Reordering labour,value,and informality in Accra’s e-waste economy: Circuits of persistence and precarity

Abstract

The demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in 2021 disrupted Accra’s central hub of electronic waste (e-waste) processing, displacing thousands of workers. This study examines how these informal economies persist and adapt to this territorial reordering through mobility, role-combination, and increased reliance on intermediaries. The reorganisation of these economies reveals the economic interdependence of formal and informal systems. We draw on interviews with informal and formal stakeholders, site observation, and relevant secondary materials to advance a 3-part framework for understanding demolition-driven displacement in e-waste economies. First, we show how informal practices persist through improvisation, sustaining material circulation under conditions of heightened precarity. Second, we demonstrate how demolition intensified new forms of mediated interdependence between informal labour and formal institutions, as access to markets, training, and safer practices became more gatekeepered. Third, we analyse the plural rationalities of value that structure e-waste economies, contrasting repair and reuse logics oriented to use-value with extraction logics prioritising exchange-value, and show how displacement reweighted the viability of these strategies under more uncertain spatial and market conditions. We argue for an inclusive governance framework that promotes environmental justice and supports more equitable integration of informal recyclers into formal systems. The study contributes to debates on urban informality, waste economies, and economic geography by theorising demolition as both a political technology of (re)ordering and an enclosure/dispossession mechanism. It also shows how displacement reorganises waste livelihoods while workers’ responses sustain circulation in more fragmented and precarious geographies.

Introduction

The demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in 2021 marked a pivotal moment in Accra’s urban history. Long depicted in international media as the world’s largest e-waste dump (Akese, 2019; Grant et al., 2024; The Guardian, 2014), Agbogbloshie was more than a toxic hotspot; it was a dense socio-economic hub where thousands of informal workers sustained livelihoods through repair, resale, dismantling, and material recovery (Akese, 2019; Atiemo et al., 2016; Manhart et al., 2020). Its clearance removed the physical worksite infrastructure that supported the scrapyard’s e-waste economy: that is, makeshift structures, storage and dismantling spaces, and access routes through which repair, resale, and material recovery were organised on-site (Figure 1), in the name of decongestion and environmental improvement. This raises pressing questions about how state-led interventions reshape urban economies and circuits of value and also redistribute access to livelihoods.

Figure 1.

Demolished scrapyard with destroyed physical e-waste/scrap scavenging infrastructure.

Before demolition, the agglomeration and concentration of activities at Agbogbloshie enabled a dense livelihood ecology: workers co-located with buyers, parts, skills, and information flows, which reduced transaction costs and enabled rapid price discovery and role-switching across repair, resale, dismantling, and collection (Akese, 2019; Grant and Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Oteng-Ababio et al., 2014). At the same time, this concentration intensified exposure to occupational hazards, stigma, and regulatory surveillance, making the site both economically enabling and politically vulnerable (Amankwaa, 2013; Amankwaa et al., 2017; Kyere et al., 2018). The demolition, therefore, displaced work and deconcentrated activities into smaller, more diffused locations across the city, reshaping where and how livelihoods could be sustained (see Amoah, 2026; Iddris et al., 2025; Sarpong et al., 2025).

Attempts have been made to bridge the post-demolition knowledge gap through studies on revanchist logics shaping demolition and redevelopment (Sarpong et al., 2025), how Agbogbloshie’s trajectory was shaped by an “academic urban legend” and urban imaginaries (Grant et al., 2024), the toxic circular economy and the pathologisation of informal e-waste workers (Finn et al., 2025), governance–labour politics under regulatory gaps and selective enforcement (Nkansah-Dwamena, 2026), and reflective accounts of the aftermath of the violent demolition (Akese et al., 2022; Chasant, 2021). However, less attention has been paid to how displacement and deconcentration reshaped livelihood activities across dispersed sites, reorganised access to buyers and materials, redistributed risks and visibility across urban space, and reworked circuits of value and labour. This study contributes to the discourse by examining the socio-economic and spatial reconfigurations of Accra’s e-waste sector in the aftermath of demolition. It centres on specific questions: how did demolition-driven displacement and the deconcentration of activities from a concentrated hub into dispersed micro-sites reshape e-waste livelihood activities, and how did workers respond to sustain income and material circulation across the city? Specifically, the study (i) examines how informal e-waste practices persist and adapt after demolition; (ii) analyses the reconfigured interdependencies between informal actors, formal infrastructures, and intermediaries; and (iii) interrogates the plural value regimes through which waste is revalorised under the new spatial constraints and uncertainties produced by dispersal, illuminating broader struggles over sustainability, recognition, and urban citizenship.

The analysis focuses on the livelihood and governance consequences of displacement for everyday repair, resale, dismantling, and access to buyers and materials. The study recognises how informal economies persist through improvisation and reorganisation by following these actors, even as they remain marginalised by state policy and urban planning. Beyond documenting post-demolition change, the Accra case shows that displacement in urban waste economies operates as a form of dispossession and withdraws access to concentrated workspaces and waste streams and thereby dismantles the agglomeration conditions that make livelihoods viable. Urban waste workers respond through adaptive strategies such as mobility across sites, role-combination, brokerage, and recalibrated value practices that keep material circulation going while shifting risk and precarity onto labour.

