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The politics of dams has been analysed from a range of disciplinary perspectivesincluding comparative politics, international relations, political economy and political ecologyand at varying levelsinternational, national and local. This paper provides a critical review of this literature, highlighting key research themes and gaps in current analysis as a means of developing a broad framework and research agenda for the FutureDAMS project. This framework emphasises the importance of integrating material and ideational drivers of dams across multiple levels of analysis. Much valuable work has been done on the international politics of dams and the micro-politics of displacement and resistance to dam construction. However, a comparatively neglected area of studyparticularly where the recent dam boom in developing countries is concernedis to link these transnational and micro-political processes to national-level decision making. To this end, the paper proposes a central concern with such national-level processes, including process tracing decision making, the distributional politics of energy, the development of bureaucratic and technical capacity to carry out dam projects and the companies contracted to build, assess and design dams.

The 1990s 'good governance agenda produced a programme of change called the standard reform model. It involves privatising utilities, the creation of markets and the unbundling of electricity-system functions into formally separate, 'independent' regulated units. Pushed by the World Bank and others, elements of this programme have been widely adopted across developing countries, including in Ghana. However, Ghana, like many countries in Africa, continues to suffer from major power crises. In the past decade, the country has lurched from unprecedented shortages to electricity overabundance, entailing spiralling debt. Donors, researchers and policymakers in Ghana have pushed further privatisation and institutional-separation reforms as a solution. However, this paper demonstrates that, thus far, attempts to create good governance through the standard reform model have been overwhelmed by Ghana's politics. Using the political settlements framework, this article demonstrates how intense competition entailing an all-consuming focus on elections overcame the formal organisational separation and the inclusion of expertise in planning and operating the electricity system. Alongside high-modernist ideological beliefs in the power of megawatts to produce industrialisation, such competition created Ghana's crises of absence and abundance. The paper consequently highlights a disconnect between a continuing focus on the good governance model and the politics driving policymaking: too great a focus on democratic institutions, formal organisations and market motivations misses the importance of political power and how it manifests within ruling coalitions to shape governmental decision making. Greater questioning is therefore needed of the standard reform model and its assumptions about how to improve electricity outcomes.

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