Mira Slavova

African Smart Cities Strategies for Agenda 2063

By synthesizing urbanization challenges and current trends in Africa, this dialogue piece captures the broader transformative processes taking place on the continent. We develop a vision of the African cities of the future and show the alignment of key aspects of the smart city concept with the African Union’s Agenda 2063. Looking at the approximately 50-year time horizon of Agenda 2063 (at the time of writing, 2016), we chart the strategy space for African megacities, medium cities, as well as small cities and new developments. Strategic insights are captured in summary and conclusions.

How do development actors do ‘ICT for Development’? A strategy-as-practice perspective on emerging practices in Ghanaian agriculture

This paper examines how development actors within the Ghanaian agricultural sector enact information and communication technology (ICT) in their day‐to‐day outreach practices with smallholder farmers. We draw on an in‐depth qualitative case study, informed by the theoretical perspective of “strategy‐as‐practice” to answer the research question: “what ICT‐mediated strategic practices are used by development actors in the Ghanaian agriculture sector?” The research findings reveal that (1) the activities of development actors are meshed within a network of interdependencies; (2) the enacted strategic practices reflect the trade‐off between novelty of content and novelty of the technologies used to deliver it; and lastly, (3) the praxis of development actors for doing ICT for development consists of hybrid strategies, combining bottom‐up approaches consistent with farmers indigenous smallholder logic, with top‐down imperatives framing agriculture “as a business” and nurturing value‐chain integration. Consequently, our research points to the impact of ICT initiatives as step‐wise and attained over the long term, rather than disruptive and attained in the immediate term.

How do conflicting logics lead to decoupled activities? Evidence from rural Ghana

In this paper we explore the links between the notions of decoupling in Institutional Theory (IT) and of activity systems of Activity Theory (AT), by considering the case of delivery of agricultura...