Paper short abstract:

This paper considers contested dynamics between the nation-state, the local experience and non-human dimensions in relation to damming the Volta River's flow in Ghana. In building a nation, how were local human-environment relations ruptured, and can things go back to nature before infrastructure?

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers contested dynamics between (representatives of) the nation-state, the local experience and non-human dimensions over and in relation to the natural flow of water in Ghana. The focus site for this nexus is the Volta River's flow as manipulated by and to the Akosombo hydro-electric dam. Constructed under President Kwame Nkrumah's leadership, this dam harnessed water's flow to power a newly independent nation-state. But at what cost? In building a nation, how were local human-environment relations ruptured, and can things go back to nature before infrastructure?

Historical human attempts to manipulate the Volta River's flow sought to control people by controlling water. However, more recent technocratic investigations explored re-instating nature through dam infrastructure by returning to pre-dam conditions of flow. Yet water, as a somewhat inherently unpredictable, even feral, material, can also undermine human assertions of control and in-turn make humans vulnerable. In water's uncooperative nature, there is space to (re)consider non-human control. As national interests impact conservation efforts to go back to nature, some, like Akwamu traditional authorities, see cultivation (of a relationship with the divine) as the ultimate conservation (of the environment). By exploring the potentials and limitations of human manipulation to conserve or to restrain water's natural flow, I seek to unpack hydro-social tensions between national and local human actors and to ponder where the ultimate (hydro-)power rests.