Abstract
AbstractEmerging issues from the Bui hydropower project suggest that the experiences of two earlier hydropower projects in Ghana failed to prevent challenges related to resource access and livelihoods. This article examines the nature of the challenges, their causes, why they were not avoided and the role of the Chinese builders. We conducted 43 interviews and 11 focus group discussions and analyzed qualitative data by themes using narrative analysis. Our findings show that the livelihoods of the resettled communities are, on balance, negatively impacted by the construction of the dam. While Chinese dam‐builders played a major role in financing and enabling the dam's construction, the Ghanaian governance arrangements were found to be more important in addressing the livelihood challenges.
Highlights
Large dam projects have been built in many countries in the past and a renewed interest in dambuilding has been observed in many developing countries in the last few years
4.1 The Political Ecology of the Asian Drivers and the Bui dam The framework of the Political Ecology of the Asian Drivers indicates that for the Bui dam, the costs and benefits associated with environmental change due to the dam-building are distributed unequally
The Chinese developers Sinohydro and the Ghanaian state represented by the Bui Power Authority (BPA) are reaping the financial benefits of the dam
Summary
Large dam projects have been built in many countries in the past and a renewed interest in dambuilding has been observed in many developing countries in the last few years. The twentieth century saw rapid increase in the construction of large dams most of them in the industrialized countries. By the end of that century there were over 45,000 large dams in over 140 countries (World Commission on Dams [WCD], 2000). While China has a long history of domestic dam-building, recent developments have led to Chinese overseas dam-building, in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) in Asia and Africa (Beck et al, 2012; Bosshard, 2009; International Rivers, 2012; McDonald et al, 2009). The large majority of these are large dams that have been built after 2000 (International Rivers, 2013), in a time when other dam-building nations and organisations, those from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) withdrew from the dam-building industry
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