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Adaptation to Climate Change and Variability in Rural West Africa pp 171–189Cite as

The Risk Frontier: Perceiving Social Transformations in Rural and Peri-urban West Africa Through a Territorial Lens

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Abstract

Addressing the distinct overemphasis on rural agricultural spaces that undergirds much of the literature on local riskscapes in West Africa, the chapter seeks to elucidate how households that live on the fringes of rapidly transforming peri-urban spaces are caught in a double bind of institutional and spatial marginality. Drawing on a comparative empirical study in northern Ghana, the chapter argues that peri-urban households are facing socio-environmental risks that are similar to those experienced by their rural counterparts, while at the same time being subjected to interrelated institutional and material transformations which define such spaces as dynamic risk frontiers. In order to compare the institutional dynamics between rural and peri-urban territories, the study advances a ‘territorialization of risk’ framework that explores the social production of risk against the backdrop of changing institutional and communal structures.

Keywords

  • Territorialization
  • Risk
  • Communal reliance
  • Social transformation
  • West Africa

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Fig. 10.1
Fig. 10.2
Fig. 10.3
Fig. 10.4

Notes

  1. 1.

    Calculations based on data for the year 2012 obtained from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA Bolgatanga) and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported through a fieldwork grant from the Dr. Hermann Eiselen Doctoral Programm of the Foundation fiat panis and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project WaterPower (reference number 01 LN 1316 A). Moreover, we thank the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) for their generous logistical support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Governance & Sustainability Lab, Faculty of Regional & Environmental Sciences, University of Trier, Trier, Germany

    Karsten Schulz

  2. Working Group Development & Knowledge Sociology, Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology, Bremen, Germany

    Rapti Siriwardane

Authors
  1. Karsten Schulz
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  2. Rapti Siriwardane
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Correspondence to Karsten Schulz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Geography and Resource Devl., University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana

    Joseph A. Yaro

  2. Dept. of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Jan Hesselberg

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Schulz, K., Siriwardane, R. (2016). The Risk Frontier: Perceiving Social Transformations in Rural and Peri-urban West Africa Through a Territorial Lens. In: Yaro, J., Hesselberg, J. (eds) Adaptation to Climate Change and Variability in Rural West Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31499-0_10

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