Contribution short abstract

As energy poverty worsens across Africa, and demand for charcoal grows, concerns about how to sustainably manage forests are re-emergent. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Upper West Ghana, I use a feminist political ecology framing to center the felt experience.

Contribution long abstract

As energy poverty worsens across Africa, and demand for charcoal grows, concerns about how to sustainably manage forests are re-emergent. This chapter engages with extant political ecology take on this resource struggle, but pivots into the stories yet told. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Upper West Region, a key site of charcoal production in Ghana, I use a feminist political ecology framing to center the felt experience. Instead of staying in the overstory of the politics shaping the problem or detailing the story of a commodity, I reveal an understory of how the people left to meet the demand for a commodity think, act, and feel as subjects to an environmental governance operating at both a global and local scale. This approach elevates the realities of a rural life in relationship to forested spaces and illuminates the dynamism therein. Charcoal does not produce any one feeling or affective state. These complex subjectivities, in turn, point to deeper structural wounds that need to guide conversations on how to shape conservation measures fostering forest and human wellbeing.