Shifting the meaning of the land: problematizing the e-waste land fill in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Finding the conditions of possibility for the existence of the largest e-waste settlement in the world through a critical post colonial analysis

Abstract

The e-waste phenomenon is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century because of its impact on the Human Rights framework in environmental and social terms. This work aims to focus on those last ones through a case study of the largest e-waste landfill in the world located in Agbogbloshie, a neighbourhood in Accra, the capital of Ghana. For that, I problematized the phenomenon towards Foucault’s analysis to see the conditions of possibility that make the existence and persistence of the situation in Agbogbloshie through a postcolonial lens, showing that now the land is valuable for their emptiness, not their riches. The first part shows that the instrumentalization of the land, the patterns of consumerism, and geopolitics are conditions of possibility for the existence of the e-waste landfill. In the second part, the empirical multilevel analysis shows that there are other conditions of possibility, such as the invisibility of the e-waste situation and its workers, the internal migratory flows caused by internal conflicts, and the unwillingness to combat the bad labours and health conditions settle the perfect framework to persist the e-waste phenomenon in Ghana and not accomplish social and environmental Human Rights desirable standards.