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Franklin Obeng-Odoom

Franklin Obeng-Odoom

Ph.D. (Pol. Economy) M.Sc. (Urban Econ) B.Sc. (Land Econ)

About

235
Publications
48,737
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Introduction
Franklin Obeng-Odoom is with Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, where he is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science. As Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science Professor, he leads the Global South theme. Previously, he taught at various universities in Australia, including the University of Technology Sydney where he was Director of Higher Degree Research Programmes. Franklin's research interests are centred on the political economy of development, cities, and natural resources. Dr. Obeng-Odoom is the current Chairperson of the Finnish Society for Development Research, a member of The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies established in 1899.

Publications

Publications (235)
Article
The world is now more unsustainable as it has become less inclusive. Developmental environmentalism, a new approach to industrial policy, has increasingly been advocated as alternative development. But, does this developmentalism reduce urban inequalities? How has the implementation of industrial policy reflecting this developmentalist orientation...
Article
Full-text available
The restructuring of a state is crucial for promoting human development. For this reason, public–private partnerships (PPPs), the so-called “fourth revolution” in reinventing the state, have become a global strategy of choice. Yet, existing studies on PPPs mainly analyze their effect on growth or inequality, not human development. This article uses...
Article
The notion of “oil cities” is typically considered antithetical to industrialization, growth and development. This paper frames a symposium on Hou Li’s (2021) latest book, Building for Oil, which questions this imbroglio. The book’s central argument is that the oil city of Daqing drove industrialization in China from the 1960s to the 1970s. The ind...
Article
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Recent articles have demonstrated the knowledge and accuracy of oil corporations’ predictions made since the 1950s on the effects of their products on the global environment. But can the early relationship between oil corporations and national governments and lack of climate actions by both actors count as ecocide? If so, should remedial strategies...
Article
In this symposium, Mariko Frame, a political economist of Tanzania and elsewhere in Asia and Africa, Joseph Yaro, a development geographer who works on Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, and Anna Sturman, a Marxist political economist working on Aotearoa New Zealand, discuss Stefan Ouma's book, Farming as a Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Makin...
Article
Uncertified land abounds. The critical question is whether such land can provide security of tenure, access to finance, effective urban planning, and highest and best use. While much research contests the prospects and problems of conventional land title registration, the power of uncertified land is an issue rarely raised and, if done, hardly reso...
Chapter
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Discourses about forests matter as they mediate or shape action. Chapter 4 presents an update to the work of Arts et al. (2010), which used a longitudinal analysis of global forest1 (-related) discourses and interrelated meta- and regulatory discourses and their prevalence over time take stock of the discursive shifts that emerge from the literatur...
Article
Building communities is one way to limit inequality in the global development process. In Indonesia, that principle can best be illustrated in the Hindu Balinese compound. But does discrimination against women, especially those of lower class and caste, fundamentally undermine the community? Feminists contend so, but what is the nature of the press...
Chapter
Kolonialismus ist ein historisches Thema, ein Gegenwartsthema und ein geographisches Thema. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes verbinden diese drei Perspektiven und zeigen die Relevanz räumlicher und sozialer Machtverhältnisse des Kolonialismus in der Gegenwart auf. Diese »Kolonialität« genannte Kontinuität zeigt sich in der Wissensproduktion, in öffen...
Article
Reparations should be central to political-economic analyses of inequality. But, books on inequality usually demur from a systematic analysis of reparations. Britain's Black Debt (Hilary McD. Beckles) , From Here to Equality (William A Darity Jr and A Kirsten Mullen) , and Reconsidering Reparations (Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò) are three respectable exception...
Article
The ‘Scramble for Africa’ has historically been a concept used to describe the plunder of Africa by colonial powers, their subsequent economic capture of African resources, their political control and their racial domination of Africans. But, in recent times, many writers have pointed to Chinese ‘Scramble for Africa’. Of these depictions, The Econo...
Article
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Industrial policy has become the focus of much more interest in recent times. Of particular note is mainstream economists’ fascination and their peculiar claims about how and why this new industrial policy promotes growth, redistribution, and sustainability. Such contentions warrant scrutiny. Using metropolitan data, plans, and laws, along with reg...
Article
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In A Constitution of Many Minds (Sunstein 2009), Cass Sunstein, Harvard University scholar, argues that taxonomic references to constitutional literalism and purposive constitutionalism are unhelpful because they say much less about whether such philosophies espouse traditionalism, populism, or cosmopolitanism. Constitutional interpretation is, the...
Article
Housing is a major focus in urban and regional studies, but an overemphasis on empiricism inhibits its analytical study. Previous attempts to resolve this tension have proposed the use of research themes, but this strategy makes marginalised approaches even more invisible. Using disciplines as taxonomies takes us no further because, even within dis...
Article
Is mainstream economics only about growth, efficiency, and sustainability? Many critics contend so, but the recent state of the art in economics suggests not. Respectively drawing on reformist neoclassical economics, neoclassical microeconomics “proper,” and behavioral economics, major studies show that mainstream economics provides theories of ine...
