African countries serve as used vehicle dumping sites for advanced capitalist countries, undermin... more African countries serve as used vehicle dumping sites for advanced capitalist countries, undermining global and local goals to move toward safe and low-emissions transport. Africa’s used vehicle dependency is commonly explained in terms of push-pull factors linked to demand for new cars and stringent environmental policies in wealthier countries that make available used vehicles for export, the limited purchasing power for less-polluting new safer vehicles, and weak regulation of vehicle emissions in Africa, all of which sustain used vehicle import on the continent. Drawing on the Ghanaian case, we present an enhanced explanation that brings in the role of historical underinvestment in public transport and larger processes that channel public resources toward car-oriented transport and land use, marginalizing other modes of transport used by the majority. Using historically informed political economy analyses and drawing on interviews and grey literature including media and institutional sources, this paper makes two contributions. First, it advances used vehicle research by moving beyond the push-pull approach to incorporate the historical institutional drivers of used vehicle and automobile consumption generally in Africa. Second, it provides insight into why used vehicle import bans on their own are unlikely to lead to sustained environmental and public health benefits and instead recommends more holistic policies for shifting toward cleaner, safer and affordable public transport in Africa. Transport and land-use planning reforms and investment prioritizing public transit including minibus recapitalization programs, as well as mixed land use and transit-oriented development can help reduce used vehicle dependency and the harms it brings.
Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the c... more Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating ‘turf wars’ among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the com...
AUBEA 2019: Built to Thrive: creating buildings and cities that support individual well-being and community prosperity, 2019
Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the c... more Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the construction sector is limited. Such phenomena are studied mainly as ‘engineering’ problems. Encouragingly, today, there is a growing momentum towards a socio-cultural approach to safety in the sector. The approach, however, focuses only on health and safety management concerns in the context of physical construction. Little or no attention is given to accidents caused by built structures. This essay argues that the principles of health and safety in the construction sector apply to not only those who are engaged in work; they also apply to those who are placed at risk by work activities, including members of the public. Therefore, limiting the impact of socio-cultural factors on safety in the sector to only worker safety obscures the impact of the factors on another vantage area of safety in the sector: the dangers posed by completed structures such as buildings to public health. The essay argues that a sociocultural grounding for building safety/accidents in the construction sector is warranted. A socio-cultural approach to building collapse could be worthwhile, in complementing the engineering focal approach, for identifying pathways to avoidance.
The paper discusses how unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined Ghana... more The paper discusses how unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined Ghana's COVID-19 containment efforts.
Authorities in Ghana frequently blame drivers for the country's road transport problems a... more Authorities in Ghana frequently blame drivers for the country's road transport problems and poor safety record. For instance, in parliament recently, the country's Roads and Highways Minister cited driver indiscipline as the cause of accidents. His predecessor made similar claims, as have presidential committees, parliamentarians; former presidents and the National Roads Safety Authority. These claims often end up forming the basis of public policy. For instance, based on a presidential committee report claiming that: "Indiscipline is the main contributory factor to the increasing incidents of road traffic crashes" in Ghana, the government approved a colossal 1 billion Ghana Cedis ($175 million) to tackle driving behaviour through road surveillance, sensitisation and public education. The Ghanaian authorities have good cause to be concerned. Today, road trauma is among the top 10 causes of deaths in Ghana. One report suggests that about $230 million is spent annually on emergency and trauma care from motor accidents alone.
Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives ... more Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives https://theconversation.com/standard-responses-to-road-accidents-havent-worked-in-ghana-here-are-some-alternatives-168127 1/3 Academic rigour, journalistic flair Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives October 7, 2021 4.50pm SAST Road traffic accidents remain a major public health and development challenge in Ghana. They are among the top 10 causes of deaths, draining 2.54% of its gross domestic product annually. Some recent reports suggest that between January and July 2021, about 8 deaths and 43 injuries were recorded daily on Ghana's roads. The recent surge in road deaths and injuries has ignited demands for a sharper policy focus on road carnage. The conversation, however, appears to be heavily oriented towards doing more of the existing control measures. These are the so-called 3Es: education; enforcement and engineering. The contemporary science or best practice in road safety management is shifting towards an understanding of the wider societal factors that might impact road safety. It is also about the exploitation of these factors in interventions. This major shift, however, remains inadequately considered in the current search for solutions to make Ghana's roads safer.
