Description:
Oil and gas discovery in Ghana since 2007 has attracted the interest of many international and local actors, including transnational corporations. Contrary to the expected benefits of oil to broad-based development, the industry has perpetuated exclusion and poverty in communities in the neighbourhood of extractive activities in a manner that is particularly gendered. This paper employs feminist political ecology as the theoretical framing to examine the gendered disparities in the sharing of benefits and access to coping mechanism. The paper relies on data from fieldwork conducted in Ghana in 2019 to explore how the power and agency of varying stakeholders result in differentiated impacts of the hydrocarbon industry on communities. We present evidence suggesting that gendered inequalities – which are further sustained by entrenched local cultural practices and norms – determine who has access to, manages, and uses resources in a particular context. Considering that the gendered and intersectional impacts of mainstream economies remain poorly understood, this paper contributes to the existing scholarship on both the outcomes of Ghana’s hydrocarbon industry and feminist political ecology theorizing