Presentation short abstract

Through feminist political ecology, this paper shows how groups sanitation commoning in Accra challenge and mediate waste-driven enclosure. Collective cleaning emerges as reproductive and political labour to sustain shared urban spaces amid postcolonial austerity and inequality.

Presentation long abstract

Each week in Accra, community groups haul waterlogged textile waste from beaches, desilt drainage systems, and sweep neighbourhood gutters blocked by plastics and refuse they did not produce. This paper examines how residents practice sanitation commoning: collectivised cleaning labour that challenges the enclosure of shared urban spaces, particularly on customary and public lands. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork (2024–2025) with a coastal youth cleanup initiative, a dues-paying mothers’ organisation, and citywide environmental volunteers, I show how waste forecloses access to land where communities have maintained collective tenure or use despite intensifying pressure to privatise.

Structural adjustment’s austerity policies, expanding public–private partnerships, and accelerating transnational waste flows converge in postcolonial cities to overwhelm municipal systems and deposit trash burdens in the urban commons of neighbourhoods made marginal. Waste, products of distant commodification, materially withdraws these lands from collective use. Clean-up groups made up of those positioned precariously take on gendered, racialised, classed, and spatially uneven cleaning work in under-serviced neighbourhoods, storm drains, coastal ecosystems, and roadsides. While their commoning capacities are differentiated, each group creates routines, rules, rhythms, and asserts legitimacy. They do so as political actors navigating impossible scalar mismatches between local capacity and upstream drivers’ overproduction.

Using feminist political ecology and postcolonial intersectionality (Mollett and Faria 2013), I conceptualise sanitation commoning as grassroots governance in which residents collectivise reproductive labour to contest and mediate enclosure. This makes visible how urban commons persist through maintenance: essential, exhausting, risk-filled, and irreducible political work, and not only through definitive reclamation.