While many of the persisting social problems in Ghana and Africa broadly tend to be visible expre... more While many of the persisting social problems in Ghana and Africa broadly tend to be visible expressions of ‘indiscipline’ and ‘lawlessness’, their roots are often found in inequalities. Viewed this way, the current go-to public policy of deploying the violent power of the state to contain the problem, as the lived experience shows, could only yield little meaningful, sustainable benefits. More could be achieved by investing in measures that give the majority a chance to have a shot at decent life or address the conditions undermining their chances to have a shot at a decent life. This paper illustrates this argument with the mass-violation of Ghana’s March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
Behavioural economics has provided much source of inspiration for public policy in the COVID-19 e... more Behavioural economics has provided much source of inspiration for public policy in the COVID-19 era. Such is evidently the state of discussion in Ghana, where Ghanaians' so-called stubborn resistance to positive behavioural change is increasingly the target of public and popular criticisms. This paper argues that further to legitimising the police violence and extrajudicial sanctions meted out to 'undisciplined' violators of the restrictions, the indiscipline narrative leaps too quickly from an account of the personal morality/attitudes of Ghanaians to the collective action of mass-defiance of the restrictions without taking adequate account of the range of structural constraints that made it difficult for the majority of the people to comply with the restrictions. The mass defiance of the restrictions is best understood in the context of the unequal outcomes of the broader policy processes and practices, and the historical-institutional power dynamics around them that put some people in criminogenic situations in the country. It is important that media and policy analyses of public defiance of the restrictions and social problems in the country generally move beyond the simplistic notion of indiscipline to dissect how deliberate bias against the needs of the majority operates, and is institutionalised in policy and practice in ways that undermine their commitment to rules and regulations.
Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another sieg... more Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another siege. Over the past 50 years, India has seen a tremendous amount of mobilization by vibrant lower caste women’s movements, which are committed to challenging Indian caste society by securing social change and reducing caste-based discrimination and injustice. However, as it was in colonial India1, the anti-caste movements of today have to contend with socio-political and religio-cultural factors that perpetuate caste-based injustices. This study examines the ways in which Dalit women’s rights civil society organizations tackle four primary levels of caste-based challenges in India: Hindu religion, family, community, and state/institutional.
Engineers and architects have not yet developed a model for predicting when and where a building ... more Engineers and architects have not yet developed a model for predicting when and where a building may collapse. However, the odds are high that any such incident(s) may occur in an urban setting, particularly in a developing country. This review bemoans on the public safety implications of the rising urban vulnerability to incidents of building collapse for our ever-urbanising world. It acknowledges the proactive turn that construction and building safety research has taken- i.e. the shift from, hitherto, ex-post facto analysis of trigger events to identifying and neutralising organisational preconditions that create vulnerability for failures to occur. It, nevertheless, contends that the questions that urban vulnerability to building collapse incidents raise, such as what web of forces are at play, why is it predominant in developing in contrast to advanced countries and their corollaries, are beyond the current scope of causes of vulnerability for construction failures research. It...
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2020
This paper attempts a better explanation for the causes of dangerous driving behaviors among “Tro... more This paper attempts a better explanation for the causes of dangerous driving behaviors among “Tro-Tro”(minibus) drivers in Ghana. The current media, policy, and academic coverage of the problem reveals an immutable discourse that considers the behaviors (such as over speeding) as a function of moral failure, indiscipline, or bad attitudes on the part of the drivers. Often little consideration is given to the context of the behaviors and their influences. This paper provides an alternative explanation that considers the behaviors as predictable actions that are systematically connected to the Tro-Tro industry. Tro-Tro drivers operate within a precarious work climate marked by problems such as low wages; cut-throat competition; high level of job insecurity; imposition of non-negotiable throat-cutting daily fees by car owners and harassments from bribe-demanding corrupt police officers. The exigencies of meeting these numerous financial and other demands of their work, not moral failur...
