Destroy to create: Geopolitical ecologies and gendered dispossessions of solar development in Ghana

Abstract

Widely considered a success story of climate multilateralism, imperial geopolitics of the global North enabled by state development brokerage have manifested gendered energy injustices in the Upper West region of Ghana. The recently commissioned Kaleo Lawra solar plant (35 MW) was developed by the Volta River Authority in a region beleaguered by economic and energy poverty, receiving assistance from Elecnor SA (Spain), Tractebel Engineering (Germany) and funding from Kreditanstalt Für Wiederaufbau (Germany). This project also emerges out of the G20 Compact with Africa and Germany's Marshall Plan with Africa, elaborated in accordance with policy mandates of gender equality. Drawing from mixed methods fieldwork and the literatures of energy geographies, geopolitical ecology and feminist geography, our study reveals land enclosures for the project have dispossessed marginalized women of access to vital firewood and economic trees, exacerbating their economic and energy poverty. Instead of lighting up the lives of those left in the dark, the solar plant exemplifies broader dispossessionary energy transitions in the global South that sustain colonial-capitalist production relations and Northern hegemony under the auspices of saving a world-system in crisis.