Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at everyday labour practices of mining executives in Burkina Faso and their discursive strategies in drawing lines between themselves and 'the locals outside'. Education functions as a key category in setting up differences between potential workforces for (un)skilled labour.

Paper long abstract:

Large-scale mineral extraction on the African continent has long been seen as largely disconnected from national and local labour markets (cf. Ferguson 2005/2006; Appel 2012). The recent trend and political goal of integrating foreign mining endeavors into local economies figures as both an aim and a result out of the agenda of the last 'ethical turn' (Dolan/Rajak 2016, 3) in corporate capitalism. Similar to other African countries, Burkina Faso recently witnessed a rise of local content policies discussed and applied by foreign large-scale mining firms and the national government. However, while local content as a concept officially aims at diminishing the multiple disruptions between the 'global' and the 'local' in the extractive industries, it does not automatically lead to an eradication of hierarchies, nor to inclusive labour markets. To illustrate this argument on a micro-level, this paper looks at everyday labour practices of mining executives in southern Burkina Faso and their discursive strategies in drawing lines between themselves and 'the locals outside'. Education or better a lack of it represents a key category in setting up differences between non-locals and locals and their potential recruitment for skilled or unskilled labour. In doing so, mining executives ascribe different forms of spatial belonging and temporality to oneself and others. Yet the resulting categories imply very tangible consequences in terms of (non-)access to particular forms of labour. The paper highlights the ambivalent dynamics of local content agendas in connecting and disconnecting local business and expatriate (knowledge) economies.