Policy brief
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Silverdisruptedinfrastructure.pdf
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12317
984
© 2016 urban research publications limited
— DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES: An Urban Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra
jonathan silver
Abstract Cities in the global South are often considered to be in the midst of infrastructural
breakdown, and characterized as either lacking networked services or as suffering from ongoing disruption and sometimes failure. This article focuses on the electricity network of Accra to examine the series of socio-natural processes that produce this ongoing disrup- tion and to explore the power relations of networked systems in the city. It focuses on the production of disruption through the analytical lens of urban political ecology, in order to show how such a framework can be utilized to interrogate energy geographies. The article begins by describing what happens when the lights go out and the flow of electricity is inter- rupted across Accra in order to connect a series of socio-natural processes that contribute to the ongoing network disruption and interruption. The article establishes the effect of his- torical infrastructural governance, greenhouse gas emissions, flows of international capi- tal, water and drought in northern Ghana, as well as urban sprawl, slum urbanism and rising energy demand in the city, to illustrate the fundamentally unequal and politicized socio-natures of these disrupted infrastructural processes.
Introduction The electricity network in Accra, one of West Africa’s fastest-growing metro-
politan regions, powers much of the daily lives of the city’s residents. The maze of wires, power plants, substations and pylons together form a key constituent of Accra’s infra- structure, helping to sustain, through socio-natural transformation, urban life in Ghana’s capital. Infrastructure systems are important not only, as Graham (2010: 1) suggests, as the ‘fundamental background to modern everyday life’ but as Gandy (2005:28) argues, they ‘can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems’ through the flows of essential urban services they enable. Yet, disruption of Accra’s electricity network occurs regularly, sometimes without warning, but often also in the form of announced load-shedding by the Electric Company of Ghana (ECG). The effects of infrastructure disruption vary across the city, resulting in multiple difficulties for and a plethora of responses from urban dwellers, often based on socio-economic status. Fre- quent ‘lights-out’ events present an ongoing series of disruptions that reveal important historical and contemporary urban geographies of infrastructure in the city.
This article seeks to politicize the electricity network of the city and reveal the power relations between various actors across this infrastructure system through an analysis of the processes by which disruption is produced and responded to across Accra. It argues that the ongoing interruption experienced across the city is produced by the historical development of the electricity network within and beyond Accra, which has resulted in a fragmented, splintered infrastructure that reinforces urban inequalities. It suggests that this urban energy history leaves Accra vulnerable to emergent multiscalar socio-natural processes that intersect with the electricity network. First, I consider the effects of the hydro-electric production facility constructed at Akosombo Dam and the intersection thereof with the increasing climate change in the Sahel region, resulting in
This research, part of a wider project led by Professor Harriet Bulkeley and entitled ‘Urban Transitions: Climate Change, Global Cities, and the Transformation of Socio-technical Networks’, was funded by an ESRC grant (award number RES-066-27-0002).
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significantly reduced water flow. Secondly, the article looks at the links between neo- liberal governance of urban land, growing prosperity and new urbanization patterns that have led to increased energy demand across the sprawling city. However, the focus on these two processes in this article does not suggest that these are the only aspects that shape urban electricity politics in Accra. Rather, these have been chosen to demonstrate the socio-natures of the network and identify the multiscalar actors involved within and beyond the city in disruption.
Taken together, the actions of various social interest groups involved in the his- torical production of the energy network and new forms of (socio-natural) urbanization processes help to outline the politicized nature of disruption in Accra. This politiciza- tion is further articulated by examining the responses to interruptions in the flows of electricity across the city by various social interest groups. The article argues that power relationships between the upper-middle class/elites and the urban poor are reflected and reinforced by the ability of these groups to navigate disruption through access to various forms of technology and new forms of energy-secure urbanism. Analysis of dis- ruptions helps to identify the power relations in contemporary Accra and the emergent urban energy geographies of the city. The article thus focuses on examining the series of multiscalar socio-natural processes leading to disruption, how they become entwined at the urban scale with different actors and the multiple ways in which they can be understood as politicizing Accra’s electricity network.
The article draws on studies in urban political ecology (UPE) that seek to exam ine the metabolic natures of infrastructures (Swyngedouw, 2004; Loftus, 2006; Lawhon, 2013). This field of literature argues that metabolic flows produce and shape urbaniza tion, which reflects and reproduces configurations of power and mediates socio-environmental relations. Such an approach thus provides a way for researchers to politicize these urban networks by elucidating the contested and unequal geographies of infrastructure conditions. The article assesses how infrastructural disruption can be understood through the notion of metabolism and reflects on the usefulness of this concept in seeking to better understand the infrastructural dynamics of Accra. It draws on the literature to examine how socio-natural processes of urbanization are enabled through the infrastructures of the city, in order to analyse the political and contested nature of these spaces, resource flows and material configurations, while also consid- ering the contexts through which the city is shaped. Furthermore, the article seeks to show how flows of electricity play a crucial role in mediating the present and future of cities, and assesses how UPE can contribute to critical understandings of urban energy geographies, which have been approached predominantly through the socio-technical transitions literature. Finally, the article seeks to contribute to a developing, yet still limited field of UPE studies in urban Africa, as well as to the wider community of infra- structure studies, by illustrating how an analysis of disrupted electricity infrastructure can expand our understanding of unequal production of cities across the region.
In the section that follows this one, I provide an overview of UPE to show how the field and specifically the use of the concept of metabolism can provide an important basis for politicizing urban electricity networks. The third section provides a historical analysis of the development of the electricity network within and beyond Accra to show how various periods of (urban) energy governance shape particular infrastructure geographies to leave the system vulnerable to disruption. Section four argues that the frequent interruptions in electricity flows, coupled with the historical production of the network, are the result of an over-reliance on hydro-power, as climate change affects water supply and leads to new forms of energy-intensive urbanization that are linked to changes in urban form and to the growing wealth of some sectors of society. Section five seeks to examine the emerging responses to disruption in Accra across urban-poor and upper-middle class/elite spaces of the city, arguing that these display new forms
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of fragmentation and inequality. The article concludes by reflecting on the politicized nature of the urbanization of electricity through the socio-natural processes generating disruption and the actors implicated in such dynamics.
Researching infrastructure disruption — Urban political ecology
Whilst an ever-broadening literature on urban infrastructures generates multi- ple pathways for examining urban systems, the field of UPE explicitly focuses on the socio-natural power relations that are (re)configured through infrastructural processes to identify the multiple social interest groups connected to these dynamics. As Swynge- douw (2004: 4) suggests when tracing the metabolism of water in Guayaquil, which could also apply to energy, this is ‘part and parcel of the political economy of power that gives structure and coherence to the urban fabric’. A UPE analysis via a historical materialist perspective focuses on the metabolic production of socio-natural land scapes (Smith, 1984; Castree, 2001). The notion of socio-material flows shapes much of the UPE literature that has engaged with urban infrastructure (Keil, 2003; 2005; Swyngedouw, 2004; 2006). Across the field of UPE, urbanization is understood as the transforma tion of nature through processes of capital accumulation, conceptually brought together by the notion of urban metabolism, which Swyngedouw (2006: 106) describes as ‘a series of interconnected heterogeneous (human and non-human) and dynamic but contested and contestable processes of continuous quantitative and qualitative transformations that re-arranges humans and non-humans in new and often unexpected ways’.
