The rise of illicit Chinese small-scale gold mining in Ghana: examining local pull factors

Keywords: small-scale mining, Chinese miners, Ghana, injustice, informality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

Recent proliferation of Chinese gold seekers into Ghana’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM), an indigenous mining space reserved by law for Ghanaian nationals has received extensive media and scholarly coverage due to increasing socio-environmental damage, with competing causal factors being advanced for driving successful Chinese infiltration. However, rarely are key local stakeholders including the so-called illegal miners themselves asked explicitly why they engage in this informal mining ‘partnerships’ with the Chinese. Using qualitative case studies including in-depth interviews and drawing on data from legislation and media discourses, I find that concerns relating to inequitable mineral wealth distribution, inadequate state support for local miners, inequitable land regimes as well as corruption are local pull factors underpinning Chinese proliferation in this local mining branch. These findings to a larger extent provide a counter-narrative to the regnant discourse of criminality and use of force, the traditional approaches to illegal mining in Ghana. They suggest that illegal small-scale mining needs to be seen as a social and environmental justice issue. Thus, until policy thinking is attuned to address these distributional and procedural inequities that marginalises ASM in comparison to their large-scale mining counterparts, efforts to improve the social and environmental performance in the former will continue to be ineffective.