Conceptual and theoretical framings

The informal nature of Ghana’s e-waste sector

In Ghana and comparable Global South cities, informal workers, including collectors, dismantlers, repairers, refurbishers, and secondhand sellers, play vital roles in urban metabolisms. Their practices of repair, reuse, and dismantling extend product lifecycles, divert waste from landfills, and recover valuable materials (Asibey et al., 2022; Grant and Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Oteng-Ababio et al., 2014). Such practices resonate with Hart’s (1973) argument that informal income opportunities provide essential services on which urban life depends. Given reports that the activities of the sector are harmful to health and the environment, Ghana’s Hazardous and Electronic Waste Control and Management Act (2016) was introduced as a legal framework for safer recycling, supported by donor initiatives such as dismantling hubs and training schemes (Akon-Yamga et al., 2021; Bimpong et al., 2023; Owusu-Twum et al., 2022). Despite these reforms, risks have persisted. Comparative work suggests that such top-down formalisation-oriented reforms often misalign with everyday practices of informal workers and risk reproducing exclusions observed elsewhere (Schneider and Zeng, 2022; Streicher-Porte and Geering, 2009). Further comparative work on China suggests that moves towards safer and more environmentally controlled e-waste handling have depended on hybrid governance, combining regulation and formalisation with economic incentives and locally embedded collection/recycling networks, but these interventions remain uneven across places as policies travel and are implemented variably (Chi et al., 2011; Inverardi-Ferri, 2017; Zeng et al., 2017). In Ghana, the demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard exemplifies a more disruptive approach, where interventions displace livelihoods without securing sustained environmental improvements.

Beyond Ghana, scholarship on waste geographies shows that discarded materials circulate through uneven global networks where value and toxicity are co-produced (Gregson and Crang, 2010; Lepawsky, 2018; Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022). This situates Accra’s e-waste economy as part of broader global processes of circulation and dispossession. Further studies on environmental justice highlight how the risks and benefits of waste management are unevenly distributed, often along lines of class, race, and citizenship (McClintock and Morris, 2024; Pellow, 2007). These debates emphasise how informality itself is governed (McFarlane, 2012; Roy, 2005). Demolition revalorises urban land through state-led redevelopment and contested redevelopment visions (Grant et al., 2024: 2; Sarpong et al., 2025: 1, 13). In Agbogbloshie, this revalorisation was articulated through the earmarking of part of the reclaimed land for the “Agenda 111” district hospital allocation, alongside wider proposals and visions to refashion the area through green and real-estate-oriented redevelopment (Grant et al., 2024: 2; Sarpong et al., 2025: 13). This study builds on the literature by shifting attention from dominant representations of Agbogbloshie as a toxic e-waste site, to post-demolition reorganisation of Accra’s e-waste economy. It shows how displacement and deconcentration reshaped labour, value, access to waste streams, and livelihood infrastructures across dispersed sites.

Theoretical framing

Hart (1973) challenged dualistic, linear accounts of economic modernisation that treated informal work as a marginal residue outside real development. Drawing on evidence from Accra, Hart reframed informal income opportunities as economically dynamic and socially organised, supplying essential services on which urban life depends, and argued that the formal/informal divide is better understood as a distinction between activities, roles, and their regulation (Hart, 1973: 68–69). While Hart (1973) established the analytical significance of informality, structuralist work in The Informal Economy (Portes et al., 1989), especially Castells and Portes’ argument on the systemic connections between formal and informal activities, conceptualises informality as structurally articulated with capitalist restructuring. In this view, informal labour and enterprises can sustain formal accumulation through subcontracting, flexible labour arrangements, and cost externalisation (Carr and Chen, 2002; Portes et al., 1989).

To move beyond structuralist binaries that risk reducing informality to subordination, Gibson-Graham’s (2002) work on diverse economies brings economic heterogeneity into focus. Extending this argument, Gibson-Graham (2008) emphasises the performative work of making visible economic difference, including wage labour and commodity exchange alongside barter, gifting, volunteering, communal sharing, and solidarity networks. Applied to Accra’s e-waste sector, this perspective shows how repairers, refurbishers, and second-hand sellers generate alternative value regimes through practices of reuse and repair. Their practices prioritise use-value, collective survival, and material stewardship alongside profit, countering global regimes of planned obsolescence. Informal e-waste work thus embodies plural rationalities that sustain circular economies and articulate alternative imaginaries of sustainability and resilience in conditions of precarity (Amoah, 2026; Gibson-Graham, 2002, 2008).

