigenous gre…
Global South growth machines? A political-economic view of urban redevelopment and dispossessions in sub-Saharan Africa
The dynamics of urban redevelopment processes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), especially around retail spaces, have gained currency among scholars. Some scholars frame these processes as state-led, informed by party politics, clientelism and meddling, and often resisted by traders and residents. Drawing from Growth Machine theory, this article uses a qualitative case study of the Takoradi Central Market (TCM) in Ghana to reframe this conversation in…
Planning Corruption or Corrupting Planning: A Sub-Saharan Africa Perspective
Problem, research strategy, and findings Here we illuminate the often overlooked, yet pernicious impacts of corruption in planning. We used a sequential mixed-methods approach, inclusive of a survey of 82 planning practitioners in Ghana and semistructured interviews with 17 of these survey respondents, to investigate planners’ experiences of corruption. We found that incentives for corrupt behaviors, structured by the particularities of planning …
The Quantification of Child Labour by Ghana's Mass Media: A Missed Opportunity
This article describes how the mass media in Ghana use quantitative information to communicate the prevalence of child labour. During the period 2000-2020, stories about child labour frequently appeared in Ghana's mass media. Within nearly 30 per cent of the stories, at least one numerical quantification is used. Quantifications appear to be constructed primarily to dazzle readers. The large numbers and the weight of the technical jargon used wou…
Managing campus parking demand through course scheduling – an approach to campus sustainability
Purpose The purpose of this study is to use the optimization modeling method to explore whether there is an ideal arrangement of course enrollments that can yield optimal parking demand and supply on college campuses. Design/methodology/approach Using the University of Louisville as a case study, this study deploys a three-step analytical process to examine the correlation between parking demand and course enrollment, estimate parking demand base…
Broadening the Remittance Debate: Reverse Flows, Reciprocity and Social Relations Between UK-Based Ghanaian Migrants and Families Back Home
Caught in the Rigidity Trap? Limits to Farmers’ Adaptation to Water Challenges in Ghana’s Smallholder Irrigation Schemes
This article examines how smallholder farmers adapt their behaviors in response to water challenges. It employs a mixed-methods design, including focus group sessions and a survey of, and interviews with, farmers and key stakeholders concerned with government and farmer-led smallholder irrigation schemes (SIS) in Ashaiman, Ghana. A water-dependent adaptive index (WDAI) is developed from the data to capture the dynamics of farmers’ adaptive behavi…
Locating artificial intelligence: A Research Agenda
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography’s engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how an…
Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City
Assemblage thinking has emerged over the last two decades as an important theoretical framework to interrogate emerging complex socio-material phenomenon in cities. This paper deploys the assemblage lens to unpack the vulnerability of informal communities to flood hazards in an African city. Focusing on Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, the largest informal settlements in Accra, Ghana, this paper employs multiple methods including archival analysis, i…
Spaces of market politics: Retailscapes and modernist planning imaginaries in African cities
Thermally resilient communities: Creating a socio-technical collaborative response to extreme temperatures
Extreme temperatures claim more lives than any other weather-related event, posing escalating socio-technical and governance challenges that few urban communities have addressed in a systematic, coordinated and comprehensive way. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the granular scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, people’s individual subjective thermal experiences and environmental justice dimensions of the haz…
Build as you earn and learn: Informal urbanism and incremental housing financing in Kumasi, Ghana
Locating artificial intelligence: A Research Agenda
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography’s engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how an…
Techno-market fix”? Decoding wealth through mobile money in the global South
Toward a Political Urban Planning: Learning from Growth Machine and Advocacy Planning to “Plannitize” Urban Politics
This article examines Advocacy Planning through the lens of political–economic urban governance theories—primarily Growth Machine. The first part of the article engages Advocacy Planning and Growth Machine in a conceptual dialogue to search for new insights into the causes of, and potential solutions to, planning’s hitherto inability to significantly mitigate urban social inequity and injustice. The analysis corroborates long-standing assertions …
Understanding and applying principles of social cognition and decision making in adaptive environmental governance
Environmental governance systems are under greater pressure to adapt and to cope with increased social and ecological uncertainty from stressors like climate change. We review principles of social cognition and decision making that shape and constrain how environmental governance systems adapt. We focus primarily on the interplay between key decision makers in society and legal systems. We argue that adaptive governance must overcome three cooper…
Thermally resilient communities: Creating a socio-technical collaborative response to extreme temperatures
Extreme temperatures claim more lives than any other weather-related event, posing escalating socio-technical and governance challenges that few urban communities have addressed in a systematic, coordinated and comprehensive way. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the granular scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, people’s individual subjective thermal experiences and environmental justice dimensions of the haz…
Constitutional economics of Ghana’s decentralization
The Quantification of Child Labour by Ghana's Mass Media: A Missed Opportunity
This article describes how the mass media in Ghana use quantitative information to communicate the prevalence of child labour. During the period 2000-2020, stories about child labour frequently appeared in Ghana's mass media. Within nearly 30 per cent of the stories, at least one numerical quantification is used. Quantifications appear to be constructed primarily to dazzle readers. The large numbers and the weight of the technical jargon used wou…
