Paper short abstract:

Ghana’s Volta River Delta increasingly faces severe coastal erosion and flooding. Adaptation to those environmental changes materializes in two distinctive ways: state-led resettlement and ‘autonomous’ practices. This paper unravels the genesis of both by grasping them as naturecultural assemblages.

Paper long abstract:

Representing a geomorphologically highly active ecosystem, Ghana’s Volta River Delta struggles since several decades with continuously diminishing land resources. This is due to persistent coastal erosion and inundation on this narrow sand spit east of the Volta estuary that is located between the Atlantic Ocean and Keta Lagoon. My paper draws on perspectives from post-constructivist political ecology – going along with a re-appreciation of matter after the material turn – to scrutinize how adaptation to environmental changes materializes unequally at particular locations within the delta. Referring to ethnographic and other qualitative data from field visits, the paper unveils unique naturecultural assemblages that lead in one site to state-led resettlement of people into villages on reclaimed land that is protected by sea defense structures, but in another site to autonomous practices of ‘living with’ environmental changes without many hard structures. This contribution in addition uses post-colonial thinking to demonstrate the crucial role of dichotomous valuations of knowledge – with (global) ‘scientific’ knowledge surpassing (local) ‘indigenous’ or ‘practical‘ knowledge – for these adaptation outcomes. Trying to overcome the dialectic between nature and culture, adaptation takes shape as permanently reshuffling assemblages of more-than-human sociomaterial practices. These entail as multispecies agents a.o. the dammed Volta River, flows of sand, tidal and wave dynamics, but also (inter-)national climate change adaptation discourses dominated by technocratic and managerial science-based interventions, historical knowledge of the native Anlo-Ewe clans, or traditional worldviews and belief systems – altogether renegotiating the symbolic, material and spatial dimensions of land and ocean.