Socio-natural processes constitute the material (re)production of the city; they are a combination of the social relations of production and the transformation of nature, and linked to capital flows from the local to the transnational (Swyngedouw, 2004). Noth- ing lies outside of these transformations and the city is a part of these huge networks that span across the local through to the global, incorporating human and non-human actants, which include everything from capital to the wires themselves to the flows of electricity to communications on energy policy. The use of this UPE understanding of socio-natural urbanization foregrounds the importance of infrastructure systems in seek ing to examine cities and the socio-environmental relations that are embedded across these ever-shifting spaces. To approach the urban from this perspective means to recognize that infrastructure systems form a central consideration in these circulatory processes of capital accumulation and the transformation of nature as constituent ele- ments of the metabolic process, as opposed to static systems or technical ‘things’.
Much of the UPE literature has thus taken urban infrastructures as point of depar- ture in seeking to understand how capital accumulation shapes the city and the social relations that are created, reflected and reinforced (Zimmer, 2010; Lawhon et al., 2014; cf. Gandy, 2004; Heynen, 2006; Loftus, 2006). This suggests that urban infrastructures act as conduits, circuits and sites for processes of socio-natural transformation (Heynen et al., 2006). Thus, like the waterscape for Loftus (2007: 49), the urban electricity net- work in Accra ‘should be understood as a produced socio-natural entity. It is produced directly through the urbanization of nature’. From this perspective, electricity networks are not only a series of socio-natural circulations but also make possible other metabolic flows, implicating such networked systems in shaping and mediating the urban. This dual role is particularly important in considering the geographies of infrastructure and how such segregated, fragmented and fractured networks may reflect and reinforce configurations of power.
This socio-natural framing generates a range of implications for developing an analysis of infrastructure disruption. The use of electricity disruption as entry point sug- gests a need to not only trace and make visible, but, more importantly, to centre on the contested and politicized nature of infrastructure systems (Swyngedouw, 2004). It is imperative to consider how these urban flows shape the city and its networked
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sys tems and to look at the important structuring role these processes play in connect- ing, composing, fragmenting, enlarging and renewing wider processes of urbanization across the city (Kaika, 2005).
In UPE, there is a dearth of studies on energy that focus on the electricity net works of cities. While water has been central to the development of the field (Swynge douw, 2004; Loftus, 2006), work on urban energy infrastructures, particularly electricity, tend to be interrogated through studies that have mobilized a socio-technical transitions approach (Rohracher, 2009; Jaglin, 2014; Mouton, 2014). Yet electricity is arguably as important as water when it comes to shaping urbanization processes, and more attention needs to be given to a UPE analysis of these resource flows across and beyond urban regions. The application of insights developed through work on water to electricity can offer a complimentary perspective to understanding the socio-natural production of cities as a series of contested processes. Furthermore, despite much work in the global South, there are only a limited number of studies of African cities (Loftus, 2006; Njeru, 2006; Lawhon, 2013) across the literature that prompt thought about the potential of UPE to interrogate the emergent urbanization dynamics of this region and how this might contribute to urban studies of cities such as Accra.
— An urban political ecology of disruption Lack of networked provision, disrupted services and potential fragmentation
constitute an ongoing series of visible energy issues across cities, affecting service users and urban dwellers who interact with the electricity system. Infrastructural geographies of disruption, disrepair and failure are well documented generally (Graham, 2010) and particularly across the global South (Davis, 2006; Pieterse, 2008; McFarlane, 2010). A UPE analysis can mobilize such disruption to provide a window on wider multiscalar flows that, importantly, also reveal the inequalities of interruptions in circulations of urban resources (McFarlane, 2010). As Graham (2010: 3) suggests, ‘infrastructural disrup- tions provide important heuristic devices or learning opportunities through which critical social science can excavate the politics of urban life, technology or infrastructure’.
This literature on disruption generates three key areas of examination when understood through a UPE approach. First, it provides an understanding of the historical governance of infrastructure (Kooy and Bakker, 2008) and the networked conditions that shape disruption. Secondly, it traces the metabolism of disruption, revealing the multiscalar socio-natural processes generating such infrastructural episodes. Thirdly, it examines the ways in which a range of actors are responding to and addressing ongo- ing disruption, based on McFarlane and Rutherford’s (2008: 368) assertion that ‘the politics underpinning urban infrastructural transformation are rarely more evident or visible than in times of crisis or rupture’. A focus on the disruption of flows of electricity can thus be mobilized as a window in order to trace and reveal the multiscalar processes that shape uneven energyscapes and interrogate the role of different actors implicated in such inequalities.
— Methodology Ethnographic research was conducted in Accra between 2010 and 2011. A number
of different methods were used to draw together a multiscalar analysis of disrupted electricity infrastructure. This included around 25 semi-structured interviews with a wide range of actors involved in energy and urban governance, including national and local policymakers, utility-company representatives, built-environment professionals, civil-society actors and others. Whilst the questions put to each of these actors differed, the aim of the interviews was to establish a metabolic narrative revealing the extent to which individuals, organizations and relations structured the production of energy dis- rup tion and the response. Alongside the interviews, a series of workshops involving par ticipant observation were held, as well as a survey of 35 households of residents in
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the low-income networked neighbourhood of Ga Mashie, in order to understand how these dynamics dialectically unfolded in urban poor areas (see Silver, 2014). In addi- tion, a range of sites were visited, including Akosombo Dam, resettlement villages, new middle-class residential developments and the arid Sahel region. This article draws on the data collected and produced through these different methods to show the multiple scales and spaces with which an analysis of infrastructures needs to engage. It has been supported by ongoing research through the SAMSET project, an investigation into urban energy issues that began in 2014 in order to support municipalities in Ghana in shaping sustainable energy transitions.
The historical production of the network The electricity network of Accra and the wider geographies involved in flows of
energy into the city are produced through the overlapping histories of Accra’s infra- structure (Chalfin, 2010) that shape a highly localized energyscape of wider global modal ities of infrastructure governance. This history incorporates many actors, includ- ing the colonial authorities, the post-independence administrations of the Ghanaian government and the utility companies involved in electricity generation, distribution and supply, together with international institutions such as the World Bank.