African countries serve as used vehicle dumping sites for advanced capitalist countries, undermin... more African countries serve as used vehicle dumping sites for advanced capitalist countries, undermining global and local goals to move toward safe and low-emissions transport. Africa’s used vehicle dependency is commonly explained in terms of push-pull factors linked to demand for new cars and stringent environmental policies in wealthier countries that make available used vehicles for export, the limited purchasing power for less-polluting new safer vehicles, and weak regulation of vehicle emissions in Africa, all of which sustain used vehicle import on the continent. Drawing on the Ghanaian case, we present an enhanced explanation that brings in the role of historical underinvestment in public transport and larger processes that channel public resources toward car-oriented transport and land use, marginalizing other modes of transport used by the majority. Using historically informed political economy analyses and drawing on interviews and grey literature including media and institutional sources, this paper makes two contributions. First, it advances used vehicle research by moving beyond the push-pull approach to incorporate the historical institutional drivers of used vehicle and automobile consumption generally in Africa. Second, it provides insight into why used vehicle import bans on their own are unlikely to lead to sustained environmental and public health benefits and instead recommends more holistic policies for shifting toward cleaner, safer and affordable public transport in Africa. Transport and land-use planning reforms and investment prioritizing public transit including minibus recapitalization programs, as well as mixed land use and transit-oriented development can help reduce used vehicle dependency and the harms it brings.
Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the c... more Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating ‘turf wars’ among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the com...
AUBEA 2019: Built to Thrive: creating buildings and cities that support individual well-being and community prosperity, 2019
Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the c... more Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the construction sector is limited. Such phenomena are studied mainly as ‘engineering’ problems. Encouragingly, today, there is a growing momentum towards a socio-cultural approach to safety in the sector. The approach, however, focuses only on health and safety management concerns in the context of physical construction. Little or no attention is given to accidents caused by built structures. This essay argues that the principles of health and safety in the construction sector apply to not only those who are engaged in work; they also apply to those who are placed at risk by work activities, including members of the public. Therefore, limiting the impact of socio-cultural factors on safety in the sector to only worker safety obscures the impact of the factors on another vantage area of safety in the sector: the dangers posed by completed structures such as buildings to public health. The essay argues that a sociocultural grounding for building safety/accidents in the construction sector is warranted. A socio-cultural approach to building collapse could be worthwhile, in complementing the engineering focal approach, for identifying pathways to avoidance.
The paper discusses how unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined Ghana... more The paper discusses how unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined Ghana's COVID-19 containment efforts.
Authorities in Ghana frequently blame drivers for the country's road transport problems a... more Authorities in Ghana frequently blame drivers for the country's road transport problems and poor safety record. For instance, in parliament recently, the country's Roads and Highways Minister cited driver indiscipline as the cause of accidents. His predecessor made similar claims, as have presidential committees, parliamentarians; former presidents and the National Roads Safety Authority. These claims often end up forming the basis of public policy. For instance, based on a presidential committee report claiming that: "Indiscipline is the main contributory factor to the increasing incidents of road traffic crashes" in Ghana, the government approved a colossal 1 billion Ghana Cedis ($175 million) to tackle driving behaviour through road surveillance, sensitisation and public education. The Ghanaian authorities have good cause to be concerned. Today, road trauma is among the top 10 causes of deaths in Ghana. One report suggests that about $230 million is spent annually on emergency and trauma care from motor accidents alone.
Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives ... more Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives https://theconversation.com/standard-responses-to-road-accidents-havent-worked-in-ghana-here-are-some-alternatives-168127 1/3 Academic rigour, journalistic flair Standard responses to road accidents haven't worked in Ghana: here are some alternatives October 7, 2021 4.50pm SAST Road traffic accidents remain a major public health and development challenge in Ghana. They are among the top 10 causes of deaths, draining 2.54% of its gross domestic product annually. Some recent reports suggest that between January and July 2021, about 8 deaths and 43 injuries were recorded daily on Ghana's roads. The recent surge in road deaths and injuries has ignited demands for a sharper policy focus on road carnage. The conversation, however, appears to be heavily oriented towards doing more of the existing control measures. These are the so-called 3Es: education; enforcement and engineering. The contemporary science or best practice in road safety management is shifting towards an understanding of the wider societal factors that might impact road safety. It is also about the exploitation of these factors in interventions. This major shift, however, remains inadequately considered in the current search for solutions to make Ghana's roads safer.
While many of the persisting social problems in Ghana and Africa broadly tend to be visible expre... more While many of the persisting social problems in Ghana and Africa broadly tend to be visible expressions of ‘indiscipline’ and ‘lawlessness’, their roots are often found in inequalities. Viewed this way, the current go-to public policy of deploying the violent power of the state to contain the problem, as the lived experience shows, could only yield little meaningful, sustainable benefits. More could be achieved by investing in measures that give the majority a chance to have a shot at decent life or address the conditions undermining their chances to have a shot at a decent life. This paper illustrates this argument with the mass-violation of Ghana’s March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
Behavioural economics has provided much source of inspiration for public policy in the COVID-19 e... more Behavioural economics has provided much source of inspiration for public policy in the COVID-19 era. Such is evidently the state of discussion in Ghana, where Ghanaians' so-called stubborn resistance to positive behavioural change is increasingly the target of public and popular criticisms. This paper argues that further to legitimising the police violence and extrajudicial sanctions meted out to 'undisciplined' violators of the restrictions, the indiscipline narrative leaps too quickly from an account of the personal morality/attitudes of Ghanaians to the collective action of mass-defiance of the restrictions without taking adequate account of the range of structural constraints that made it difficult for the majority of the people to comply with the restrictions. The mass defiance of the restrictions is best understood in the context of the unequal outcomes of the broader policy processes and practices, and the historical-institutional power dynamics around them that put some people in criminogenic situations in the country. It is important that media and policy analyses of public defiance of the restrictions and social problems in the country generally move beyond the simplistic notion of indiscipline to dissect how deliberate bias against the needs of the majority operates, and is institutionalised in policy and practice in ways that undermine their commitment to rules and regulations.
Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another sieg... more Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another siege. Over the past 50 years, India has seen a tremendous amount of mobilization by vibrant lower caste women’s movements, which are committed to challenging Indian caste society by securing social change and reducing caste-based discrimination and injustice. However, as it was in colonial India1, the anti-caste movements of today have to contend with socio-political and religio-cultural factors that perpetuate caste-based injustices. This study examines the ways in which Dalit women’s rights civil society organizations tackle four primary levels of caste-based challenges in India: Hindu religion, family, community, and state/institutional.
Engineers and architects have not yet developed a model for predicting when and where a building ... more Engineers and architects have not yet developed a model for predicting when and where a building may collapse. However, the odds are high that any such incident(s) may occur in an urban setting, particularly in a developing country. This review bemoans on the public safety implications of the rising urban vulnerability to incidents of building collapse for our ever-urbanising world. It acknowledges the proactive turn that construction and building safety research has taken- i.e. the shift from, hitherto, ex-post facto analysis of trigger events to identifying and neutralising organisational preconditions that create vulnerability for failures to occur. It, nevertheless, contends that the questions that urban vulnerability to building collapse incidents raise, such as what web of forces are at play, why is it predominant in developing in contrast to advanced countries and their corollaries, are beyond the current scope of causes of vulnerability for construction failures research. It...
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2020
This paper attempts a better explanation for the causes of dangerous driving behaviors among “Tro... more This paper attempts a better explanation for the causes of dangerous driving behaviors among “Tro-Tro”(minibus) drivers in Ghana. The current media, policy, and academic coverage of the problem reveals an immutable discourse that considers the behaviors (such as over speeding) as a function of moral failure, indiscipline, or bad attitudes on the part of the drivers. Often little consideration is given to the context of the behaviors and their influences. This paper provides an alternative explanation that considers the behaviors as predictable actions that are systematically connected to the Tro-Tro industry. Tro-Tro drivers operate within a precarious work climate marked by problems such as low wages; cut-throat competition; high level of job insecurity; imposition of non-negotiable throat-cutting daily fees by car owners and harassments from bribe-demanding corrupt police officers. The exigencies of meeting these numerous financial and other demands of their work, not moral failur...
