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Household water provides the entry point for this ethnography and study of institutional change. The book discusses the political economy of poverty and presents the polyphone discourse on water and the environment. It outlines water history and water rights from the 1970s onwards, and analyzes social dynamics. It offers a critical voice in the debate on climate change by arguing that local and global perceptions are not necessarily coherent.
How businesses can and are acting to redress social and environmental issues is a question of growing academic interest. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, this insightful Research Agenda evaluates the current state of the art of sustainability and business and assesses key challenges for the field.
With a focus on the institutional set-up and the political environment as central to understanding and rectifying the poor impact of mining on Ghana's economic development, this paper highlights the vulnerabilities in mining sector governance along the industry value chain. The authors explain why it has been difficult to implement policies that would have improved social welfare. They find that incentive problems in institutions directly or peripherally involved in mining governance are a major factor, as are an excessively centralized policy-making process, a powerful executive president, strong party loyalty, a system of political patronage, lack of transparency, and weak institutional capacity at the political and regulatory levels. The paper argues that the net impact of mining on economic development is likely to be enhanced with appropriate reforms in governance. Most importantly, there should be a greater awareness of incentive problems at the political level and their possible implications for sector performance and the economy at large. The set of checks and balances, as stipulated by the Constitution, have to be reinforced. Furthermore, capacity building at different levels and institutions is needed and should be combined with efforts to enhance incentives for institutional performance.
Access to water and sanitation remains a critical challenge in various countries in Africa. The crisis remains the crisis of governance rather than the physical and economic scarcity. In most countries, water is realized as a human right and subsidies are provided for the indigent households. The tricky issue in rural areas remains an issue of access that is often linked to willingness and ability to pay for the installation and daily consumption. The Handbook of Research on Resource Management and the Struggle for Water Sustainability in Africa presents practical examples of integrated water resources management (IWRM) implementation in African countries. It further addresses the contemporary issues of alternative energy as part of climate change mitigation and utilizes case studies to examine how communities adapt to climate change. Covering topics such as climate justice, ecological governance, and political ecology, this major reference work is a dynamic resource for government officials, sociologists, climate scientists, activists, students and educators of higher education, academicians, and researchers in the fields of social sciences, government, developmental studies, international relations, and political science.
This paper uses a political ecology approach to examine the institutional drivers of watershed depletion and contamination in the Offinso North District, Ashanti region of Ghana. Perennial streams supply water to 77% of the largely rural population who lack access to piped water or boreholes. Political ecology provides a framework for identifying hierarchical social relations that govern resource use and environmental degradation (Robbins 2003). Timber firms, chainsaw operators and agricultural activities have destroyed vegetative cover around watersheds. As a consequence, small rivers have begun to dry up. Moreover, the widespread use of agro-chemicals has contaminated the water. Land is owned communally in the district. Earlier research on deforestation in rural Ghana linked indiscriminate tree cutting to loss of communal land control and traditional, sustainable use of forest resources. Land control changes in turn are tied to conflicting interests among agents and forces such as export-led development and the increasing commercialization of agriculture (Dei 1992). This paper links declining access to water to these larger institutional drivers of environmental change with interviews, surveys and GIS analysis of land cover change collected during an international university-community collaboration to support local development objectives arising from the District Medium-Term Development Plan.
This paper offers a political economy explanation to the question of why over 100 years of mineral resource extraction in Ghana has failed to translate into broad-based development. It does so through the lens of political settlements, which draws attention to how relations of power and ideas shape elite commitment to allocating mineral resources towards long-term development goals. The analysis draws attention to how clientelist political pressures engendered by Ghana's highly competitive electoral system have historically underpinned the diversion of mineral revenues towards shorter-term goals of maintaining the stability of ruling coalitions. In particular, all ruling coalitions have allocated significant shares of mineral rents to chiefs not necessarily for the socio-economic development of their communities, but mainly because political elites want to avoid provoking resistance from a group in society that brokers land and votes in rural areas. These findings challenge recent suggestions concerning the centrality of inclusive political settlements for the effective management of mineral rents. As the analyses reveal, broad-based elite inclusion can also carry the danger of undermining the effective management of rents for long-term development if mineral rents are deployed with the aim of 'buying-off' elites who can potentially undermine the stability of ruling coalitions. Under such circumstances, inclusive political settlements may at best result in unproductive peace, as substantial mineral resources are shared for consumption rather than development.