Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Ghana’s latest efforts to build an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry and, particularly, how these are being complicated by emerging uncertainties, inequities and contestations associated with the energy transition agenda both nationally and transnationally

Paper long abstract:

A growing body of research has started exploring how countries are positioning and ‘greening’ their heavy industries in response to the ‘global energy transition.’ However, to date, the vast majority of this research has examined the interventions of, and challenges faced by, relatively high-income countries with established heavy industries, rather than lower-income countries with fledgling ones and aspirations to continue expanding them. Our paper responds to this lacuna by examining the case of Ghana, a country that– in large part because of the conditions of late(late) development– has long struggled to realise its founding president’s vision of developing an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry but is now facing even greater challenges due to the global energy transition and surging demand for ‘green’ manufactured products. Transnationally, Ghana is confronting a deeply unequal and unpredictable global political economy, one in which it and other countries in the Global South are struggling to access the latest ‘green’ technologies or devise long-term strategies for powering their industries because of constant shifts and reversals in the energy transition taxonomies of key export markets and financial institutions in the Global North. Nationally, meanwhile, tentative government plans to feed parts of Ghana’s aluminium industry with relatively ‘green’ hydropower (also Ghana’s cheapest source of electricity) are provoking pushback because of the trade-offs involved, while other contestations are emerging around moves to expand bauxite mining into forest reserves. Collectively, these issues may frustrate Ghana’s ambitions once more, even though an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry could generate significant economic benefits for the country.