Debates on displacement and dispossession show that urban improvement frequently operates through enclosure: delegitimising informal economies, withdrawing rights to space and resources, and reorganising who can access value-bearing land and material flows (Inverardi-Ferri, 2018a). Inverardi-Ferri (2018a: 235–239) conceptualises the enclosure of “waste land” as a process that dispossesses waste workers of workspaces and of access to waste streams, infrastructures, and recognition, thereby producing new dependencies and vulnerabilities even when livelihoods persist. As such, the demolition of Agbogbloshie can be understood as a dispossessive intervention that displaced workers, fragmented the socio-material conditions of livelihood-making, and reconfigured access to discarded electronics across Accra’s dispersed micro-sites. This framing also aligns with scholarship that treats informality as a mode of urban governance, since planning selectively produces legality/illegality and thereby authorises displacement and exclusion (Roy, 2005), while informal livelihoods adapt and reorganise relationally rather than disappear (McFarlane, 2012).

Across these theoretical currents runs a shared recognition of waste as a political object, entangled in disputes over who defines value, whose labour is recognised, and whose environments are protected or sacrificed (Amoah, 2026; Moore, 2012). This politics is also evident in “waste regime” scholarship, which shows that waste pathways are materially produced through governance and infrastructure, and some councils can remain locked in to collection and processing configurations that were economic at the time of procurement; the regime’s underlying economic configuration can block the enactment of new circular-economy policy objectives (Gregson and Forman, 2021: 222–223). Bringing this insight into conversation with informality, displacement, and dispossession clarifies that demolition is a mechanism through which access to urban space and value-bearing waste streams is enclosed and redistributed (Gupte et al., 2019; Inverardi-Ferri, 2018a; Roy, 2005). Demolition and eviction are often justified through aesthetic and sanitised narratives of urban improvement, such as cleanliness, decongestion, order, and modernisation, that reconfigure the terms of belonging and governability in the city (Bandauko et al., 2025; Ghertner, 2011; Okwei et al., 2025).

In waste economies, such interventions also re-route material flows and reorder metabolisms, generating conflict over infrastructure, livelihoods, and the political terms of “sustainable situated political ecologies” (Demaria and Schindler, 2016: 309). Building on this synthesis, we developed a conceptual framework that theorises Accra’s post-demolition e-waste economy as a contested urban metabolism. The framework (Figure 2) depicts demolition as a political technology that redistributes access to discarded electronics and reorders urban citizenship. Three axes structure the analysis: P1. Informality as constitutive practice (repair, resale, dismantling as metabolic work); P2. Formal–informal interdependence (commodity flows, brokerage, price spreads, and spatial control); and P3. Plural value regimes (use-value preservation and material valorisation). Across P1–P3, the analysis is organised around a main guiding problem: how displacement and deconcentration reshape e-waste livelihoods and how workers respond. We therefore treat post-demolition reorganisation not as a linear transition from informality to formalisation, but as a field in which livelihood strategies emerge under conditions of dispossession and dispersal, reshaping access to materials, buyers, and recognition (see Brickell et al., 2017; McFarlane, 2012).

Figure 2.

Contested urban metabolisms after demolition.

Bringing these debates together, we conceptualise the demolition of Agbogbloshie as a political technology through which urban space and informal livelihoods are reordered. Here, demolition as political technology refers to a state-led practice of urban ordering that reconfigures space, labour, risk distribution, and citizenship claims by displacing informal workers, fragmenting circuits of material circulation, and revalorising central land. To operationalise this framework, we advance three working propositions (P1–P3) that guided data coding and analysis. P1 (constitutive practices) informed identification of repair, resale, and dismantling activities as metabolic work persisting despite displacement. P2 (formal–informal interdependence) directed attention to how brokerage, pricing, and market access reproduced dependencies between informal workers and formal industries. P3 (plural value regimes) shaped the analysis of how actors prioritised different rationalities of value and use-value through repair or exchange-value through selective dismantling, under new spatial and economic constraints.

Research study setting and methodology

The study area

The study was conducted across multiple e-waste and second-hand resale sites within Accra, Ghana, including Old Fadama, Zongo lane, Konkomba line, Circle, and Lapaz (Figure 3). These sites are embedded in the city’s dense and heterogeneous urban fabric, where informal economies intersect with processes of rapid urbanisation, migration, and contested governance. Similar to informal settlements across the Global South, they represent spaces of both vulnerability and resilience marked by precarious working conditions, insecure tenure, and environmental risks, but also by strong social networks, improvisation, and entrepreneurial activity. Accra’s e-waste sites can be cautiously read through urban frontier debates, particularly where such debates address urbanisation, enclosure, dispossession, and the revaluation of land (Gillespie and Mercer, 2025). Here, this framing is used to emphasise how global material flows, informal recycling livelihoods, and state-led interventions converge in Accra’s e-waste economy.

Figure 3.

Study area map showing the e-waste and second-hand resale hubs.

Adopted methodology

This study adopts a qualitative case study design, focusing on the aftermath of the 2021 demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana. The case was selected because Agbogbloshie had long been central to Ghana’s informal e-waste economy, and its clearance provides a critical moment to examine how demolition reshapes urban metabolisms of waste, labour, and governance. The case study approach was chosen for its empirical significance and its capacity to capture the emergent, relational, and contested dynamics through which waste, actors, and infrastructures are assembled in rapidly transforming urban environments.

