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The risk frontier: perceiving social transformations in rural and peri-urban West Africa through a territorial lens. In: Adaptation to climate change and variability in rural West Africa

  • Karsten Schulz
  • Rapti Siriwardane

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.

Cite this activity

Schulz K. and Siriwardane R. (2016) The risk frontier: perceiving social transformations in rural and peri-urban West Africa through a territorial lens. In: Yaro J.A. & Hesselberg J. (eds.). Adaptation to climate change and variability in rural West Africa (pp. 171-189). 10.1007/978-3-319-31499-0_10

Details

Date 13.04.2016
Pages 171-189
Book Title Adaptation to climate change and variability in rural West Africa
Editors Yaro J.A. and Hesselberg J.
ISBN 978-3-319-31497-6
Open Access Closed Access
Open Access Status Closed Access
Eprints_link https://cris.leibniz-zmt.de/id/eprint/2375

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