— Colonial infrastructures Colonial-era infrastructure systems in Accra have much in common with those
in other urban areas across Africa. Accra emerged within the wider context of resource extraction, slavery and the necessity for an administrative apparatus to manage the socio- natural flows of humans, precious metals, cocoa, and so forth; it grew through the capi- tal it generated as a colonial node in the global imperial infrastructures of exploita tion and subjugation. Accra’s history is predicated on the transformation of these natures, via the ongoing power of the colonial authorities, into flows of capital that were partly reinvested in the growing built environment, leading to further accumulation through rents, services and tariffs. At the same time, the British colonizers ignored the infra- structure needs of non-Europeans. As Myers (2006: 294) explains about Lusaka, ‘for the most part urban authorities and European residents simply ignored develop ments in the African part of town’. Accra is no exception, and this lack of attention was jus- tified through various discourses of imperial and racial supremacy. Thus, the city is representative of the common yet differentially unfolding colonial governance prac- tices of urban areas in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, the 1878 Gold Coast Towns Police and Health Ordinance created a new legisla- tive tool for the authorities with the objective of empowering the governor to deal with new urban flows such as waste and sanitation (Hess, 2000). Through the Town Council Ordinance the colonial authorities sought to develop new urban systems through the introduction of the first energy infrastructures in the form of street lighting (paraffin lights) and the construction of an integrated water network, from 1885, which began with the building of a reservoir.
The development of these forms of resource flows continued through the estab- lishment of committees set up to develop infrastructural systems across a range of urban services, including water supply, sanitation and lighting (Dickson, 1969). By 1885 an increasingly panicked colonial authority explicitly racialized concerns about the socio- environmental conditions of the city, particularly the spread of disease, which led to the planning and creation of a new European extension called Victoriaborg. Established well away from what the colonizers considered the cramped and unsanitary urban natures of historical Accra, this new, racially segregated settlement provided the colonizers with what they considered a safe environment. The segregated neighbourhood attracted many traders, administrators and other settlers away from the perceived dangerous con ditions of historical Accra. From 1914, limited electricity was provided in Sekondi,
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and from 1922, the Public Works Department provided electricity to Accra to fulfil the needs of the imperial industries and the residencies of the colonial elite. Thus, by the early twentieth century, spatial segregation, mandated through law, established a divi- sion of not only people, but also of urban services such as electricity. Segregation began characterizing the fragmented spatial form of the city and the social relationships bet- ween different urban dwellers. This segregation was neither total, nor always enforced, indicating an incompleteness in the colonial project of urban control. As Graham and Marvin (2001: 82) note, ‘this partial completion of modern infrastructure was a very delib erate attempt to symbolize the superiority of colonial power holders over colonized civilizations’.
By 1947 the colonizers, who continued to control management of this resource flow, established the Electricity Department in the Ministry of Works and Housing as a dedicated unit to oversee the growing but segregated emergence of an electricity network in Accra and across the country. Following the second world war, as visions of independence appeared on the horizon and nationalist sentiment grew, the colo- nial authorities, fearing unrest, moved towards a paternalistic relationship with urban dwellers based on a particular type of infrastructural development in what has been termed the ‘compassionate period’ (Iliffe, 1987). While this rather problematic term fails to convey the continuation of imperial domination it serves to illustrate a changing emphasis on the part of the colonial authorities as they sought to provide essential resource flows to Accra’s population, and shows the shifting nature of colonial logics over this period of urban governance.
— Post-independence Once Ghana became independent in 1957 its first president, Kwame Nkrumah,
set about developing his own vision of Accra, which focused on creating an (Afro-) socialist and modern(ist) vision of the future (Demissie, 2007). Electricity formed a key part of this post-independence modernity. The establishment, through the Volta River Development Act in 1961 of the Volta River Authority (VRA), responsible for the planned generation of hydro-power, which was followed in 1963 by the establishment of the Electric Company of Ghana (ECG), responsible for supply and distribution, formed the key post-independence electricity utilities in Ghana. This optimistic era was a break from the logics of colonial rule yet at the same time continued to be mediated by ways of governing the city and the (fragmented) infrastructural legacies of pre- vious modes of governance. As Otiso and Owusu (2008: 150) comment on Ghana (and Kenya), ‘the provision of housing, basic services, and urban infrastructure also suffered in both countries because of their continued reliance on colonial urban planning regulations, by-laws, architectural styles, and housing standards’. Such urban geographies are partly predicated on the mobilization, by the new urban elites, of Ghana’s natural resources such as cocoa and gold, reinvested in the built environment for their own purposes rather than in comprehensive infrastructure development for the growing city.
Despite the contradictions of Nkrumah’s rule and the entwining of colonial logics in this period––logics that were exclusionary and later followed by a weak form of developmentalism––the construction of the Akosombo Dam provided an infrastructural legacy for this era. It was a vivid symbol that embodied a range of pan- African visions for the future of Ghana and the wider continent, based on modernization, the taming of nature and economic growth, while at the same time leading to a reliance on hydro-power and on the foreign capital required to undertake such a project. During Nkrumah’s rule many neighbourhoods, particularly the new elite areas in Accra, were linked to the electricity network, thus expanding access to energy services in the city. The end of the Nkrumah regime, through a military coup in 1966, brought about the decline of socialist visions for Accra and the country (Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1966)
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and to a large extent to the partial ‘infrastructural ideal’ that guided the government in the immediate post-independence period.
During the era of alternating civilian and military rule (1966 to 1992) infra- structures in Accra were mediated by an overlapping of various modalities of gov- ernance that show the energyscape to be the product of many histories both from afar and more proximate that shape the geographies of infrastructure. One constant was the continued splintering of the city. As Konadu-Agyemang (2002, quoted in Davis, 2006: 96) insists, ‘the indigenous elite took over the European posts and all the benefits attached thereto, and have not only maintained the status quo, but have, through zoning and other planning mechanisms, created several other upper-class residential areas, where income, position and clout determine access’. Such dynamics were shaped within a context of accelerating urbanization and an ever-increasing debt burden on the country as the new elites took the place of colonial officials and prioritized the flows of urban services. Thus, after the promises of the post-independence government of a modern (and infrastructural) future for Accra, attention to networked systems declined markedly despite what Chalfin (2010: 197) terms ‘the later copycat projects of Acheampong’. This failure of the government and of its under-financed utilities in this period to develop a strategic response to the electricity needs of the country, including through diversification beyond Akosombo, produced an infrastructural legacy that continues to this day. Yet the electricity infrastructure that President Nkrumah built, in addition to ad hoc government interventions and ever-increasing urbanization, has led to a continued growth in demand for electricity. For instance, between 1967 and 1976 domestic consumption doubled to around 1,300 GWh (RCEER, 2005), making visible the growing importance of this resource flow in powering this West African nation’s future.
— Neoliberal infrastructures The historical fragmentation of and under-investment in the electricity net-
work was compounded by neoliberal reforms in the 1980s. While Chalfin (2010: 195) describes Ghana as being at the ‘forefront of neoliberal reform in Africa’, the Structural Adjust ment Program (SAP), led by the World Bank and supported by the Ghanaian govern ment, left Accra increasingly vulnerable to disruption across its electricity net- work. The SAP was characterized by the creation of a pay-as-you-use model for net- worked services (Peck and Tickell, 2002), with the World Bank (1994:2) aiming to
‘manage infrastructure like a business, and not like a bureaucracy’. During this period, the withering of state investment in urban and wider energy networks echoed wider restructuring logics in what has become known across the continent as the ‘lost decade’, a time which was marked by the increasing role of the private sector in the provision and governance of services (Otiso and Owusu, 2008). The SAP and associated reforms have had significant consequences for Accra’s electricity networks since their introduc- tion in 1982. By 1993, World Bank financing of a new thermal power plant became contingent on wider comprehensive reforms of the sector, which sought to unbundle the integrated electricity network. Reforms remained based on the goal of universal provision, while tariffs were increased and privatization encouraged (Williams and Ghanadan, 2006). While these reforms were only partially implemented, revealing the ways in which neoliberal logics mutated and became entwined in local geographies (Chalfin, 2010), the 1990s continued to witness neoliberal visions of electricity-sector reform that left a number of urban spaces without power, further fragmentation of the network and the increasing cost of energy through a modality of governance that has had significant influence on Ghana’s present energyscape.
