Abstract
This paper based on the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) is to discuss the local governance and labor organizations on artisanal gold mining camps in Burkina Faso; a West African country that in recent years has been increasingly exploiting its gold reserves. Field data were collected from three sites in the villages of Diosso, Siguinoguin and Zincko in accordance with the purposive sampling. One major finding gleaned from the on-site research is that forms of governance vary along a continuum from flexible (enforced by a joint powers: artisanal miners’ union, customary authorities and landowners) to rigid (enforced by landowner). Another finding is that the type of relationship between indigenous communities and miners depend on the importance of the authocthony of the artisanal miners. Indeed, they are harmonious in Zincko, where miners originate from the village, whereas they are tense in Siguinoguin, which is populated by migrants. Eventually, this paper relies on the French school of proximity to enrich the definitions given to the attributes of the physical world and the attributes of the community highlighted by Ostrom’s theory as geographical proximity fails to detail forms of relational proximity that clearly structure the way governance is organized on the mining camps.
Highlights
Artisanal mining has become a growing phenomenon in many developing countries [1,2,3], which raises the question of why the communities that spring up around mine sites often manage to work together over time
Women often find pit digging and the world of gold mining to be difficult, indicating that the activity is gender-oriented as addressed by the only female pit owner we have found while visiting the study areas and explained in Kitula [13]
The aim of this paper is to discuss the different modes of governance that occur on non-industrial gold mining sites of Burkina Faso
Summary
Artisanal mining has become a growing phenomenon in many developing countries [1,2,3], which raises the question of why the communities that spring up around mine sites often manage to work together over time. It is tempting to view small-scale mines as disorganized sites prone to collapse. The number of people throughout the world involved in artisanal mining has increased dramatically from an estimated six million in 1992 to 13 million in 1996 [4]. In 2009, it was estimated that more than 100 million people worldwide depend directly or indirectly on artisanal and small-scale mining for their livelihoods [5]. We consider that there is an actual mining community. Adding to that is the fact that a mining “community can range in size from a city which could be serving as a base for distant ‘fly in fly out’ operations to a village (which relies extensively on local mining” [10] (p. 192)
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