Infrastructural encounters and unfinished reform: rethinking development in Ghana’s power sector in the age of Global China

This article analyses Ghana’s power sector as a site of infrastructural encounter where Chinese infrastructure-led development ideologies, Ghana’s competitive clientelist political settlement, and local struggles over environmental and social justice intersect. Over the past two decades, Ghana has moved from chronic shortages to apparent structural overcapacity: installed capacity has more than doubled and independent power producers – including Chinese-owned plants – now dominate generation, yet outages persist, debt has soared and institutional fragilities remain. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork centred on ASG (a pseudonym for a Chinese energy enterprise) alongside archival and policy research, the article argues Chinese-backed infrastructure in Ghana is neither simply alternative nor merely a neocolonial repetition. Rather, it operates as an infrastructure encounter through which Chinese developmental logics are absorbed into Ghana’s unfinished reform regime, addressing some forms of shortage while redistributing debt, risk and political obligation. The Ghanaian case therefore demonstrates that infrastructure cannot be equated with development itself, but must be judged through the uneven distribution of benefits, burdens and futures across differently positioned actors.

This article was published in Global Social Challenges Journal, Online Publication Date: 27 Jul 2026, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2026D000000095