The Power Sector Reform Programme, instigated from the mid-1990s by the World Bank, entrenched neoliberal logics within the electricity sector as it sought to shift financing from government and donor sources towards creating favourable con ditions
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for private-sector involvement, as new independent power producers (IPPs) begin to enter the market. Such dynamics, which have slowly pushed Ghana towards energy- sector liberalization since the 1980s, seem to have reached a logical culmination in the government’s consideration of privatizing the ECG in early 2015 (Ghanaweb, 2015). This would be a radical transformation away from the state control that has char- acterized the sector’s history and illustrates how the political economy of electricity is being shaped by international institutions such as the World Bank. These reforms, combined with the lack of political will by successive government administrations to invest national funds in local energy sources, are leading to the unbundling of the elec- tricity sector and creating the conditions for disruption through a series of increasing vulnerabilities across the electricity network. Furthermore, ongoing under-investment in the electricity network has resulted in numerous issues, including high transmission loss, an obsolete infrastructure, and government fuel subsidies to the tune of US $900 million to the VRA, as well as poor management of the various utility companies. The precarious fiscal state of the sector is illustrated by the need for emergency debt relief for the ECG and the VRA, which totalled over US $200 million early in the millennium (World Bank, 2004), and by the failure of various energy policies, such as the Energy Sector Development Plan (1996–2000) to address power issues in the country.
The tensions inherent to the process of powering Accra mean that the main actors involved––VRA, ECG and GRIDCO––are fragmented by ongoing rivalry, disputes over payments vital to sustaining flows of electricity1 and the growing obsolescence of infrastructure systems: the ECG currently needs US $200 million a year to keep operating.2 The power play between the different utilities is most clearly visible in the public attributions of blame across the media over load-shedding events, with GRIDCO being blamed for supply shortfalls, the VRA being blamed for failing to keep up with demand and the Ghanaian government being accused of failing to invest in infrastructure. While Ghana is currently characterized as ‘a rising star and one of the recent success stories in Africa’ (Breisinger et al., 2009: 3), it is clear that the electricity network remains shaped not only by governance relations between the state and its utilities but also by the continuing influence of international institutions, notably by the World Bank (Honkaniemi, 2010).
A look at the historical governance of infrastructure in Accra reveals the fragmentation that has characterized the city, the wider energy geographies that have been shaped by different actors and the politicized nature of the electricity network. These histories have produced a particular (urban) energy geography that created conditions for disruption through the infrastructural legacies of the past. This analysis shows not only the ways in which conditions for disruption have been produced historically but also implicates a range of actors in these processes. These include the colonial administrators and the historical patterns of splintered urbanism they produced through racial segmentation, as well as the post-independence elites who maintained this fragmentation while failing to invest in comprehensive infrastructure development. The Nkrumah government, guided in part by international investment capital in Akosombo, created a reliance on hydro-power. And the post-Nkrumah administrations failed to diversify the energy-generation mix and to address the growing obsolescence of the network (within and beyond Accra). Finally, the government of Ghana, influenced by the World Bank, is following a path to liberalization that is being sustained by international neoliberal logics concerning infrastructure, which have been embedded within various levels and branches of the state.
1 The ECG owes the VRA about US $767 million, and the Ghanaian government also owes the authority around US $250 million.
2 See http://article.wn.com/view/2015/01/09/ECG_Needs_200m_Yearly_To_Meet_Demand_For_Power_Supply/ (accessed 17 May 2015).
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The socio-natural production of electricity disruption in Accra The production of the energy network, historically fragmented or ‘splintered’
and suffering ongoing under-investment through national policies that are increasingly shaped by neoliberal reforms, leaves the flows of electricity into the city vulnerable to disruption. This article contends that disruption of Accra’s network is produced through the intersections between these histories and processes of climate change and urban sprawl, implicating a range of actors in producing an unequal energyscape.
— Akosombo Dam, a reliance on hydro-power and the effects of climate change Akosombo Dam stands testament to the modernist infrastructural ideals of the
Nkrumah government, which sought to modernize and universalize Ghana’s energy infrastructure through large-scale generation of hydro-electric power (Moxon, 1969), but also to the World Bank’s logics of financing such energy mega-projects across the global South. The largest constructed lake in the world covers over 8,000 square kilometres (Fobil et al., 2003), and like many such projects, has had a series of socio- environmental impacts. These include the displacement of over 80,000 people in the Volta River basin (Gyau-Boakye, 2001), many of whom have been resettled in villages close by, where they continue to suffer from health, social and economic problems. As Ghana’s key electricity-generation facility it leaves Accra vulnerable to emerging climate-change dynamics because of its reliance on sustained water flows from the increasingly arid Sahel region.
Plans for harnessing nature through the Akosombo Dam were first conceived by the colonial authorities, but it was only in the post-independence era that the government set about seeking to construct this infrastructure mega-project. The project reflects the dominating influence of World Bank energy policy on governments in the global South (Goldman, 2005). As it had limited access to finance, the Ghanaian government needed to access international capital and technological expertise to execute the project, which entailed American-based Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Company creating, with World Bank support, the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO). Such arrangements are predicated on unequal power relationships between the newly independent state and foreign capital while also forestalling the building of other potential power-generation facilities. The conditions of the financing arrangement, to which the Ghanaian government contributed around 50%, involved that the priority of the VRA at Akosombo is to power the VALCO aluminium smelter first, and only then the population of Ghana. The financing of Akosombo Dam was thus based on the continuing practice of resource extraction by companies from the global North, reflecting the difficulty newly independent states experience in generating capital for infrastructure investment. However, following a cost crisis that culminated in 2006, VALCO became state-owned, and these inequalities therefore continue in new forms. The company has been the largest consumer of power in the country, estimated by a VRA representative at up to 40%, for which it pays 25% less than other consumers, thus making huge demands on the electricity infrastructure of the country while also representing an unequal relationship in terms of cost and access. Furthermore, its failure, like other parts of the government, to pay the VRA and GRIDCO continues to leave these two operators starved of capital for investment in the obsolete infrastructure they are using, increasing the potential for disruption and further weakening their ability to address transmission losses of up to 20%.
The demands of (foreign-based) capital, via the production of aluminium, together with the World Bank’s preference for large dam projects, have led to Akosombo binding together Ghana’s electricity production with its hydrological dynamics and with emergent climate-change processes. As a VRA worker at Akosombo Dam clearly states, the socio-natural relationship to water is vitally important for the country:
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‘In Ghana water is life, not just for the thirsty but for those who need energy in their lives’.
