Description
Transboundary water governance in West Africa is a complex arena in which local, regional, and global actors struggle for discursive hegemony over managing the precious resource. However, contemporary hydropolitics literature often overlooks the origins and genealogies of the ideas, discourses, and practices in circulation. Focusing on the Volta basin, this paper interrogates the ways Anglo-European experts shaped the construction of this hydrographic unit from the colonial period through the postcolony. Grounded in historical institutionalism, the paper blends expertise and science and technology studies with critical decolonial theory. Data collection features original archival and documentary research across the UK, France, and Ghana, combined with interviews with a diverse range of experts on the Volta. Through critical discourse analysis, the paper unpacks the complex array of actors, coalitions, agendas, and narratives that legitimised, institutionalised discourses that became hegemonic over the decades. We hypothesise that a dual process shaped later governmentalities in the Volta basin throughout the 20th century. First, the subjectivation of actors across generations, ranging from imperial explorers to colonial administrators, and from cooperation advisors to development consultants, who became “experts” by appropriating the inherited knowledge-power of their predecessors. Second, the objectification of the basin rendered this a legible, measurable, governable, and exploitable hydro-spatial economic unit. By tracing the multigenerational lineages of experts and their concurrent construction of the basin, this paper will reveal how these networks (re)produced, circulated, and translated colonial ideologies, epistemic hierarchies, and imperial logics into technocratic water management frameworks that perpetuate asymmetrical power relations in African waterscapes.