A total of 60 interviews were undertaken with a wide range of actors involved in Accra’s e-waste economy. These included research institutes, government agencies, NGOs/CSOs, dismantlers (e.g. at Zongo lane, Old Fadama, Konkomba line), collectors (street-level and itinerant scrap collectors), repairers and refurbishers (e.g. at Circle, Zongo lane, Lapaz), and traders/second-hand electronics sellers (e.g. at Circle, Lapaz). The selection of these participants was guided by the need to capture diverse perspectives, roles, and interests in shaping Accra’s e-waste economy. We were able to reflect the formal policy and regulatory frameworks influencing e-waste governance by including state institutions, international development actors, and research organisations. Interviews were conducted in English and a local language (Twi). This multi-actor sample was designed to capture the heterogeneous practices and positionalities that emerge across the e-waste chain, tracing how different actors co-produce material flows, economic value, and governance relations. Fieldwork was conducted between March and August 2024.

The fieldwork was led by a researcher with prior familiarity with Accra and the Agbogbloshie e-waste economy. This shaped a shifting insider–outsider relationship: the researcher was culturally and linguistically proximate to many participants, but institutionally distinct as an academic researcher and not a member of the e-waste workforce (Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). Access was initially negotiated through repeated site visits, a pilot survey, and introductions through personal contacts (see Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). Given the precarious conditions of work and unequal power relations in the field, participation was voluntary and based on informed consent, with anonymisation used throughout. Interviews conducted in Twi were translated into English, with meanings checked during interviews through clarification and follow-up questions, and supplemented by reflexive fieldnotes capturing context and potential misunderstandings. To ensure the rigour of the analysis, reflexive memoing was employed alongside iterative coding. This allowed the examination of how positionality influenced the interpretation of the data, and how the specific conditions of access within Accra shaped the narratives collected. Triangulation across interviews, observation, and documents helped minimise over-reliance on any single perspective (Braun and Clarke, 2021).

Participant observation was carried out at new trading and dismantling sites, roadside repair points, and resale markets, while documentary sources included policy papers, NGO and advocacy group reports, and media coverage (from CitiNewsRoom, 2021a, 2021b; Myjoyonline, 2021, 2025). Extended immersion helped to observe how practices, spaces, and relationships emerged and stabilised through everyday negotiations of risk, value, and legitimacy. Participants were recruited through purposive, convenience, and snowball sampling. Initial entry points came through personal contacts and local associations, with further participants identified through referrals and by following materials in the field. This was a necessary strategy given the fragmented and dispersed assemblages of workers post-demolition. This approach enabled engagement with diverse perspectives across occupational, institutional, and governance roles. Coding combined inductive and deductive strategies: inductive codes captured emergent themes, while deductive codes reflected the three analytical propositions (P1–P3). This approach enabled analysis of how informal practices persisted post-demolition (P1), how new interdependencies emerged (P2), and how plural value regimes were reweighted (P3). Analytical rigour was enhanced through iterative coding cycles and constant comparison, tracing how meanings, connections, and practices were enacted across sites and participants.

While the study draws on diverse sources, it faces certain limitations. The demolition displaced workers to dispersed sites, making access uneven and sometimes dependent on snowball introductions. The research captures a particular temporal moment between 1 and 3 years after demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard, so longer-term dynamics may evolve differently. As with other qualitative case studies, findings are contextually situated and not intended for statistical generalisation, but they provide rich analytical insights transferable to debates on informality and urban governance across the Global South. Nevertheless, triangulation across actors and methods enhanced the findings. We remained attentive to the risk of overrepresenting more visible voices and worked to balance accounts across differently positioned participants.

Findings and discussion

This section is structured around a main question: how did demolition-driven displacement from a concentrated hub to dispersed micro-sites affect e-waste livelihoods, and how did workers respond? We specify livelihood impacts through specific indicators: that is, changes in access to scrap and buyers, income stability, transaction costs (time, transport, search), work conditions, health risks, workers’ bargaining position, visibility, and recognition. We then trace responses as the practical strategies through which workers sustained circulation under dispersal, including role-combination, increased mobility between sites, greater reliance on intermediaries, and recalibration between repair, resale, and rapid extraction. The three propositions (P1–P3) therefore operate as interrelated lenses on the same displacement problem; each sub-section concludes by summarising the specific displacement impacts evidenced and the responses observed.

Informality as constitutive practice (P1)

The demolition of Agbogbloshie dismantled Accra’s central hub for e-waste processing, displacing thousands of workers and disrupting long-established material flows. As a concentrated agglomeration, the site had previously reduced search and transaction costs by co-locating scrap inflows, buyers, repair and dismantling services, and brokerage in one accessible place. Its removal, therefore, reshaped livelihoods by displacement and by dismantling the agglomeration advantages that enabled rapid circulation and income-making. For livelihoods, this deconcentration translated into reduced and less predictable scrap inflows, weaker buyer access, and declining incomes across the new dispersed sites. Yet, informal practices of dismantling, collection, and repair did not disappear; rather, they re-emerged and reorganised across dispersed sites such as Zongo lane and Konkomba line, among others. Workers responded by improvising new ways to secure materials and sustain income, including combining roles, expanding household collection, and shifting between dismantling and collecting depending on what was available. Within these fragmented spaces, workers relied on improvisation and everyday resourcefulness to sustain livelihoods, revealing that informality persists as a constitutive force in Accra’s urban metabolism (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Photo of a scrap site at Old Fadama. Persistence of dismantling at Old Fadama. Despite reduced income and hazardous conditions, informal workers sustain urban metabolisms through repair, reuse, and extraction (2024).

