Electronic Waste and the Environmental Justice Challenge in Agbogbloshie

This article explores the promise and politics of environmental justice (EJ) in Agbogbloshie, a scrap market in Accra, Ghana, that has become a popularized zone of electronic waste (e-waste) advocacy and science. In the absence of direct engagement with EJ theory in much of the e-waste research on Agbogbloshie, the article probes how and to what extent the “environmental justice framework” fits in this postcolonial and toxic urban space. In particular, we examine and problematize the conventional EJ framing—developed countries dumping waste on vulnerable communities in the global south—that underwrites the research and advocacy work on the e-waste problem in Agbogbloshie. In doing so, we contend that an important dimension of the EJ challenge at Agbogbloshie is that conceptions of injustice and thus interventions are geared toward amending the visible aspect of harm from e-waste processing without considering the broader postcolonial terrain of plural injustices and violence producing the toxic urban landscape of Agbogbloshie in the first place. Consequently, as Ghana explores a sustainable e-waste policy, we argue for engagements with what we term a “situated e-waste justice”; a contextualized EJ frame that recognizes the differences and histories implicated in producing a landscape of violence and toxicity as evidenced and experienced in Agbogbloshie.