Looming Uncertainties of Neoliberal Techno-optimism

Abstract

This chapter engages the looming politics of uncertainty and optimism surrounding Ghana’s e-waste management and infrastructural future. Beyond a discardscape of toxic risk, Agbogbloshie can also be understood as an intervention environment in the urban margins where uncertainty and neoliberal techno-optimism thrive. The ethnographic findings explored expose how efforts to address e-waste “crisis” in Agbogbloshie are conditioned by sociotechnical renderings of pollution control, risk mitigation, and e-waste economization efforts that tend to perpetuate green developmentalist agendas, projects, and discourses of hope centered on cleaning up Agbogbloshie. As explored in this chapter, other, more radical, perspectives, ways of knowing, and methods of intervention might be needed to address Ghana’s e-waste challenges, especially environmental health interventions and e-waste policies directly informed by emerging “just transition” and decolonization debates.