The production of uneven access to land and water in peri-urban spaces: de facto privatisation in greater Accra

ABSTRACT

Peri-urban spaces are frontiers of privatisation where inequalities in access to land and water evolve. In this article, we analyse a particular mode of land and water privatisation in peri-urban spaces of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), Ghana. We illustrate that in the domain of land, traditional authorities tend to act as private owners rather than custodians of customary land, while in the domain of water, multiple private water providers have emerged next to the official water utility. A combined reading and analysis of these processes as forms of de facto privatisation contributes to understanding the similarities in the control over and access to land and water in peri-urban spaces. We show that in the de facto privatised control context of the peri-urban GAMA, access gained to land and water has to be actively maintained. Both gaining and maintaining access exhibit socio-economic inequalities and this is particularly so in the case of maintaining access. The article is a call for a better connection between land and water studies in order to deepen understanding of the processes at play in peri-urban spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Customary land tenure
• commodification
• resource access
• Political Ecology
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the WaterPower team, David Simon and Jennifer Gerend, for the constructive criticism they provided for previous versions of this article, and Christel Weable for helping to produce the map of this article. We are, moreover, grateful for the support of Kofi Owusu and John Akubia in the field and for the invaluable insights of the residents of Oduman and Pantang on which this article is based. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the conference “Accessing Water in Africa: emerging paradigms between risks, resiliences and new solidarities” in Paris in July 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 “Stool” refers to the wooden seat that is the traditional symbol of chieftainship in southern Ghana and thus in the GAMA, whereas “skin” is the counterpart in northern Ghana (Gough and Yankson 2000). Even though only stools and skins and not land owning families are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution of Ghana (Government of Ghana 1996a), so called family land accounts for a significant part of customary land in GAMA (expert interview, Office of the Administrator of Stool Lands, 22 October 2015). Family land is vested in the family lineages of the first arrival and occupier of a particular land. An elected family head governs the community and the land (Sackeyfio-Lenoch 2014, 42). In the GAMA the chieftaincy-system of the Ga-Dangme ethnic group applies because they are regarded as the indigenous people of Accra (Owusu 2008). In this system the chief is called “Mantse”.

2 This strand of UPE is linked to the concept of Environmental Justice (EJ). Evolving out of an activist movement primarily concerned with the racial and unjust distribution of environmental “bads” in the US (Bullard 1994; for an overview see Schweitzer and Stephenson 2007), studies on EJ increasingly also focus on injustice in relations to “goods” such as water (Mehta et al. 2014; Joy et al. 2014). In this article, however, we focus on inequalities in access (i.e. distribution) and do not engage in question of (in)justices (for a discussion of the difference between an analysis of inequalities and injustices see Bartels 2016).

3 Sometimes reference is made not to UPE but to PE (see for instance Bakker 2003a; Loftus 2009).

4 There is no common, unambiguous definition of the peri-urban. Peri-urban has been conceptualised as a place, concept or process (Narain and Nischal 2007); peri-urban in relation to the urban fringe, as analysed here, is commonly understood as a dynamic, heterogeneous space or interface with boundaries constantly shifting as (peri-) urbanisation proceeds. See, for instance, Allen (2003), Iaquinta and Drescher (2000), Simon, McGregor, and Nsiah-Gyabaah (2004) and McGregor, Simon, and Thompson (2006) for conceptual debates of the term “peri-urban”.

5 Water tankers and domestic vendors mainly serve the domestic water needs of (peri-) urban dwellers, whereby drinking water is mostly served through sachet water. Sachet water is 500 ml of water that is sealed in plastic bags and locally referred to as “pure water” (Stoler et al. 2012).

6 Interview, an elder of the 2nd royal family, Oduman, 30 August 2015.

7 Interview, a family head of the customary group, Oduman, 01 September 2015 but see also Ubink (2008b).

8 The Constitution of the Republic of Ghana (Government of Ghana 1996a) forbids a freehold interest in stool land, i.e. the outright ownership of land, and thus apart from the allodial interest only leasehold interests can be held and registered in Ghana. Leaseholders can however grant further sub-leases (Ministry of Lands and Forestry 2003; Gough and Yankson 2000).

9 Interviews, leader of the youth group, Oduman, 12 October 2015; member of the youth group, Oduman, 25 October 2015.

10 Interview, chief of Oduman, 03 September 2015.

11 Interview, rival of the chief/acting chief of Oduman, 24 October 2015.

12 Interview, a family head of the customary group, Oduman, 01 September 2015.

13 Guided tour in Oduman with a member of the youth group, 25 October 2015.

14 Household interview 4, Oduman, 26 August 2015.

15 Household interview 27, Pantang, 27 September 2015.

16 Household interview 6, Oduman, 03 September 2015.

17 Ibid.

18 Social relationships help in accessing land, for instance when companies and public institutions purchase several plots of land and resell them to their employees (Household interview 18, Pantang, 05 October 2015).

19 Household interviews 5 and 3, Oduman, 01 September 2015, 03 September 2015.

20 Household interviews 3 and 23, Oduman, 26 August 2015, 03 October 2015.

21 Household interview 3, Oduman, 26 August 2015.

22 Household interview 2, Oduman, 26.08.2015.

23 Household interview 5, Oduman, 01 September 2015.

24 Household interview 17, Oduman, 20 September 2015.

25 Household interview 15, Oduman, 20 September 2015.

26 Photo diary, Oduman, 2. Family, November 2015.

27 Household interview 23, Oduman, 03 October 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This study forms part of “WaterPower”, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) under the reference number [01 LN 1316 A].