The hydrological zones that provide the water flows necessary for electricity production at Akosombo Dam stretch north towards the Sahel region. These zones are becoming increasingly unstable, reflecting the effects of climate change in this fragile region (Tacko Kandji et al., 2006). The parts of the Sahel region in northern Ghana and in the other West African countries that make up the Volta water basin have been experiencing a reduction in rainfall of 20% (CARE, 2007) over the past 20 years. This reduction in rainfall and increase in aridity can be partly explained by processes of deforestation and desertification that have characterized northern Ghana over the past century, which are closely linked with the energy needs of the region’s urban populations (via charcoal). Furthermore, the region from which Akosombo Dam draws much of its water resources is predicted to become increasingly drier and more arid (Gyau-Boakye, 2001), which may lead to a further drop in rainfall by up to 27% (CARE, 2007). Thus the hydrological zones that together constitute the water supply for Akosombo Dam are forecast to experience, through the effects of climate change, reductions in flow of between 30% and 40% (EPA, 2000: 6), which will lead to a reduction in hydro-power output by up to 59% (Government of Ghana, 2000), thus further compounding the already problematic energy-generation situation.
During various periods in the past, water flows had already been reduced dra- matically, giving some indication of present and future difficulties. These include the water flows to Akosombo Dam dropping to below 30,000 square cubic metres a second in 2008, lowering generation capacity by up to 60% and precipitating widespread and sustained load-shedding. As over 55% of Ghana’s electricity-generation capacity is dependent on the Akosombo Dam (RCEER, 2005), emergent climate-change processes in the Sahel threaten to further destabilize energy flows into Accra and lead to frequent infrastructural disruption. The historical over-reliance of the Ghanaian government on hydro-power production coupled with institutional problems in the VRA indicate that ongoing future disruptions of the electricity network in Accra will be closely associated with the growing climate-change crisis across the region.
While water flows for electricity production have decreased, the govern ment’s response since the early 2000s has been to rely increasingly on new circulations of gas to help the ECG navigate these energy uncertainties. Yet the ability of the VRA to sustain flows to its power plants has not been successful, with demand at least twice as high as supply even when the West African Gas Pipeline is operational (which in itself is not guaranteed). This is the result of geo-political failure by the government to co- operate with countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, coupled with the instability of supply by the West African Gas Pipeline Company, which is partly due to difficulties experienced across Nigeria. Furthermore, the government has not invested sufficiently in new energy sources (for example, renewables such as solar and wind energy) over the past two decades; therefore, the failure of the government and its utilities to diver- sify the energy sector are becoming increasingly visible as climate-change affects production at Akosombo.
Global anthropogenic changes and associated hydrological dynamics become key metabolisms through which energy disruptions are produced in Accra, linking the city to socio-natural processes across northern Ghana and the wider Sahel region, where the earliest impacts of climate change are already being experienced. Climate change is clearly implicated in the destabilization of the energy production in Ghana (Owusu et al., 2008)] and is therefore an important dynamic in energy disruption in Accra. This shows how the energyscape is produced and mediated via the urbanization of nature and is intricately linked to processes of capital accumulation that implicate a range of actors within but also beyond Ghana in network disruption. Greenhouse gas
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(GHG) emissions caused by historical industrialization in countries of the global North have started having serious global repercussions that are manifesting as climate changes in regions such as the Sahel. These climate-change effects have been exacerbated by Ghana’s energy-production investment paths. Ghana’s need for international capital in the form of VALCO, coupled with World Bank infrastructural policy, the Nkrumah gov- ernment’s decision to invest in hydro-power and the subsequent failure of the Ghanaian government and its utility companies to diversify over the past 20 years, have made the country reliant on hydro-power. This reliance has set the conditions for climate change- driven disruption.
— A sprawling city The sprawling nature of Accra, the housing systems that characterize capitali-
zation of urban land and an increasingly neoliberal urban environment are other impor- tant components of the production of disruption. Accra’s population growth rate of 4.4% contributes to its status as one of the largest cities in West Africa: its population, estimated at 3.7 million in 2006, is potentially more than 4 million at present (UN- Habitat, 2009), thus generating the significant energy-intensive urban sprawl that reveals the politicized nature of disruption.
These urbanization dynamics have emerged as a direct consequence of the SAP of the 1980s, in which the free market expanded, creating new private-sector actors in the built environment, as well as aspirations of homeownership and new forms of liquidity to invest in urban land. Such processes had a direct impact on the landscape of Accra (Yeboah, 2000; Grant, 2009) and its surrounds through the urbanization of nature in the form of peri-urban land. This sprawl has been compounded by the inability of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the government, through the Town and Country Planning Department, to undertake effective planning of Accra. The SAP’s impact on government resources to effectively respond to this sprawl is profound. The planning regime implicates not only the neoliberal reforms of the SAP, but also the role of the elite in ignoring planning laws, as they were able to use their wealth to navigate around standards and regulations. As Hanson (2010: 31) argued: ‘These days, people build wherever and whenever the please as long as the money is available’.
Contrasting housing and infrastructure systems frame this growth and sprawl, which accelerated through the late 1980s and into the 1990s through the increasing number of middle-class/elite housing systems across the city. The series of networked systems that characterized the growth and sprawl of Accra emerged from Accra’s sus- tained real estate boom and the financialization of land, based on housing construction for the emerging middle-class and elite sectors of Ghanaian society. The elite (classified by the African Development Bank, 2011, as spending over US $20 a day) who make up around 2% of Ghana’s population (or 450,000 of the country’s residents) helped to shape new consumption patterns, particularly in the capital. The wealth of the elite is increasingly visible in the building of new shopping centres and expensive cars on the city’s streets. Their new spending ability is further reflected in the range of housing being constructed, from detached housing (costing upwards of US $450,000 for a three- bedroom house in ‘desirable’ neighbourhoods such as Cantonments) to new apartment blocks such as Atlantic Tower, Airport City (with prices starting at US $250,000) and the growing residential estates that have characterized much of the newly built urban form in the city (Grant, 2009).
This Ghanaian elite is joined by an emergent middle class, which reflects the economic growth the country has experienced in recent years. The term ‘middle class’, in Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa, remains a subject of debate: some estimates suggest that it now includes around 5 million people or 20% of the country’s residents. Yet the income range of this ‘middle class’, with a daily per capita consumption of US $4 to $20, does not help explain the growth of new (suburban) housing typologies. A more
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accurate measure of the influence of growing wealth in Ghanaian society on house purchasing and on spatial form is the ‘upper-middle class’. The African Development Bank (2011) suggests that this group has a daily per capita consumption of US $10 to $20 and makes up 13% of the population. These Ghanaians have increased their spending on non-essentials such as cars, household goods, flights and, of course, houses (costing upwards of US $60,000). Together, the middle class and the upper-middle class of Ghanaian society are fuelling housing demand (Bank of Ghana, 2007) and creating a mortgage sector estimated to account for 8% of the population (Oxford Business Group, 2012), resulting in the socio-material transformation of Accra’s landscape, including its energy geographies.
Accra’s rapidly growing housing landscapes for the elite and upper-middle class increasingly consist of detached, expensive homes modelled on European and North American suburban typologies––row upon row stretching towards the horizon on former peri-urban land. An example is Trasaco Valley, a huge development with prices that begin at US $1 million. The increased visibility and availability of global capital is present in some of these new developments, with a range of financial actors, including private equity groups such as Actis and housing groups such as Hollywood International Development, investing in real-estate markets in West Africa. This suburbanization, financed through the increasingly marketized urban land market, produces a series of important changes across Accra in relation to understanding and politicizing disruption of the electricity network.
As far as energy flow and circulation in Accra is concerned, these new housing developments contribute significantly to the ongoing disruptions that are associated with new consumption patterns in these sectors of society. The main construction materials in many of these new middle-class housing systems are imported concrete or sandcrete blocks; these are used in over 84% of (formal) houses across Accra (AMA, 2006). Concrete is chosen partly because it is relatively cheap and readily available, and partly as it allows for architectural details that symbolize the emergence of an (imported) middle-class/elite aesthetic (classical columns, arches, and so forth). It has become the defining material characterizing the urban sprawl of Accra. The energy- intensive nature of concrete is significant, not only in terms of high volumes of produc- tion, but also because concrete buildings require large air-conditioning systems, owing to the thermal inefficiency of concrete, thus leading to an ever-increasing demand for electricity. As an Accra-based architect explains: ‘Most of the new middle-class hous- ing has air conditioning and this creates a growing demand on energy and the need to finance this at the household level and at the national level’ (interview with architect, Accra, November 2010).The design and materialities of these housing systems have fur- ther contributed to the urbanization of energy demand and added to the significant growth in total electricity consumption by domestic users: demand rose from 1,319 GWh in the year 2000 by 853 GWh to 2,172 GWh by 2009––a jump of around 65% (Ghana Energy Commission, 2011: 13).
The production of disruption in Accra can be extended from the climate change-driven crisis at Akosombo to implicate a series of actors shaping, profiting and participating in processes of urban sprawl. This urbanization is reshaping socio-natural dynamics of energy in the city and has placed increasing pressure on the electricity net- work. The actors implicated in this energy-intensive transformation of Accra include the government of Ghana and the World Bank via their support for the SAP, which created conditions under which marketized land has increased significantly and the capacity of planning authorities to regulate the growth of the city has been curtailed. Increasing global financial investment in real estate suggests that local and international housing developers are also implicated in the energy-intensive typologies that characterize (sub)urbanization in Accra as capital accumulation opportunities in the city accelerate urban development and marginalize sustainability concerns. Finally,
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the growing prosperity of certain socio-economic groups and the consumption choices they are making concerning housing and household goods (such as air-conditioning units), coupled with a disregard for planning processes, also contribute to increased demands on the electricity network. The fact that these actors have instigated, profited from and participated in these processes suggests that the production of disruption can be politicized, revealing new forms of fragmentation and splintered urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This politicization becomes particularly relevant when considering which parts of society in Accra suffer most from interruptions in the flows of electricity in terms of their capacity to respond to this disruption.
Splintered responses to disruption across Accra — The urban poor
When the electricity network is disrupted through the metabolisms examined above it is the urban poor who very often face the most dire consequences. An ECG employee explains such disruption in Ga Mashie as follows: ‘The lights-out affects a lot of people and business, and much revenue is lost during these episodes, interrupting people’s lives and ruining appliances and businesses’ (interview, November 2010). These effects are exacerbated by another form of disruption: the daily interruptions of flows of electricity as a result of an inability to sustain connections through the introduction of prepaid meters and the rising costs of electricity. Over the past decade the price of electricity has risen sharply, from 1.94 to 6.92 cedi per kWh (Energy Commission of Ghana, 2013) with 76% of households in the household survey suggesting that they sometimes or often experience difficulties paying for electricity. Survey results in Ga Mashie show that 94% of households experienced more than 20 disruptions to their electricity supply over the course of 2010 as a result of these two forms of disruption, namely everyday energy poverty and wider network disruptions. As one resident explained, this causes serious problems for residents who are already struggling with difficult socio-environmental conditions: ‘We depend on light for our everyday activi- ties. Without light or energy there were many problems for people trying to make money or for people to get by in the family compound’ (interview, December 2010).
Many of the urban poor who are living in neighbourhoods where electricity access remains precarious are forced to find multiple low-cost responses to ongoing dis- ruptions at household and community scales, which are often improvised or incremental (Silver, 2014). The disruption of the electricity network in neighbourhoods such as Ga Mashie therefore prompts a variety of responses. These responses range from dealing with disruption caused by prepaid meters by means of clandestinely connecting to the grid, to load-shedding responses such as storing candles, forming neighbourhood groups to protect property during network failure and purchasing shared generators for businesses. The urban poor are often forced to come together to navigate the worst effects, and low-income households thus have to opt for a series of alternatives when disruptions such as load-shedding occur. They are forced to make use of these alterna- tive strategies in order to navigate the problems caused by disruption, or suffer the sometimes unavoidable effects of darkness on important household activities, includ- ing on income generation and children’s homework––something that cannot always be avoided.
While technologies that can help navigate disruption exist, many of these remain unaffordable. For instance, a 4.5 kilovolt-ampere (kVA) diesel generator that could supply a low-income household with limited power during network disruptions, remains prohibitively expensive at 4,000 Ghanaian cedi (US $1,000). Such secondary infrastructure thus remains out of reach of many urban dwellers in Accra who are already struggling to survive. Members of the Ga Mashie community are aware of the potentials of off-grid technologies, such as solar photovoltaic systems. Over 80% of survey participants suggested that such technology would help their households
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to manage network disruption better. However, these forms of technology emerge through market mechanisms and are mainly bought by the upper-middle class/elite, the urban poor being unable to access these. As an ECG employee (interview, Decem- ber 2010) working in Ga Mashie candidly states, ‘Solar becomes [available] only for the rich but should be for the poor’. Even low-tech solutions to disruption are fraught with difficulties: the survey in Ga Mashie showed that 64% of participants have found that alternatives to electricity, such as paraffin and candles, cost more, thus placing further financial as well as psychological strain on households during disruptions. Research by Quartey (2010) supports this, showing that the urban poor lost up to 10% of their monthly income during the power crisis of 2007. The need to purchase alternative fuel, coupled with the difficulty of affording technology such as generators, has resulted in many residents in low-income neighbourhoods facing disrupted lives when electricity flows are interrupted.
