Emmanuel Adu-Ampong

Emmanuel graduated in 2008 with a first class honours BA Sociology and Social Work degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Between 2008 and 2009, he worked as a teaching and research assistant at the Sociology department of the same university. In 2009, he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for an MSc Tourism, Environment and Development programme at King’s College London, and graduated from this programme in 2011 with Distinction. Emmanuel was subsequently awarded a scholarship for the Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme in Public Policy (Mundus MAPP) during 2011 – 2013. His first year was spent completing an MA Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. For the second year he completed an MA International Relations programme at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals in Barcelona, Spain. Emmanuel received a full University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Sciences scholarship to study for a PhD in Town and Regional Planning starting from September, 2013.

PhD Topic: The Elmina 2015 strategy and tourism-led local economic development planning in Ghana: An interactive governance perspective

A tourism-led local economic development planning process is seen as having the potential to bring benefits to local people. This is on the basis of continued increase in international tourist numbers and revenue and tourism’s propensity to improve livelihoods through foreign exchange earnings, job creation, income generation and biodiversity conservation. Emmanuel’s research is concerned with understanding the governance conditions under which a tourism-led local economic development planning deliver benefits while minimising the externalities that tourism development brings to a given locality. The overall aim of his PhD research is therefore to understand, analyse and explain how governance interactions shape the planning and use of tourism for local economic development.