Built to Thrive: creating buildings and cities that support individual well-being and community prosperity, 2019
Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the c... more Current level of knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural factors on building collapses in the construction sector is limited. Such phenomena are studied mainly as ‘engineering’ problems. Encouragingly, today, there is a growing momentum towards a socio-cultural approach to safety in the sector. The approach, however, focuses only on health and safety management concerns in the context of physical construction. Little or no attention is given to accidents caused by built structures. This essay argues that the principles of health and safety in the construction sector apply to not only those who are engaged in work; they also apply to those who are placed at risk by work activities, including members of the public. Therefore, limiting the impact of socio-cultural factors on safety in the sector to only worker safety obscures the impact of the factors on another vantage area of safety in the sector: the dangers posed by completed structures such as buildings to public health. The essay argues that a sociocultural grounding for building safety/accidents in the construction sector is warranted. A socio-cultural approach to building collapse could be worthwhile, in complementing the engineering focal approach, for identifying pathways to avoidance.
Built to Thrive: creating buildings and cities that support individual well-being and community prosperity, 2019
Building collapses are becoming a common, tragic occurrence in cities in developing countries – p... more Building collapses are becoming a common, tragic occurrence in cities in developing countries – particularly Africa and Asia. This does not bode well for urban sustainability given the rapid growth and concentration of more and more people in cities in those parts of the world. The growing number of climate-related hazards portends an even higher disaster-risk as more buildings could collapse in such places subsequent to hydro-meteorological hazards. This raises the need for conversations toward unravelling and addressing the underlying causes. This review draws on contemporary as well as historic documents on housing and construction, media, scholarly and investigative reports on building collapses and other cognate materials on the growth and development of cities across diverse locations to confer insight into the phenomenon. In summary, it was found that accelerated demand for buildings triggered by urban expansions provides the context for how the creation of unsafe buildings arise in developing countries’ cities and are thus central to understanding the deleterious consequences of building collapses in those parts of the world. The implications of the findings for control are discussed. The review provides an exploratory reference for empirical research into the situations of specific countries and cities
At the core of the review is the critique that the extant theoretical approach to the study of bu... more At the core of the review is the critique that the extant theoretical approach to the study of building accidents does not sufficiently address societal level influences of vulnerability for such phenomena. Using the collapse of buildings in urban settings as reference point, the review makes a case for why the omission is fatal.
The mountain of criticisms leveled against the microfinance project is largely founded on the cla... more The mountain of criticisms leveled against the microfinance project is largely founded on the claim that microfinance institutions (MFIs) are unethically making egregious profits from the sweats and in the name of poor people. Both the pro and critical literature unanimously point to the fact that the industry is financially viable – they only part ways on who benefits from the profit. The taken position of this study to investigate what drives commercial MFIs into bankruptcy therefore clearly contradicts received wisdom. How could institutions seen as making profits (critics even say excessively) be at the same time running to Chapter 11? Is it the case that the MFIs do not experience profit as claimed? Could it be commercialization sowing its own seed of destruction? Or it is about management and governance and/or different factors including regulation?
Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another sieg... more Untouchability practices and caste-based discrimination and injustices are under yet another siege. Over the past 50 years, India has seen a tremendous amount of mobilization by vibrant lower caste women’s movements, which are committed to challenging Indian caste society by securing social change and reducing caste-based discrimination and injustice. However, as it was in colonial India1, the anti-caste movements of today have to contend with socio-political and religio-cultural factors that perpetuate caste-based injustices. This study examines the ways in which Dalit women’s rights civil society organizations tackle four primary levels of caste-based challenges in India: Hindu religion, family, community, and state/institutional.
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Papers by Festival Godwin Boateng