Beyond Enclosure: Strategies of Exploitation and Accumulation in Madagascar’s Mineral Commons

Abstract

This paper uses a political ecology approach to examine strategies of exploitation and accumulation in Madagascar’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector. Goldfields on the island are often managed and maintained as mineral commons, where miners and mining communities engage in varying forms of collective self-governance. While many gold-bearing landscapes have historically been and continue to be targeted by state-corporate extractors, the socially-embedded and historically-sedimented natures of artisanal gold extraction often render physical processes of enclosure and exclusion by external concession-holders largely impracticable, for both socio-cultural and techno-geological reasons. Faced with such conditions, corporate representatives, government officials, and a range of political-economic elites have been forced to look beyond physical enclosure as they navigate local politics in pursuit of gold and attendant riches. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence gathered in the gold-mining region of Betsiaka in Madagascar’s far north, I argue that state-corporate actors and other political-economic elites have manipulated the forms and leadership structures of governance institutions; dispute mediation processes; sponsorship arrangements; share distribution systems; narratives and relations of ownership and belonging; and socio-cultural expectations around extraversion in order to exploit miners’ labor and accumulate gold-based wealth. These strategies help to facilitate a sort of "vampiric governance," allowing elites to extract value amidst geological uncertainty and socio-political unruliness. At the same time, local miners have resisted these attempts, further (re)producing the goldfields as a contested landscape of both oppressive and autonomous possibilities.