Production and Circulation of Local Knowledge About Air Pollution and Health Effects in Ghana

According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is the main environmental health risk at the global scale, but it affects more particularly and severely populations of Global South cities, where environmental regulations remain weak. Data play an important role to shed light on the problem of air pollution and to trigger political responses. In this paper, I propose to analyze the conditions of production and circulation of data and local knowledge on air pollution and effects on health in Ghana. More specifically, I will focus on the actors and the resources they mobilize, what knowledge do they produce and how are they circulate and are used. This contribution is drawn from an ongoing (2021–) post-doctoral research project in sociology conducted in Accra and funded by the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation en Société. It is based on a qualitative methodology made of observation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA-Ghana) and semi-structured interviews conducted in Accra (N = 35) between August 2021 and May 2022 with academic and institutional actors. Preliminary results show that Ghana's air quality and health effects knowledge result from transnational financial, human and technological circulations. Overall knowledge produced remains limited to raw air quality (PM) data and lack of enough data in source apportionment and health effects. Moreover, these data are not disseminated to the public and seem to be partly ignored by the political authorities, enabling the formulation of mitigation policies.