Incremental responses by the urban poor to infrastructural disruptions are ongo- ing and often temporary, aimed at making small differences to the metabolic interac- tions between urban dwellers and infrastructure networks. Responses include material improvisation to improve network connections (McFarlane, 2011; Silver, 2014) and com- ing together as a community to secure urban space during disruption. Such incremental infrastructure dynamics, flows and processes encompass diverse practices that help urban dwellers bridge spaces of absence between unequal flows of capital investment in urban infrastructure and the socio-natural manifestation of such disjunctures. The urban poor, already struggling to sustain electricity connections as a result of ongoing poverty, face further difficulties in sustaining flows of electricity that are vital to their everyday economic activities in areas such as Ga Mashie. In this neighbourhood, as in other poor urban networked communities, access to emerging premium network spaces, technologies and eco-innovations remains low or non-existent. As poor urban dwellers lack the ability to generate large-scale financing for new technologies such as solar systems that would enable them to mediate the worst effects of network disruption, and as they have only limited access to capital, resources or political connections, they need to find ways to intersect interests to navigate network disruption and hope. This contrasts starkly with the options that are open to the upper-middle class and elites of Accra, who do have the ability to sustain flows of electricity through traditional generators, and are able to access emerging premium network spaces, technologies and eco-innovations.
— Upper-middle class and elite spaces When network disruption occurs, secondary infrastructures beyond the electri-
city network provide additional levels of energy security for upper-middle class and elite households. The spluttering and humming of diesel generators is a ubiquitous sound across many neighbourhoods in the city. This response to disruption, based at least partly on the very design and construction of such new housing typologies, reveals the difference in the responses available to different socio-economic groups in the city. Furthermore, while the urban poor struggle to navigate the everyday difficulties caused by disruption, Accra’s energy network is being reconfigured around new private net- work spaces that offer increased security for those able to afford such developments. These emerging housing/energy infrastructures are being produced through new exper- imental eco-homes and large master-planned potential housing developments.
A number of eco-homes being built across the city provide early premium spaces for eco-innovation, as well as emergent technologies and materialities that offer infra- structural security. Thus far these are available only in a handful of locations, often developed and owned by architects. One example is that of the Addo practice, which avoids the use of cement, rather employing technologies such as rainwater collection and solar photovoltaics to help navigate disruption and create natural cooling through
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passive design, large roof overhangs and timber screens in order to lower energy consumption. Furthermore, the use of indigenous materials, such as mud, which have been used for centuries across West Africa, exemplifies the large financial saving that can be achieved by reducing energy usage. Yet less than 10% of (formal) houses in Accra currently contain mud in outside walls, compared to over 50% in other parts of the country (AMA, 2006), particularly in the arid Sahelian north of Ghana. This also illustrates what may be considered a ‘cultural splintering’ over the past decades, which has seen urban dwellers moving away from traditional methods of climate-resilient building in the region.
Experiments in eco-innovation that articulate new Afro-centric architectural styles and are based on sustainable materials remain a niche part of development, taking place only in isolated locations across Accra rather than significantly permeating the imaginations of the city’s growing and aspirational upper-middle class and elite. Interest in these eco-houses is linked to new, imported sensibilities around sustainability and energy efficiency from international developers. Thus the increasing number of niche responses that centre on security from infrastructural disruptions in individual eco- homes are also evident in the development of ‘sustainable masterplans’ for new middle- class and elite housing. Such developments suggest a significant upscaling of housing that offers various levels of energy security across Accra. The construction of these housing systems, and the attendant premium network spaces that are being created, is mainly being driven by international developers, backed by significant capital holdings. These systems often have some level of sustainability embedded in their governance charters and offer a vision for new housing systems in Accra beyond the ubiquitous concrete suburbias that have grown across the city and have given rise to concerns over disrupted flows of essential urban services such as electricity.
Delivery of such sustainability-orientated projects is about to begin on a sig- nificant scale in Accra, as the city becomes an increasingly attractive urban space for flows and circulations of international capital, to which developments such as the mammoth US $6 billion technology park Hope City are testimony. One residential example is the aptly named Appolonia––City of Light scheme, financed by global equity provider Renaissance Group and delivered through its African land business Rendeavor Ltd. The developers have mobilized US $100 million in initial investment for master planning, land division, infrastructure systems and management framework for the Appolonia project. The project is part of a series of real-estate projects by Rendeavor Ltd. across Africa, with similar visions for a project on the outskirts of Nairobi, where construction began in 2012 but which has since been plagued by problems and delays. Such developments show the increasing convergence of global flows of capital in fast-growing African cities and emerging concerns about urban sustainability and, importantly, infrastructural security. Appolonia, planned as a new city on the outskirts of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, is expected to be constructed over the next 10 years on an 800-hectare site, with ambitions to eventually accommodate over 85,000 residents. It is described by its developers as promoting ‘world-class environmental integrity and sustainability’ with the potential to transform housing development across Accra. The construction of such upper-middle class/elite homes in Accra is partly based on providing infrastructural security for potential customers and may therefore counter the fast-growing energy demands of the energy-intensive housing systems that are currently being constructed. The new developments may thus help Accra lower demand on the electricity system; yet they also reveal the unequal technological response to disruption in the city.
New urbanization processes generate a number of potential subsequent geo- graphies across Accra’s electricity system. Clearly, the potential exists for a reduction in energy demand that may affect the frequency of disruption and failure. At the same time, the increasing number of upper-middle class/elite households opting out of large
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networked infrastructures will lead to a reduction in revenue for the ECG, which will make it more difficult for the ECG to sustain its lifeline tariff and will have an adverse effect on the already weak investment in upgrading and maintenance, potentially resulting in increased disruption.3 Furthermore, these dynamics will reinforce the historically splintered infrastructure, giving it a new contemporary form and illustrating the politicized nature of responses to disruption between those who are able to afford access to premium networked spaces and those who are unable to afford it.
Those who are able to afford technologies such as generators and photovoltaic panels, or new energy-secure and sustainable housing developments, are able to access different types of premium network spaces that offer increased (and unequal) capacity to navigate disruption. Such spaces are being shaped beyond the city’s under- invested, fragmenting electricity network, creating additional layers of household energy security for upper-middle class/elite households. These inequalities in terms of security from disruption show the further unbundling and reconfiguring of Accra’s splintered infrastructure, which is being shaped through access to diversifying circuits and flows of electricity based on socio-economic status and the ability to pay for premium network spaces.
Conclusion This article has elucidated an urban political ecology (UPE) of disruption through
an understanding of the historical production of Accra’s electricity network, in particular two emergent socio-natural processes that are generating increased interruptions and responses across the city to such infrastructural episodes. The production of disruption provides a useful heuristic device to understand the infrastructural geographies of the city and is important because it reveals the political nature of the electricity network. While UPE studies have tended to focus on water infrastructures, this article shows how such an analysis can be mobilized to understand urban energy geographies, thus extending such studies into new infrastructural systems and resource flows. It shows that an understanding of the electricity network in Accra is intrinsically linked to the urbanization of nature, through the interactions of water dynamics, GHG emissions, housing production, and so on. Most importantly, it is infused with power relations. As Kaika (2005: 75) commented, this focus on metabolism illustrates the socio-natural production of electricity networks: ‘Exploring the uncanny materiality of “the other” in the form of the invisible metabolized nature or technology networks points at the social construction of the separation between the natural and the social, the private and the public. It reveals the individual, the social, and the natural, as a socio-natural continuum that disrupts the boundaries between the above socially constructed cate- gories’. These insights thus open up new ways to interrogate urban electricity infra- structures, which is perhaps the most important consideration to emerge from this work. They suggest that future analysis needs to engage with the multiscalar and socio- natural metabolisms that mediate electricity infrastructures both within the city and through the dialectical shaping of wider landscapes through processes of urbanization (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015).