Article
Daniel W. Bromley’s new book: Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism (2019) must be read by all institutional and evolutionary economists. The book’s history of economic thought is occasionally imprecise and its claims do not always demonstrate its treatise, itself sometimes light on empirical evidence, but, overall, Bromley’s new theory...
Article
The resurgence of interest in industrial policy in both development economics and urban studies requires reflection. To learn lessons about the past and avoid potential problems about the future, our present actions must be informed by both our past experience and our expectations of the future. One way to do so is to review and ponder key studies...
Chapter
The mobility of students has become one of the most common fixtures of global migration. Yet, international student migration experiences are under-researched. When discussed, they are typically assumed. The neoclassical economics theory of human capital usually serves as a short-cut for doing so. In turn, the lived experiences of such students are...
Book
Global Migration beyond Limits carefully considers but ultimately rejects the idea that migration is driven by the choices of individual migrants, and instead starts from the idea that institutions shape all forms, forces, and functions of migration. Of these institutions, however, land is central, whether in internal migration, international migra...
Chapter
Returning is intrinsically tied to migrating. Both mainstream and humanist models of migration posit the process as a response to crises. Structuralists are interested interest in return, too, Afterall, returning must be part of changing the structure. The study of remittances and return can enable us to evaluate the contention that there is a spat...
Chapter
This chapter provides the background and context for the whole book, while it also offers the questions, methodology, and methods based on which the book makes its key arguments and how they are demonstrated in the rest of the book. Migration is the new normal in the world. Almost one in every eight people in the world today is a migrant. Of this p...
Chapter
The rise of China raises a number of fundamental questions for global migration studies. Beyond age-old debates about whether Africa has become China’s colony, the two-way labour migration of Africans and Chinese provides an excellent case to evaluate the dominate theories of labour migration. First, why do African and Chinese labour migrants move...
Chapter
As Chapters 1 and 2 have shown, mainstream ecology and economics are incapable of addressing the complex, long-term problems of economic uncertainty, health crises, inequality and racism, segmentation and stratification, and the stresses of global migration. This chapter develops a more holistic framework for analysing the processes and experiences...
Chapter
Even when migrants are able to overcome the obstacles described in Chapter 5, the political economics I have so far described also shapes the migrant experience where migrants settle when they arrive at their destination. A major contributor to negative attitudes towards migrants is that they exert pressure on the infrastructure of the host communi...
Chapter
The orthodoxy on analysing and addressing the migration question is diverse and complex, but in whatever version it comes, it is problematic. This chapter demonstrates this variety in the orthodoxy, offers fundamental critiques, and provides the grounds for reframing and addressing the migration question. The chapter accepts that there is substanti...
Chapter
The forces of global migration have intensified. Accordingly, many more studies have been conducted about internal and international migration. Yet, more research has not necessarily brought more insight. Questions about the forms, drivers, ramifications, and policies persist. This book has tried to address these questions by examining global migra...
Chapter
If internal migration is complicated, global international migration is even more complex, raising questions such as: ‘What are the causes of the current refugee crisis?’, ‘What about the causes of the 2008 global economic crisis?’, ‘Are these crises interlinked and, if so, how can both be resolved?’ Previous research has pointed to ‘civil war’ in...
Chapter
Internal migration is usually neglected, but it is increasing and sometimes linked to international migration. What work exists on the motivation of migrants and their conditions of life is usually cast in the push-pull model or variants of it such as the Harris-Todaro model. In most cases, too, internal migration is cast in populationist terms, im...
Preprint
Full-text available
Surging philanthropic enterprises across the globe have raised questions about different approaches to giving and their associated moral theories. Much attention has been devoted to 'effective altruism', an outgrowth of the broader paradigm of 'effective' philanthropy which is aimed at addressing social problems using a businesslike , data-driven,...
Article
Full-text available
Theories of rent are wide-ranging. However, whether neoclassical, Marxist, or Proudhonist, they tend to neglect evolutionary institutionalist theorising. Increasingly dominated by the income approach, rent theories need to be expanded, partly to correct existing work, partly to break persistent intellectual monopoly and oligopoly, and particularly...
Article
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Development economics must be rethought. Not only has it hindered the liberation of the Global South, it has also deflected attention from the most critical questions of underdevelopment. Much economics inspires dirty growth, while Western political economy risks defending recolonisation under the guise of protecting nature in the Global South. Mos...
Article
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Richard Giles, a leading Australian Georgist political economist, suggests that criticisms of mainstream economics can be reduced to three: neglect of the Physiocrats, rejection of Georgist political economy, and the attempted revival of Georgist land economics with faulty variants of those principles. Yet, in defending Georgism, Giles fails to sho...
Article
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Nations and NGOs are promoting the idea of a transition from a petroleum‐based civilization to one fueled by renewable energy. But there are many questions about how to proceed. The solution usually proposed is to develop “clean energy” as the underlying basis of a transition. Analysts tend to be concerned with climate change and land use change, w...
