Samson AKINOLA is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning with specialisation in Polycentric Planning and Problem-Solving Entrepreneurship. He has spent substantial part of his research endeavours in exploring and finding solution to the challenges and problems that are confronting Nigeria and Africa.

He innovated Polycentric Planning as a powerful tool/strategy from multidisciplinary engagement that is rooted in the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, Knowledge Management (KM) tools, Political Economy Approach (PEA) to Policy Analysis, and Robert Owen’s Principles of Industrialisation for confronting complex, complicated and hydra-headed problems that are bedeviling Nigeria and Africa. He applies the strategy to community development for ordering the use of physical, human, environmental and institutional resources as well as engaging the citizens in contractual relations with the public authority on community development matters to alleviating poverty.

He is concerned with knowledge generation and application to the challenges that are confronting Africa, especially how to initiate and implement comprehensive development planning that cuts across various sectors of Nigerian/African economy. He designed and published strategies and institutional mechanisms for the application of at least forty one (41) African development models that are pragmatic and problem-solving in several sectors of African economy.

He has published numerous journal articles on the socioeconomic and political development of Nigeria and Africa. With Sixty Six (66) publications (of which 32 are international) and Eighty Seven (87) conference papers, he believes in drawing pragmatic lessons from community institutions, through restructuring, to reconstitute order from the bottom-up for the emergence of adaptive self-reliant arrangements in Nigeria and Africa.