West African Waterworlds: Narratives of Absence versus Narratives of Excess

In the 2000s northern Ghana and northern Burkina Faso experienced extreme flooding as a result of unusually heavy rains attributed to climate change. As a consequence evidence of destruction from flooding was dramatically present during our fieldwork in the area in 2009-10. Nevertheless, we kept encountering a narrative of desertification with little mention of floods and saw that the narrative influenced both local everyday life agendas and global policy agendas. We here discuss how and why water’s absence has remained the dominant environmental narrative, eclipsing the increasingly relevant problem of water’s excess. We suggest that the emerging climate change narrative might prove powerful enough to change the desertification narrative’s dominance.