Contemporary road architectures and roadside institutions: Mapping agentive resilience in regimented urban spaces in Ghana

Abstract

ABSTRACTResearch on African long-distance roads have divulged ground-breaking insights, which departs from primary concepts about North-Atlantic road regimes in terms of socio-technical orders. The study of processes and practices of transfer and translation in Ghana shows the Ghanaian context is instantiated by contestations and accommodation that functions as manoeuvrable spaces between epistemic consortium of planners, politicians, and policy-makers vis-à-vis local agency. This has bolstered the latter to make confident anticipation to change the world around them in a pluralistic political environment. Using multi-sited ethnographic methods this article seeks to elucidate entanglements of a seemingly constellational narrative on both sides of the actor’s aisle. Constraints and limits on local agency also provide a desideratum for mapping inter-locking processes of resilience at various levels of (dis-)engagement. The hypothesis is informed by (1) policies and practices of epistemic actors for renewal and transformation: (a) compromise the visions and creativity of local agents; (2) practices and processes of local agents: (b) invigorate new visions; attain lateralisation of one form or the other. It reveals how the dialectics of contemporary road architectures and roadside institutions reinforces non-path dependent processes foregrounded by remarkable social resilience and change in the macro-context. The results have implications for the technology/society/governance nexus. It would, however, require a longitudinal study in order to map out livelihood and protective trajectories, unpack the nuances of the meaning-portfolios of local agents to make full meaning of adaptive capacity and regenerative potential in the context of socio-technical transition.