Living in the Shadow of the Large Dams: Long Term Responses of Downstream and Lakeside Communities of Ghana's Volta Project

Living in the Shadow of the Large Dams: Long Term Responses of Downstream and Lakeside Communities of Ghana's Volta Project. By Dzodzi Tsikata. Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 440. $102.00/euro79 paper.

The core of Dzodzi Tsikata' s study of the long term responses of downstream and lakeside communities to Ghana's Volta Dam (a massive hydroelectric dam built in the 1960s) is a finely honed socioeconomic analysis of local people's coping strategies in a situation of post-dam environmental degradation. Tsikata's careful fieldwork contributes important evidence on the losses to downstream communities when dams change the ecological balance between a river and its floodplain. One of her more dramatic findings is that basic livelihoods (men's once lucrative creek fishing and women's highly profitable clam digging) were literally wiped out.

Theoretically, the book relates primarily to the burgeoning literature on livelihoods. Its detailed focus on how forced changes in livelihoods both draw upon and modify pre-existing social relations of production in both the established downstream communities and the new migrant-created lakeside...