ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Transnational Outages: Power, Blame, and Everyday Politics in the Pacific Northwest and Ghana

• In Event: Wires Across Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Electrical Histories

English Abstract

This paper places the Pacific Northwest’s 1948–49 hydropower crisis and Ghana’s 1983–84 Akosombo shortages into a shared transnational frame to examine how obligation, responsibility, and blame were constructed across two differently situated electrified societies. Although separated by geography and decades, these events were linked by circulating expertise, contract norms, and industrial firms, connections captured in the Samuel Moment papers, which trace the movement of U.S. hydropower thinking from the Bonneville Power Administration to Kaiser Aluminum and eventually to VALCO. Yet these ties also reveal striking contrasts. In the postwar Northwest, aluminum smelters were deeply entangled with federal power policy, bound to the state through wartime allocations and regional development promises that helped frame winter shortages as unavoidable. In Ghana, by contrast, VALCO’s declining global output and precarious position in a shifting economic order gave the company room to renegotiate and assert priority during the 1983–84 drought, even as Accra’s residents endured rolling outages and voltage collapse. These divergences raise questions about the broader terrain of electricity crisis politics: What obligations were ordinary users expected to shoulder, and by whom? How were they judged when they failed to comply? Turning to residents themselves, the paper examines how people became the objects of instruction, suspicion, and blame when the water failed. In the Pacific Northwest, households were asked to “do their part” even as public anger targeted federal officials for shielding industrial loads. In Ghana, residents were urged to accept load-shedding while rumors of corruption and preferential treatment circulated widely. By juxtaposing these crisis politics, the paper shows how outages illuminate the uneven moral and political landscapes in which ordinary people were imagined, managed, and allowed, or refused, the power to demand change.

Author

• Veronica Jacome, Temple University