Map the gap: Alternative visualisations of geographic knowledge production
The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production which is attentive to the multiple elements embedded in research processes. In particular, we seek to problematise the representation of scholarship indicators by depicting theoretical contributions and field sites along a spectrum, rather than as discrete points, recursively and relationally constituted. The primary aim of our visualisations is to capt…
The long journey to equity: A comparative policy analysis of US electric micromobility programs
Farming within a dual legal land system: An argument for emancipatory food systems planning in Accra, Ghana
The long overhang of bad decisions in agro-industrial development: Sugar and tomato paste in Ghana
In theory, learning from past mistakes should result in adapted and improved development policy. However policy learning can be difficult to achieve, and the link between learning and policy change is neither direct nor immediate. In this study we look at learning in agro-industrial policy in Ghana, by tracing the interest in sugar production and tomato processing over six decades. Specifically we ask why four failed factories established in the …
Infrastructural violence and urban development in African cities: The case of Takoradi Central Market in Ghana
Gender Disparity in Travel Demand Management of University Students and Employees
The Earn-a-Bike (EAB) program is a travel demand management (TDM) effort at the University of Louisville. It provides a $400 bike shop voucher for students and university employees to forgo their parking permits for two years. This research explores this program to answer three questions: Does gender affect people’s willingness to participate in a TDM program such as the EAB? Does gender have different impacts on population segments at different …
The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central A…
Planning by (mis)rule of laws: The idiom and dilemma of planning within Ghana’s dual legal land systems
This paper contributes to our understanding of urban planning challenges within dual legal land systems in sub-Sahara Africa. It draws ideas from Ananya Roy’s “idioms of urbanization and planning” to make two arguments regarding the prevailing idiom of planning urban and peri-urban areas in Ghana. First, there is (mis)rule of statutory planning and land laws: the state places itself both within and outside statutory planning laws to enforce emine…
Making the invisible hyper-visible: Knowledge production and the gendered power nexus in critical urban studies
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectiv…
Beyond patriotic discourse in financing the SDGs: Investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model for sub-Saharan Africa
Mobilising and sustaining investment flows are two interrelated challenges of development financing. Given the untapped potential of remittances and knowledge flows of sub-Saharan Africa diasporas, an investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model is proposed to target three issues: generating diaspora investments, which will not be used to service sovereign debts; linking such investments to projects, programmes, and sectors with high economic r…
The three-dimensional causes of flooding in Accra, Ghana
The perceived and actual causes of flood hazards in cities of sub-Saharan African countries have come under tremendous debate. In Accra, the capital of Ghana, flooding has been the key source of human vulnerability. Studies carried out on flood vulnerability in the city have given varied attributions to their frequent occurrences. In this paper we comprehensively explore the various causes of flood hazards in our bid to set the stage for an integ…
Build as you earn and learn: Informal urbanism and incremental housing financing in Kumasi, Ghana
Map the gap: Alternative visualisations of geographic knowledge production
The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production which is attentive to the multiple elements embedded in research processes. In particular, we seek to problematise the representation of scholarship indicators by depicting theoretical contributions and field sites along a spectrum, rather than as discrete points, recursively and relationally constituted. The primary aim of our visualisations is to capt…
Toward a Political Urban Planning: Learning from Growth Machine and Advocacy Planning to “Plannitize” Urban Politics
This article examines Advocacy Planning through the lens of political–economic urban governance theories—primarily Growth Machine. The first part of the article engages Advocacy Planning and Growth Machine in a conceptual dialogue to search for new insights into the causes of, and potential solutions to, planning’s hitherto inability to significantly mitigate urban social inequity and injustice. The analysis corroborates long-standing assertions …
Understanding and applying principles of social cognition and decision making in adaptive environmental governance
Environmental governance systems are under greater pressure to adapt and to cope with increased social and ecological uncertainty from stressors like climate change. We review principles of social cognition and decision making that shape and constrain how environmental governance systems adapt. We focus primarily on the interplay between key decision makers in society and legal systems. We argue that adaptive governance must overcome three cooper…
Beyond patriotic discourse in financing the SDGs: Investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model for sub-Saharan Africa
Mobilising and sustaining investment flows are two interrelated challenges of development financing. Given the untapped potential of remittances and knowledge flows of sub-Saharan Africa diasporas, an investment-linked diaspora revenue bonds model is proposed to target three issues: generating diaspora investments, which will not be used to service sovereign debts; linking such investments to projects, programmes, and sectors with high economic r…
Polycentricity of urban watershed governance: Towards a methodological approach
This paper makes an initial contribution towards building a polycentricity index to account for the governing of social–ecological systems. It develops three indices and an overall index, using an approach based on network science, to measure the extent to which actors develop ordered relationships to address scale mismatches in urban water governance. These indices are discussed with respect to the overarching system of rules governing actors’ d…
