Research Focus Group Talk: Accumulation by Dispossession: The Timber Salvage Project on Ghana’s Volta Lake

This talk draws on the timber salvage project on Ghana’s Volta Lake to theorize how accumulation by dispossession is reproduced through contemporary environmental governance. It situates salvage within the lake’s longer history of state-led development and displacement following the Akosombo Dam. Framed around sustainability, safety, and economic opportunity, timber extraction reworks a shared lake space into a site of value capture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, the talk shows how state and corporate actors consolidate profit through restricted access and uneven benefit sharing. It traces global connections and foregrounds the inequalities and injustice enacted, advancing debates on green grabbing and environmental justice.

Eric Tamatey Lawer is a human geographer whose research and teaching lie at the intersection of human geography and development studies. His work is grounded in the political ecology of natural resources, examining how power, policy, and spatial transformations shape livelihoods and environments in Africa and beyond.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Ghana Studies Research Focus Group, Department of History, Environmental Studies Program, and Africa Center