The state of research on Ghana’s oil and gas resources: Themes and future directions

Abstract

Research on Ghana's oil and gas resources has flourished since the country discovered oil in 2007. Yet, the existing body of knowledge is scattered across scientific journals and other outlets without any attempts to synthesize and distill key themes and future research directions. Furthermore, prior efforts to synthesize existing research did not use robust methods to select and analyze the articles. Building on past work, we conducted a meta- review of empirical oil and gas articles published in English Language journals between 2007 and 2020. We generated nineteen search terms to select articles from Google Scholar and Web of Science and developed a codebook to manually code thirteen variables for analysis. The findings demonstrate an extensive diversity of authors with local and international institutional affiliations. Additionally, the frequency of publications has increased though the distribution is uneven across time. The dominant research topics are sustainable and economic development, environmental management, and energy governance. Finally, most of the studies are theory-driven and apply qualitative data collection and analytical methods. In conclusion, we propose that future research on oil and gas in Ghana should incorporate more policy process focal lenses, combine diverse theoretical frameworks, advance comparative analysis, and leverage mixed methods and hypothesis testing techniques.