Constitutional economics of Ghana’s decentralization
Planning by (mis)rule of laws: The idiom and dilemma of planning within Ghana’s dual legal land systems
This paper contributes to our understanding of urban planning challenges within dual legal land systems in sub-Sahara Africa. It draws ideas from Ananya Roy’s “idioms of urbanization and planning” to make two arguments regarding the prevailing idiom of planning urban and peri-urban areas in Ghana. First, there is (mis)rule of statutory planning and land laws: the state places itself both within and outside statutory planning laws to enforce emine…
Making the invisible hyper-visible: Knowledge production and the gendered power nexus in critical urban studies
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectiv…
The long overhang of bad decisions in agro-industrial development: Sugar and tomato paste in Ghana
In theory, learning from past mistakes should result in adapted and improved development policy. However policy learning can be difficult to achieve, and the link between learning and policy change is neither direct nor immediate. In this study we look at learning in agro-industrial policy in Ghana, by tracing the interest in sugar production and tomato processing over six decades. Specifically we ask why four failed factories established in the …
Techno-market fix”? Decoding wealth through mobile money in the global South
Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City
Assemblage thinking has emerged over the last two decades as an important theoretical framework to interrogate emerging complex socio-material phenomenon in cities. This paper deploys the assemblage lens to unpack the vulnerability of informal communities to flood hazards in an African city. Focusing on Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, the largest informal settlements in Accra, Ghana, this paper employs multiple methods including archival analysis, i…
Spaces of market politics: Retailscapes and modernist planning imaginaries in African cities
Thermally resilient communities: Creating a socio-technical collaborative response to extreme temperatures
Extreme temperatures claim more lives than any other weather-related event, posing escalating socio-technical and governance challenges that few urban communities have addressed in a systematic, coordinated and comprehensive way. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the granular scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, people’s individual subjective thermal experiences and environmental justice dimensions of the haz…
Gender Disparity in Travel Demand Management of University Students and Employees
The Earn-a-Bike (EAB) program is a travel demand management (TDM) effort at the University of Louisville. It provides a $400 bike shop voucher for students and university employees to forgo their parking permits for two years. This research explores this program to answer three questions: Does gender affect people’s willingness to participate in a TDM program such as the EAB? Does gender have different impacts on population segments at different …
Farming within a dual legal land system: An argument for emancipatory food systems planning in Accra, Ghana
The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central A…
Managing campus parking demand through course scheduling – an approach to campus sustainability
Purpose The purpose of this study is to use the optimization modeling method to explore whether there is an ideal arrangement of course enrollments that can yield optimal parking demand and supply on college campuses. Design/methodology/approach Using the University of Louisville as a case study, this study deploys a three-step analytical process to examine the correlation between parking demand and course enrollment, estimate parking demand base…
Broadening the Remittance Debate: Reverse Flows, Reciprocity and Social Relations Between UK-Based Ghanaian Migrants and Families Back Home
Caught in the Rigidity Trap? Limits to Farmers’ Adaptation to Water Challenges in Ghana’s Smallholder Irrigation Schemes
This article examines how smallholder farmers adapt their behaviors in response to water challenges. It employs a mixed-methods design, including focus group sessions and a survey of, and interviews with, farmers and key stakeholders concerned with government and farmer-led smallholder irrigation schemes (SIS) in Ashaiman, Ghana. A water-dependent adaptive index (WDAI) is developed from the data to capture the dynamics of farmers’ adaptive behavi…
Locating artificial intelligence: A Research Agenda
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography’s engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how an…
Planning Corruption or Corrupting Planning: A Sub-Saharan Africa Perspective
Problem, research strategy, and findings Here we illuminate the often overlooked, yet pernicious impacts of corruption in planning. We used a sequential mixed-methods approach, inclusive of a survey of 82 planning practitioners in Ghana and semistructured interviews with 17 of these survey respondents, to investigate planners’ experiences of corruption. We found that incentives for corrupt behaviors, structured by the particularities of planning …
The Quantification of Child Labour by Ghana's Mass Media: A Missed Opportunity
This article describes how the mass media in Ghana use quantitative information to communicate the prevalence of child labour. During the period 2000-2020, stories about child labour frequently appeared in Ghana's mass media. Within nearly 30 per cent of the stories, at least one numerical quantification is used. Quantifications appear to be constructed primarily to dazzle readers. The large numbers and the weight of the technical jargon used wou…
Planning as polycentric: Institutionalist lessons for communicative and collaborative planning in Global South contexts
This article puts the ‘communicative turn’ in planning into conversation with polycentric governance to offer three lessons for communicative and collaborative planning. These lessons probe the nexus of institutional-cultural contexts and (1) stakeholders’ agency to initiate, enter, and exit discursive arenas, (2) incentives and interactions among actors, and (3) information and power (a)symmetries within communicative-action-based planning proce…
Political science (27 works) · Economics (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Business (20 works) · Geography (18 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economic growth (12 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (11 works)