One dismantler described the decline in income but also the persistence of practice:

I break down old electronics like fridges, computers, and TVs to extract copper and aluminium . . . At Agbogbloshie, there was a lot of scrap coming in, and we made more money. Now the income has gone down because fewer people bring their scrap to us at Zongo lane. I have to work harder just to make ends meet. (RES58GQ31, Zongo lane)

Others combined roles to secure materials:

Aside from dismantling, I also work as a collector. I go around different households in Accra, looking for unwanted electronics. Sometimes, I have to pay a small fee to the household to collect these items. It helps me find more scrap to work with when things are slow at Zongo lane. (RES59GR40, Zongo lane)

In the aftermath of demolition and dispersal, such role-combination and increased nomadicity/mobility show how livelihood-making is reorganised through everyday “search work” across the city, as workers move between households, sites, materials, and buyers to secure scrap and maintain exchange relations (Inverardi-Ferri, 2018b). What emerges is the ongoing reproduction of urban metabolisms through labour that is at once precarious, undervalued, and indispensable to the functioning of the city. In spite of this, persistence comes at a cost. Dismantlers repeatedly described unsafe conditions:

No, I don’t use any protective wear. I often get cuts from the sharp parts of the scrap I work with, but I don’t go to the hospital. I just use herbal medicine to treat the cuts and keep working. (RES57GP28, Zongo lane)

The dismantler further emphasised both health risks and declining incomes:

The biggest challenge is the income . . . Now at Zongo lane, it’s slower, and the money is less. Also, working without protective gear makes it risky. But this is the only work I know, so I have to continue, even with the cuts and injuries. (RES57GP28, Zongo lane)

Such accounts challenge deficit framings that reduce informality to a mere hazard (Dodd et al., 2023). Instead, they reveal how workers sustain circulation under hazardous conditions that state and donor-led reforms have been unable or unwilling to resolve. What persists is not informality as an external or residual economy, but a constitutive process that continually reproduces urban life itself through repair, reuse, and extraction that keep discarded materials in motion across the city. Informal recycling, repair, and resale embody rationalities of use, circulation, and collective survival that refuse reduction to simple market accumulation. These practices constitute vital forms of metabolic labour that keep materials, value, and livelihoods in circulation under conditions of exclusion.

In Accra, such practices are observed to sustain the reproduction of the city itself, powering flows of repair, resale, and extraction that formal infrastructures neither recognise nor adequately support. Yet their structural precarity and social invisibility reveal a central paradox (Finn et al., 2025; Grant and Oteng-Ababio, 2012). The same practices that enable environmental value recovery and everyday survival are persistently devalued, pathologised, or erased from policy visions. Recognising this tension emphasises that persistence is a politics of survival, where informal actors continually negotiate legitimacy, recognition, and the right to remain within the city’s contested metabolisms. This persistence, however, is deeply entangled with new dependencies, as workers increasingly rely on brokers, NGOs, and intermediaries to access markets and sustain livelihoods. The displacement reduced predictable access to scrap and buyers and heightened occupational risk, while workers responded through role-combination, mobility between sites, households, and improvised strategies to keep materials and income circulating.

Formal–informal interdependence (P2)

The demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard reconfigured formal–informal interdependence by removing the central marketplace where scrap, buyers, and services co-located. Under dispersal, access to buyers, credit, and safer practices increasingly ran through intermediaries (brokers, NGOs, donor projects), who could coordinate flows across space and thereby gained gatekeeping power. This heightened dependence shows how demolition reconfigured the channels through which livelihoods are sustained. Intermediaries became gatekeepers, mediating flows of materials, training, and capital, while simultaneously shaping who could participate and under what conditions. Such dynamics resonate with Asibey et al. (2022) and Portes et al. (1989); formal and informal economies are structurally interdependent, but often on unequal terms that reproduce vulnerability and precarity. Viewed from this perspective, demolition entrenched new asymmetries of power, with intermediaries occupying an increasingly central position.

