The Many Waters of Bamboi, Ghana: An African Feminist Ethnography of Intersectionality and Water Governance

This thesis interrogates the universalised assumptions underpinning gender mainstreaming in global water governance frameworks – particularly SDG 6 and Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) – and demonstrates their inadequacy for explaining the complex, relational, and intersectional dynamics of water governance in Bamboi, northern Ghana. Although gender mainstreaming is framed as essential to achieving global development goals, its operationalisation obscures the multiple socio‑cultural categories that shape participation in decision‑making.
Drawing on African feminisms, feminist political ecology (FPE), and (epistemological) cultural relativism, the study adopts a decolonial feminist ethnography to examine how gender, power, cosmology, and intersectional identities interact within Bamboi’s waterscape. This study demonstrates that mainstream feminisms – often positioned as universal – insufficiently reflect the lived realities and socio‑cultural dynamics of diverse societies. This critique guided the study’s overall question: What prospects do African feminisms, FPE, and epistemological cultural relativism offer for decolonising water governance? Relatedly, four sub-questions were generated: What are the dynamics of water governance in Ghana, and how do they manifest in Bamboi? Who shapes and controls the waterscape in Bamboi? How do local and customary institutions interact with formal water governance institutions? And how are local and customary institutions gendered?
The study responded to these questions in four analytical chapters: Four to Seven. The first analytical chapter relied on primary and secondary data to explore the BVR and the making of Bamboi. The empirical analysis reveals that water governance in Bamboi is historically situated within transitions from autochthonous custodianship to colonial and contemporary state control, producing enduring political and infrastructural inequalities. The second analytical chapter revealed that everyday access, authority, and participation in water decision‑making are shaped less by gender alone and more by intersecting factors, including age, kinship, ethnicity, marital status, economic status, migration history, and spiritual legitimacy.
The third analytical chapter looked at the localised worldviews and layers of water resource stewardship in Bamboi. This chapter shows that local governance systems – anchored in cosmological worldviews, ritual stewardship, and the Water Priesthood – coexist with, resist, and sometimes complement formal state-led arrangements, generating a dynamic form of institutional (water) bricolage. The final analytical chapter employs FPE to unravel the fluid gender of the BVR and the gendered dynamics of the village’s water decisions, demonstrating that the BVR is conceptualised as a sentient, gendered being whose fluid personhood – variously feminine, masculine, or gender-neutral – shapes extraction practices, moral regulation, and stewardship responsibilities. This challenges Western gender binaries and affirms African feminist critiques of epistemic homogenisation. The chapter further documents the historical agency of Bamboi’s Women’s Committee (WoC), whose adjudicatory authority disrupts prevailing narratives of African women’s passivity and highlights the limits of quota‑based gender reforms.
Overall, the study argues that decolonising water governance requires moving beyond universalised gender templates toward context‑attuned, intersectional, and cosmologically informed approaches. It concludes that African feminisms and FPE provide analytically robust frameworks for reimagining gender, participation, and power in natural resource governance. The thesis offers methodological, theoretical, and policy insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to align water governance with lived realities across African contexts.