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 ...