Article
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Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla is contextualised, analysed, and assessed. Overall, this book is a major contribution to African political economy. It is commonly claimed that Africa has not had much to show for its independence. This view is widespread. Even periodicals like Third World...
Article
Ghana’s national economic transformation has been widely celebrated, but the role of its cities in this transformation is poorly understood. Typically, the contribution of cities in Ghana to the country’s transformation is seen as negative, or non-existent to negligible, at best. This characterization is quite common for cities in Africa for which...
Article
There are considerable variations in the extent to which growth has improved the position of the poor. In all cases except one the incomes of the poorest have improved over the periods for which data on distribution are available. However, in all cases there is some evidence that inequality has tended to increase. The relative importance of mineral...
Article
Full-text available
We would like to invite theoretical, empirical and methodological papers, and review articles on Stratification Economics to a special issue of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE). The abstract submission deadline is January 31st; the expected publication date is the first half of 2022. Please see attached the call and consider subm...
Article
Full-text available
The current pandemic might temporarily slow down environmentally destructive economic growth. However, claiming that we are flattening the curve of (un)sustainability is dangerous. The global sustainability crisis is not just being driven by uneconomic growth but also increasing global inequality and social stratification. Teaching this key lesson...
Article
Labour migration is, perhaps, the most widely discussed economic issue today. Yet, its underpinning theory and its empirical tests have remained largely Western-centric. In turn, the causes, effects, and policy options for the substantial, but widely neglected, Afro-Chinese labour migration, are poorly understood. By systematising existing data, th...
Article
We live in a new Gilded Age. Inequality in terms of access to and control of income and wealth is rising everywhere. Global inequality, in turn, has become a household word. The tsunami of academic books on the subject—ranging from The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions by Jason Hickel (2018) to Global Inequality: A New Ap...
Conference Paper
The UNDP HDR 2019 has called for "a revolution in metrics" to develop new ways to measure emerging forms of inequality. However, we do not only need better measurement, but also deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind inequality. Mainstream economists have long studied inequality, but much of that work focuses on narrowly conceived market mec...
Book
Cambridge Core - Economic Development and Growth - Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Article
How to explain persistent inequality in Africa and its widespread consequences of uncertainty and social costs continues to be the focus of heated debate. In this debate piece, I argue that the contending orthodox, heterodox and political economy explanations are not satisfactory. Instead, stratification economics, centred on property and instituti...
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Chapter
Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa - by Franklin Obeng-Odoom March 2020
Article
Monopolies continue to dominate world trade by controlling global production and distribution chains. Neither free trade nor fair trade has transformed this system; the recent rise in nativism and pseudo‐protectionism has not, and cannot, address these problems either. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade area in...
Article
Full-text available
Botswana – A Modern Economic History: An African Diamond in the Rough. By Ellen Hillbom and Jutta Bolt. New York: Palgrave, 2018. Pp. v–xv, 235, hardcover. - Volume 79 Issue 4 - Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Article
The intellectual marginalisation of Africa is often explained in terms of the lack of human capital. However, the peripheralization and systemic neglect of excellent research published in Africa problematise the human capital thesis and, ironically, demonstrate that the appeal to ‘Southern theory’ is not a panacea either. Although these perspective...
Article
As an institution that often seeks to redress global inequality and poverty, philanthropy is commonly dismissed as either masking structural causes, an insufficient response, or a contribution to the problem itself. Either way, philanthropy is increasingly labelled as philanthro-capitalism because it serves the interest of capital. But what about p...
Article
Development economics has struggled to understand the conditions of Africa and Africans. However, the nature of this critique, the alternative to development economics, and the challenges of the existing revisionism of today have not, as yet, received the attention of political economists. As this body of work is relevant to the current debates on...
Article
Full-text available
The common and dominant view that customary land tenure systems in Africa are inefficient because they forbid individuation, are not registered, are insecure, discourage access to credit, and provide incentive for free rider problems is examined through a case study of one community in Ghana, West Africa. A ninety-day field study in the case study...
Article
This entry describes the nature of the water challenge in cities. The entry also identifies causes and posited mainstream solutions, and analyzes the criticisms of mainstream views on the water challenge. Overall, the evidence suggests that the mainstream analyses of the water challenge and its accompanying policy prescriptions of marketization are...
Article
What are the causes of the current transnational migration “crisis”? What about the causes of the 2008 global economic crisis? Are these crises separate or interlinked? Previous research has pointed to civil war in refugee-sending countries and problematic financial practices in the United States as causal mechanisms of the refugee and economic cri...

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