In addition, this article has contributed to the growing field of UPE across African cities, providing an illustration of how socio-natural processes are part and parcel of the urbanization process of this region. This is important, as it suggests that debates about the geographies of infrastructure, social relations, associated politics and investment flows in African cities need to move beyond the city scale, technical understandings of networked systems and normative accounts that dominate understandings, policy and debates in countries such as Ghana. Such an understanding of the urban means engaging with the multiscalar and socio-natural processes that mediate infrastructures
3 The lifeline tariff offers a flat rate to customers consuming 50 kWh per month or less.
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both within the city and through the dialectical shaping of wider landscapes; this can contribute to ongoing critical studies of African urbanisms. The need to respond to the current technocentric, managerial accounts that dominate literatures on infrastructures in African cities is increasingly recognized (Lawhon et al., 2013), and this study provides one way to ‘rethink and recast the pragmatic considerations of development policy on the back of a more textured appreciation of the urban and its probable and possible futures’ (Pieterse, 2010: 208).
Furthermore, an examination of disruptions to the electricity network provides important insights into how scholars politicize Accra’s urban environment. It argues that a series of multiscalar actors are involved in producing interruptions across the city that reflect, reinforce and reshape power relations between different social interest groups. First, it implicates the various actors involved in the historic shaping of the city’s electricity network, which can be characterized as splintered (Graham and Marvin, 2001) and vulnerable to emergent metabolic processes of climate change and urban sprawl. The role of the colonizers is, of course, pertinent, as they shaped an infrastructural geography across the electricity network that still contains ongoing legacies of colonial-era governance that need to be accounted for. Yet, colonial histories obviously have been reshaped since independence: the World Bank’s preference for investing in the hydro-power complex at Akosombo, the need to provide energy for international capital in the form of VALCO, often at preferential rates, and the failure of the government from Nkrumah onwards to diversify electricity generation all account for the conditions that have led to the network becoming vulnerable to climate change and energy-intensive sprawl. Increased liberalization of the electricity sector has compounded these problems, particularly as the Ghanaian government has failed to invest sufficiently in an increasingly obsolete infrastructure. The actions of utilities such as the ECG and the VRA further reinforce the vulnerability of the network: lack of payment, ongoing disputes and debt suggest that the utilities have failed to plan properly for Ghana’s future energy needs. A plethora of actors have historically been involved in the production of energy circulation, in this case electricity, suggesting that an understanding of the organizations and institutions that are implicated in the current configuration of infrastructure involves analysis that pays attention both to the overlapping, globally shaped histories of governing Accra and to the localized arrangements through which these unfold (Chalfin, 2010).
Secondly, closely related to this historically produced vulnerability is the increasing effect of climate change on energy generation and thus on disruption. This shows that climate change is political: it politicizes urban infrastructures at a series of scales. The instigation of anthropogenic processes by the industrializing countries of the global North, the Ghanaian government’s reliance on hydro-power, VALCO’s power needs, World Bank policy and the failure of the VRA to adequately respond to these imperatives all reveal the multiple implicit and explicit decisions both locally and further afield that have contributed to disruption. Furthermore, the actions of these actors intersect with historical investment decisions concerning hydro-power that have brought about a metabolism of disruptions centred on Akosombo but stretching across the Sahel region and into the earth’s atmosphere. As climate change becomes increasingly apparent, such findings call for further work to understand how anthropogenic processes intersect with the historical production of infrastructure, how they reconfigure socio-natural relations and what the political, policy and social-justice implications of these dynamics are.
Thirdly, the analysis implicates a range of contemporary actors in the urbani- zation of Accra who have contributed to the increase in energy demand through explicit and implicit consumption choices, policy orientations and profit motives. Historical and contemporary processes of capital accumulation through the growth of the built
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environment have generated profit for a series of actors, from the colonial authorities through to the postcolonial elites, including the country’s housing developers and increasingly also comprising international housing financiers. Furthermore, the impact of the World Bank in shaping this structural adjustment programme is clearly visible across the city. Partly supported by the government of Ghana, the programme has severely curtailed the capacity of planning authorities at both the urban and national scale. The failure of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the Town and Country Plan- ning Department to respond to urban sprawl, either because they lacked the capacity or failed to hold elites and developers to account, further reinforces these energy- inten sive urbanization trends. Such conditions allow the elites and housing developers to increasingly construct upper-middle class housing systems that increase energy demand across the city significantly and intersect with the consumption choices of the growing upper- middle class in terms of housing design and energy usage. This analysis draws attention to how studies of urban infrastructure need to recognize the ongoing reconfiguration of spatial and social inequalities across conditions of splintered urban- ism (Graham and Marvin, 2001) resulting from contemporary forms of urbanization and the social interests involved in such geographies.
Finally, responses to the ongoing disruptions and failures across the energy network reveal the inequalities between the capacities of the urban poor and the upper- middle class/elite to navigate interruptions. The consequences for the poor are severe, as a community leader in Ga Mashie comments: ‘Economically it will stop community development’. The effects are often amplified by the fact that the poor are unable to access costly technologies and are forced to resort to incremental and improvised strategies in order to try and limit the costs caused by the frequent interruptions to their everyday lives. The upper-middle class/elite, by contrast, have access to technology such as generators. Furthermore, new forms of (splintered) urbanism that incorporate sustainable technologies and various forms of energy security are emerging. These dynamics and processes may instigate a further process of fragmentation and networked inequality, potentially creating archipelagos of energy security for the upper-middle class/elites. While the wider urban energy network will continue to operate, Coutard and Rutherford (2011:107) point out that ‘the development of “small- scale”, “decentralized”, “dispersed”, or otherwise “alternative” technologies clearly problematizes the inherently networked nature of the urban, on the environmental, spatial, social and political levels that technical infrastructure always implies and impinges on’. This post-networked urbanism, while currently minimal and dispersed, is likely to increase its presence across Accra as the growing upper-middle class/elite seek ways to insulate themselves from wider infrastructural disruption. Such networked geographies call for further interrogation of these new forms of urbanization predicated on energy security concerns (Hodson and Marvin, 2009) and for further investigation of how these are reshaping urban inequalities, and the incremental responses of low- income households and communities to (unequal) conditions (Silver, 2014).
This article has shown the significance of seeking to understand the socio- natures that shape Accra’s electricity network through a focus on disruption. Impor- tantly, it has sought to politicize such dynamics by examining the actors implicated in these emerging urbanization and infrastructural geographies. Its findings raise questions about the power relations that are distributed across and associated with networked systems, which call for a reconfiguration of the electricity network, emerging forms of urbanization and the agency of different social interest groups to produce a more just energyscape across Accra.
Jonathan Silver, Department of Geography, Durham University Science Site, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom, [email protected]
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