Affiliated Ph.D. Fellow, Cohort 2021

Research Interests

• Institutional Economics
• Institutional Change
• Political Economy of Institutions
• Coastal Blue Economy
• Environmental Governance
• Common-Pool Resource Governance
• Collaborative Governance Regimes

Dissertation topic
Towards sustainability in the coastal blue economy: navigating institutional change for coastal resource co-management in Ghana

Dissertation abstract
Institutions are critical for the sustainable use and management of environmental and natural resources. However, the development or design of institutional arrangements for the sustainable governance of resources can become a challenge depending on the context. This is much so in the context of coastal resource management where uncertainties, interdependencies, power asymmetries, and institutional transaction costs are high. Institutional development for the co-management of coastal fisheries in Ghana has been ongoing since 1997 with little success. This is despite the existence of enabling conditions for the emergence of co-management institutional arrangements, as espoused in extant institutional analysis literature. This thesis examines the challenge of institutional development from the perspective of institutional theory. It does this by drawing from the diversity of theories of institutional change in institutional economics and using qualitative methods of data collection and analysis to understand why institutional design is difficult to achieve in the context of coastal resource governance in Ghana.

Academic Supervisors
Achim Schlüter
Marco Verweij
Aisa O. Manlosa