Resisting resilience: re-conceptualising “counter-conduct” to environmental (in)justices in Northern Ghana

This article examines how donor-funded resilience interventions in the Global South obscure local knowledge and cultural experiences, posing a subtle resistance to learning from local communities. Drawing from fieldwork in Northern Ghana, and using Scott’s and Foucault’s analytics of resistance, I analyse how farmers resist domination and empower themselves in climate-resilience discourses. I re-conceptualise subtle and overt actions of resistance as what Foucault calls “counter-conduct”: a way through which subjects resist governmental power that undermines their local knowledge and ontologies of “being”. This offers nuanced insights into understanding environmental injustices at the micro-levels, particularly how they homogenise worlds and subjugate farmers in resilience policy design and implementation. I argue that the lack of meaningful community participation in resilience policy, induced by power asymmetries and unequal knowledge production, (re)constructs inequitable distribution of resilience “benefits” that nurtures resistance for justice. I call for decolonial alternatives that do not produce and reproduce injustices.