Government officials pointed to reforms such as the Hazardous and Electronic Waste Control and Management Act (2016) as evidence of the state’s commitment to regulating e-waste. They also acknowledged the limits of infrastructural interventions, many of which remain underused or bypassed by informal workers. As one city official explained:

We installed an incinerator at Agbogbloshie . . . but because they have to pay something little to burn, they don’t even access it. So, they go and manually burn at open places, causing a lot of smoke. (RES05MM45, Accra)

The account captures the gap between policy ambition and everyday practice; a formal facility may exist, yet becomes functionally irrelevant when its costs, rules, or siting do not fit the livelihood logics and constraints of informal work. Urban scholarship cautions that infrastructure cannot be treated as a stand-alone technical fix, because the design of the city is produced through the interaction of socio-economic life with spatio-technical systems, involving both formal and informal practices (Tonkiss, 2013). In Ghana’s e-waste sector, this governance problem is visible in the limited and often reactionary integration of e-waste into urban planning, and in the difficulty of building inclusive arrangements that work for informal recyclers (Asibey et al., 2021). Even where regulatory reform has introduced training and incentive schemes to reduce burning, implementation remains constrained by the lack of end-to-end facilities and persistent challenges in registering/formalising the sector (Bimpong et al., 2023). In this governance vacuum, NGOs stepped in as key intermediaries. Several piloted initiatives aimed at safer dismantling and informal sector inclusion. One NGO worker described:

When you go to the satellite hulk, you wouldn’t find either GIZ or KfW, but the operation is funded by KfW. GIZ offers technical support, teaching the scrap dealers how to do manual dismantling, teaching them how to strip cables to get copper without burning. (RES03FM52, Accra)

The interview findings further revealed that other organisations experimented with financial mechanisms to reduce workers’ dependence on exploitative middlemen. Caritas Ghana, for example, piloted a prefinancing model that sought to stabilise the volatile cash flows of collectors and reduce their reliance on risky burning practices. As one participant explained:

They built relationships with collectors, gave them money, and brought them something, so they didn’t have to burn or dump it. They prefinance the collectors; you go and collect, and you just bring it to us, and we have already paid you for the service. (RES02CP42, Accra)

Such initiatives highlight the ambivalent position of NGOs as both facilitators and gatekeepers. On one hand, they create alternatives to hazardous recycling by providing training, safer methods, and limited forms of capital access. On the other hand, their dependence on donor funding and externally imposed project cycles makes these interventions fragile and difficult to sustain. We observe that this fragility reflects a wider tension in e-waste governance across the Global South. While NGOs can temporarily bridge structural gaps left by weak state regulation, their interventions often remain project-bound and externally driven. Comparative cases from China suggest that more durable outcomes are possible under hybrid governance models that combine regulatory oversight with sustained training and incentive structures (Chi et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2023; Zeng et al., 2017). When viewed in Accra, such hybridisation remains partial and precarious, dependent on the rhythms of donor finance rather than the creation of lasting institutional frameworks. In effect, NGOs occupy a paradoxical role, simultaneously enabling informal workers’ survival and reproducing their dependency on external actors.

Deductively, the study shows that demolition did not dissolve informal–formal entanglements; it reconfigured them. Brokers, NGOs, and donor-funded infrastructure now mediate access to markets and safer practices, but often under conditions that reproduce dependency and vulnerability. Informal actors remain indispensable to material recovery, though their participation is channelled through intermediaries whose authority derives less from everyday practice than from financial or institutional power. This uneven interdependence shows that questions of access are also questions of value: whose labour is recognised, what forms of recovery are legitimised, and which practices are marginalised. This uneven interdependence also reshaped value-making. Under dispersal, intermediated access to buyers and materials reweighted which livelihood strategies (repair/resale vs rapid extraction) remained viable.

Plural value regimes (P3)

Plural value regimes are examined here as an impact of displacement. Demolition-driven deconcentration into dispersed micro-sites altered the spatial and market conditions under which value could be realised by increasing distance to buyers, making scrap inflows less predictable, changing customer footfall for repair/resale, and intensifying reliance on brokers. These shifts reweighted the relative viability of repair/resale (use-value) versus rapid dismantling (exchange-value), shaping how actors prioritised income speed, risk, and mobility across the post-demolition landscape. Informal actors recalibrated their practices, drawing sharper distinctions between repairing devices for continued use and dismantling them for parts. These strategies reveal the coexistence of plural rationalities in the valuation of waste, where repair and second-hand goods render visible durability and reuse, while dismantling prioritises rapid extraction and resale (see Figures 5 and 6). Such plural logics show that value is actively negotiated through everyday practices of circulation, survival, and adaptation.

Figure 5.

Second-hand sales shop, Lapaz (2024).

Figure 6.

Dismantlers stripping metals (2024).

As one dismantler explained:

. . . For me, as a dismantler, the value is in the copper and aluminium I can extract. But for the repairers, the value is in the electronics that can be fixed and sold again. It’s all about who is handling the e-waste and what they want to get out of it. (RES60GS42, Zongo lane)

For dismantlers, exchange-value was paramount, stripping metals such as copper and aluminium for immediate resale, especially as margins tightened with the dispersal of buyers and materials after demolition. Repairers, by contrast, emphasised use-value, extending the lifespan of electronics through repair and refurbishment for resale in roadside markets and small shops. The contrast shows that value is actively produced through different practices and positions within the network of circulation. This aligns with Gibson-Graham’s call to read economies beyond singular, capitalocentrism logics, making visible the coexistence of multiple economic rationalities and practices within the same urban metabolism (Gibson-Graham, 2002, 2008).

