ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the diverse everyday governance practices in Old Fadama, Accra’s largest informal settlement and how these affect different individuals and groups in the neighbourhood. In the context of an ongoing eviction threat and a range of local urban development interventions, it illustrates the tensions between individual experiences and collective identities. Through the lens of intersectionality, the chapter traces how instances of inclusion and exclusion are often predicated on one’s position in a complex web of social relationships and one’s ability to actively form these relationships. While such an ability may depend on one’s ethnicity, class background, and gender, it is argued that both the most powerful and the most vulnerable in Old Fadama, cannot easily be identified only through a set of social identities such as gender, age, property ownership or ethnicity, but rather through their ability to access horizontal and hierarchical social networks.
