The risk frontier: Perceiving social transformations in rural and peri-urban West Africa through a territorial lens

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.