Repairers further highlighted how their work sustained circulation in ways often overlooked by both policy and scholarship. They slow material flows and keep products and components in use strategies that sit at the core of circular-economy definitions centred on maintenance, repair, reuse, and refurbishing as means of minimising waste and leakage (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017). This practice positioned repairers as service providers and crucial actors sustaining everyday access to technology for low-income households. One repairer in Lapaz emphasised this role, noting that,

. . . people still prefer to repair phones and TVs if the price is good; it saves them money and keeps the device in use. (RES14OW24, Lapaz)

Their work thus demonstrates how use-value was prioritised over immediate profit, creating forms of value that aligned with collective survival strategies rather than narrow market logics. Comparable dynamics have been observed elsewhere in the Global South. In Bangalore, informal ICT bazaars such as SP Road function as primary sites where low- and middle-income customers purchase, maintain, and repair devices, sustaining affordable access and extending product lifetimes even as corporatised retail expands (Chandra et al., 2017). More broadly, work on India’s informal used-electronics economy shows that repair and resale are often more economically significant than recycling, complicating linear policy framings that treat devices as waste once discarded (Corwin, 2019). In Lagos, Nigeria, refurbishers clustered in market centres (including Ikeja Computer Village and Alaba) extend equipment lifetimes and feed second-hand markets, while associations coordinate repair activity and manage the handoff of non-repairable devices to informal collectors (Ogungbuyi et al., 2012; Schleicher et al., 2022).

In Accra, however, the point is that displacement actively reweighted them. As activities were pushed out of a concentrated hub into dispersed micro-sites, actors faced new spatial constraints, greater distance to buyers, uneven access to parts and customers, and more uncertain scrap inflows, which reshaped how quickly income could be realised and which forms of work could be sustained. Under these conditions, dismantlers’ emphasis on rapid extraction often intensified as an immediate livelihood strategy, while repairers’ use-value practices became more dependent on securing parts, customer footfall, and affordable workspaces in roadside markets and small shops. Plural value regimes, therefore, operate here as an impact of displacement: value is negotiated through survival under dispersal. In this post-demolition landscape, the viability of repair, resale, and extraction is increasingly mediated by brokers and NGO/donor infrastructures that shape access to materials, training, and market connections, further influencing whose practices are recognised and which forms of value are legitimised. The demolition-driven displacement reorganised the conditions under which value can be made, accelerating some strategies (rapid extraction) by dismantlers due to limited storage spaces and thereby reshaping livelihoods across Accra’s dispersed e-waste economy. The displacement reweighted the viability of use-value practices (repair/resale) versus exchange-value extraction by altering access to parts, customers, and buyers. Workers responded by switching between roles and strategies to navigate income speed, mobility demands, and risk.

Demolition as a political technology of (re)ordering and enclosure/dispossession

As discussed in the section on formal-informal interdependence, demolition-driven dispersal also expanded the gatekeeping role of intermediaries including brokers, NGOs, and donor projects, making access to markets and safer practices more mediated and precarious. Donor-funded initiatives such as satellite dismantling hubs and prefinancing schemes were introduced to integrate workers into safer and more regulated recycling circuits. Still, their long-term viability was undercut by reliance on external funding cycles and weak state support. The combined effect of demolition was a governance landscape marked by fragmentation. Workers were pushed to smaller, peripheral sites, where transaction costs rose, visibility declined, and access to buyers became more uncertain. What had been a dense hub of circulation was broken apart into dispersed pockets of activity. Against these odds, circulation itself did not collapse. Instead, it persisted through brokers, household e-waste collection networks, and everyday improvisation, re(pointing) to the notion that demolition did not resolve the contradictions of Accra’s waste economy; it reconfigured them into more precarious and hidden forms. The demolition crystallised this struggle.

In so doing, it exposed the contradictions of clean city interventions that simultaneously depend on and marginalise the very actors who keep waste circulating. These findings demonstrate that the demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard reconfigured informality into new, more fragmented, and precarious forms. Informal workers persisted through adaptive strategies, sustaining material flows under conditions of heightened risk while enacting plural rationalities of value that underpin Accra’s urban metabolism. Amid these conditions, their labour was increasingly mediated by brokers, NGOs, and donor infrastructures that reproduce dependency. Demolition thus functioned as a political technology of (re)ordering and an enclosure/dispossession mechanism, fragmenting circuits of circulation, displacing livelihoods, and revalorising central land (see Inverardi-Ferri, 2018a) for state-led redevelopment and contested land-use projects (Grant et al., 2024; Sarpong et al., 2025), while informal repair, collection, resale, and dismantling continued to sustain material flows across the city.

