Conflicts Between Fish and Oil in the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana: Thinking Beyond the Resource Curse

Efforts to enhance economic growth through natural resource development in Ghana have led to the enclosure and commodification of the country’s coastal zone in the western region. This commodification of maritime space has appropriated fish and fishing places from small-scale fisheries, which now have to compete with the oil and gas industries for use of the coastal zone. In the resource curse literature on sub-Saharan Africa, researchers have explained resource conflicts as emanating from the abundance of resources in countries without good governance. This can rightly be applied to the conflicts between the fish and oil activities in the Western region of Ghana. However, researchers have critiqued the resource curse theory, arguing that it focuses on internal socio-economic and political factors while ignoring the historical geography of colonialism and global capitalism. As an alternative explanation for fisheries and oil conflicts in Ghana, this paper suggests that the conflict can best be understood through the historical geography of resource grabs tied to enclave development and commodity frontiers in the country. The paper uses the toponymy of maps of the Gulf of Guinea from 1500 to 2015 to trace historical resource grabs driven by European colonialism and to put into context the transformation of the coast from a fishing place and national fishing basket into an oil and gas space. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .