Paper short abstract:

In Burkina Faso, artisanal gold mining extraction, rapidly expanding during the recent years, suffers from a lack of regulation at a national level. Our paper describes dynamics and mechanisms of autonomous rule-making at work in some artisanal gold mining (orpaillage) sites.

Paper long abstract:

During the last years, artisanal gold mining activities (locally designed as 'orpaillage') have undergone an exceptional growth in Burkina Faso. The number of sites has raised from a few dozens in 2003 to 800 in 2012. Currently, about one million people are working in the sector.

The juridical framework regulating artisanal mining, based on the 2003 mining code, can hardly follow the recent evolutions and stakes of the sector. Thus, artisanal gold mining is practiced in a situation of normative vacuum where 'de facto' national law is not enforced. The public debate and the political discourse often describe orpaillage as an "anarchic sector" or a "lawless world" - whereas the activity is not illegal in itself, though often practiced in conditions of illegality.

In our paper, we argue that these conditions of illegality do not imply an absence of norms and regulation. Our analysis, drawing on ethnographic material collected in sites located in Western and South-Western Burkina Faso in 2012, focuses on the mechanisms of normative production, concerning both the internal regulation of mining sites and their integration in the social and institutional local context.

Artisanal gold sites, considered by some scholars as "semi-autonomous social fields" (T. Grätz), are governed through a normative pluralism, articulated around the cohabitation between local regimes of access to natural resources, miners' behavioral patterns, and the market. Multiple registers - commercial, mystical, institutional, landownership-related - contribute to build the precarious order regulating the sites' existence and the relationship between the actors.