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Naaborle Sackeyfio. Energy Politics and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Ghana. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 193 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $119.99. Cloth. ISBN: 978-3-319-60121-2.

In Energy Politics and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Ghana, Naaborle Sackeyfio investigates why Ghana, a country with such vast access to hydropower and a rapidly growing economy, has produced such uneven electricity development. While Ghana boasts an official electrification rate of 80.5 percent, second only to South Africa on the continent, access is unreliable and irregular for many Ghanaians, particularly in the rural areas. This book offers a thorough institutional analysis of the Ghanaian political economy over the past several decades to provide an explanation for this puzzle. Ghana is frequently hailed as a tremendous success story of democratization and economic recovery, but Sackeyfio offers a more nuanced and critical account of this case. The book also furthers the theoretical debate on the politics of the rural-urban divide in one of the most important and rapidly transforming sectors of the economy, electricity provision. The original empirical analysis offers many insights for other newly democratic developing countries struggling with the simultaneous challenges to democratize, decentralize, and adopt neoliberal reforms purportedly designed to increase the efficiency of public service delivery to their constituents. Sackeyfio makes an important contribution by highlighting the deeply political calculations involved in the provision of electricity over time. The research design for the book focuses primarily on Ghana as a case study, with very brief comparative case analyses of Nigeria and South Africa. For her evidence, the author synthesizes a great many secondary sources on Ghanaian politics and energy policy in Africa. She also draws on original fieldwork over a period of twenty-four months between 2007 and 2009, when she conducted twenty-three in-depth interviews with Ghanaian politicians and civil servants involved in the energy sector as well as analyzing archival records, parliamentary debates, and contemporary newspapers. Sackeyfio also provides valuable contextual analysis of the political economy in Ghana by comparing Afrobarometer public opinion data from Ghanaians to aggregate results from other African countries.