The study builds on earlier work on dispossession, demolition, informality, and e-waste governance and advances three key contributions. First, it demonstrates that informality in waste economies is constitutive of an infrastructure of urban survival that endures despite recurrent enclosure and state-led dispossession (Demaria and Schindler, 2016; Inverardi-Ferri, 2018a; McFarlane, 2012; Silver, 2017). Second, it shows that circularity in the Global South cannot be reduced to narrow exchange-value logics: practices of repair, reuse, and resale enact plural value regimes that complicate dominant policy framings of sustainability (see Amoah, 2026; Corwin, 2018; Gregson and Crang, 2019; Oteng-Ababio, 2012). Third, it argues that demolition-based interventions crystallise broader struggles over urban citizenship and governance in postcolonial cities, where legitimacy is negotiated through legal recognition and the metabolic labour of those who keep materials in circulation (see also Grant and Oteng-Ababio, 2021; Grant et al., 2024; Gupte et al., 2019; Sarpong et al., 2025, for more).

Accra’s e-waste economy after the July 2021 demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard is a lens onto contested urban futures and temporalities. It shows how informality, value, and governance are co-constituted through conflictual processes that determine who is recognised, whose environments are safeguarded, and whose work remains indispensable yet readily rendered disposable within shifting visions of the city. Accra demonstrates that demolition-led displacement is a dispossessive reordering that fractures livelihood infrastructures while preserving the city’s dependence on informal metabolic labour. The case, therefore, clarifies a broader pattern: displacement reshapes waste livelihoods by increasing transaction costs and uncertainty and by enclosing access to space and waste streams, while workers’ responses sustain circulation through dispersed, improvised, and intermediary-mediated arrangements.

Conclusion

This study examined how the demolition of Agbogbloshie reconfigured Accra’s e-waste economy through the lenses of persistence, interdependence, and plural value regimes. The analysis shows that demolition reshaped informality into more fragmented and precarious forms. This reconfiguration occurred through demolition-driven displacement and deconcentration, which dispersed work into smaller micro-sites and raised the costs of securing scrap, buyers, and safe workspaces. Dismantlers, collectors, repairers, and sellers continued to sustain Accra’s urban metabolisms through repair, reuse, and material recovery, yet under heightened insecurity and diminished access. Their persistence demonstrates that informality is a constitutive and incrementally produced infrastructure of urban life in Ghana and a produced boundary shaped through governance and the state’s selective suspension and enforcement of legality (Gillespie, 2016; McFarlane, 2012; Roy, 2005; Silver, 2014).

The findings highlight the interdependence between formal and informal systems (see Stacey et al., 2021). In the absence of Agbogbloshie’s central hub, access to markets and safer recycling practices is increasingly mediated by brokers, NGOs, and donor-funded infrastructures. These intermediaries play an ambivalent role, facilitating survival while simultaneously reproducing dependency and precarity. This reinforces the argument that e-waste governance must be situated within broader political struggles over inclusion, recognition, and rights. The study also demonstrates that discarded electronics are revalorised through coexisting rationalities of use and exchange. Repairers extend product lifecycles and create forms of circularity grounded in stewardship and collective survival, while dismantlers prioritise rapid extraction for immediate income. These plural value regimes complicate narrow policy framings of circular economy that privilege formal recycling infrastructures while overlooking the everyday practices that sustain urban livelihoods and material circulation (see Amoah, 2026).

Demolition emerges as a political technology of urban ordering. It simultaneously fragmented circuits of circulation, displaced livelihoods, and revalorised centrally located land for state-led redevelopment and contested land-use projects, while leaving intact the city’s dependence on informal labour. Waste governance, in this sense, becomes a terrain for contesting environmental risks, exclusion legitimacy, and the right to the city. What the Accra case adds to wider debates is an account of displacement/dispossession as a mechanism that reorganises the conditions of livelihood-making access, costs, risk, and recognition while workers’ adaptive responses keep waste circulating in more fragmented and precarious geographies.

The study suggests that e-waste governance in Ghana and comparable contexts must move beyond erasure and formalisation schemes that marginalise informal workers. Instead, governance should prioritise recognition and protection, building on the persistence and ingenuity of informal practices that sustain urban metabolisms. This calls for co-produced solutions that integrate workers’ knowledge into regulatory and infrastructural frameworks. Incremental and participatory approaches, such as inclusive training, context-specific health and safety guidelines, and supportive infrastructures that complement existing practices, are more likely to succeed than top-down enforcement. Equally crucial is the institutionalisation of representative platforms where informal workers can participate directly in shaping decisions alongside governments, NGOs, and international donors, ensuring that reforms reflect lived realities.

The study highlights the value of theorising waste economies through the lenses of urban metabolism, political technology, and plural value regimes. These concepts reveal how material flows are sustained and how governance and citizenship are contested through everyday practices. Future research should prioritise comparative and longitudinal studies to track how demolition, displacement, and hybrid governance unfold across different contexts, and to explore the long-term socio-economic and ecological implications of formalisation. Such work can advance a richer understanding of how waste economies mediate broader struggles over recognition, justice, and the right to the city. For broader urban sustainability debates, the future of sustainable urbanism in the Global South depends on technical efficiency in waste processing and on whose labour, knowledge, and rights are recognised as central to that process. Informal e-waste economies remind us that the pursuit of cleaner cities cannot be disentangled from the struggles for recognition, dignity, and justice among those whose invisible work sustains urban life.