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Paper short abstract:

A new face of disputes amongst actors is presented by renewed interest in commercial mining in Ghana's Upper East Region. The local population is worried about their benefits and is posing concerns about their participation in decision-making and respect for their position of authority and power.

Paper long abstract:

In the Upper East Region, small-scale mining operations are widespread and have been extensively studied by scientists, particularly with regard to their effects on the local ecology, way of life, and disputes that arise from them. Large-scale commercial mining is currently developing in the area, and the infrastructure that goes along with it is dispersed over multiple settlements. Large-scale mining presents different patterns of conflict between local populations and multinational corporations than those of small-scale mining. Northern Ghana is unique with its own culture and traditional leadership structure, which has consequences for the governance of large-scale mining activities. This is in contrast to southern Ghana, where conflicts between multinational mining firms and local actors are the subject of extensive research. The study used multidisciplinary research methods and looked at the nature, causes, and effects of disputes amongst various stakeholders in the Upper East Region's gold mining industry, all while being guided by the environmental justice perspective. The research design, data collection, and analysis were conducted using a mixed research technique. The unequal distribution of mining advantages, the underappreciation of community rights, and the irregularities in the selection of stakeholders and their involvement in benefit-sharing decision-making are the emerging sources of the conflicts. Legislative and policy changes that prioritize the rights of communities and provide precise benefit-sharing plans for the local populace in Ghana's mining industry are necessary.

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Paper short abstract:

The last four decades have seen a development boom at Kenya’s northern frontier. The construction of the Isiolo International Airport exacerbated boundary conflicts as it was built on already disputed land and along the boundary of Meru and Isiolo counties.

Paper long abstract:

The last four decades have seen a development boom at Kenya’s northern frontier and the gateway to the north, especially in Isiolo County. The rapid socio-economic changes within Isiolo municipality are due to proposed large-scale development projects such as the Isiolo International Airport and the completed Isiolo‒Moyale highway, both components of the proposed Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). However, such developments create contestations and competition between the development ventures and the nomadic pastoral communities in Isiolo County. The paper shows that large-scale land use changes in Isiolo County, like the construction of the international airport affecting the nomadic pastoralists, exacerbated the contestations between the Kenyan government and the communities in Wabera ward and Ngaremara ward. With the airport having been built on already disputed land and along the boundary of Meru and Isiolo counties, this has triggered land tenure insecurity and conflicts associated with the compensation process between the two major communities—Borana and Meru ethnic groups along that boundary. The conundrum is that Isiolo land is not registered but under communal or customary tenure, leading to land speculation and grabbing. The north, which connects the highlands through the pastoral corridor in Isiolo, has been neglected since Kenya’s independence through policy initiatives that focused on economic development in geographical spaces supporting horticultural production.

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Paper short abstract:

As Chinese mining projects have soared in Africa lately, we compare local and transnational struggles against Chinese and Western mining companies. Based on protest event data from Guinea and the DRC, we find notable differences of contention, showing that the investor's country of origin matters.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a “boom” of Chinese mining (and other) investments in Africa lately. While scholars documented certain particularities of Chinese investment, they found that Chinese miners face similar contestations as those from other regions. These studies, however, have some data weaknesses that we aim to address. In a protest event analysis, we compare major mining investments from Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) regarding protest frequency, tactics, and contentious interactions. We find that, although the contention is resembling in many ways, there are notable differences of how Chinese and Western mining companies become contested. These differences are due to the respective mining stages, corporate practices, and political opportunity structures. Hence, we show that the investor’s country of origin is a relevant (yet so far neglected) factor to understand the contention against large-scale investment projects.

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Paper short abstract:

This study examines how waterfront redevelopment plans in Ga Mashie, Ghana ignored local culture, leading to the loss of heritage. It argues that culturally sensitivity must be taken into account in urban planning projects in intricate African settings to preserve the heritage of communities.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, the Jamestown fishing community in the Ga-Mashie, Accra- Ghana, has played a significant role in facilitating the development of tangible and intangible indigenous artisanal fishing heritage, commerce, and a mosaic cultural community on the Accra coast. Notably, in a bid to make way for the construction of the Chinese-funded Jamestown Harbour in 2022, the Ghanaian government demolished the old canoe-landing bay in Ga Mashie and its fishing heritage. Though the fishing practices have been relocated to an undeveloped landing bay, the local stakeholders in this artisanal fishing heritage have voiced their protests concerning their lost heritage. In this paper, we rely on feedback from interviews with community members, and key stakeholders, as well as observations to interrogate the execution of such a top-down neo-colonial project that negated community heritage in the planning and construction processes. We argue that little or no effort was made to preserve the Ga-Mashie community heritage in this Chinese-influenced harbour design. This has resulted in the creation of a space that appears to exclude local culture, denial of access to local canoes and the disruption of intangible heritage practices in the ancient bay of the Ga-Mashie fishing community. The case of these neo-colonial disruptions in the Ga-Mashie canoe bay, drums home the point that legal and culturally sensitive attentions must be given prominence in the nexus between top-down urban planning, development projects, and indigenous community heritage in culturally, economically, and politically contested environments in Africa.

Keywords: Community Heritage;Ga-Mashie, neo-colonial development projects; artisanal fishing, cultural sensitivity

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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how forest protection and rehabilitation initiatives by state and international actors and their attendant infrastructures get highly contested and involve violence in a context where forest-dependent communities claim ancestry to the place

Paper long abstract:

At COP 21 in Paris (2015), OECD member states committed to a minimum of USD 100 billion/year up to 2025 in so-called “climate finance”, to support developing countries in their efforts to combat climate change. However, state-supported climate action projects often result in unintended negative effects upon impacted communities (Magnan et al. 2016). This is captured in the climate adaptation literature as “maladaptation” – without, however, elucidating the processes and mechanisms behind. In order to gain a better understanding of the politics of forest protection and rehabilitation, this paper looks at a case of contested forest protection and rehabilitation from the perspective of socioecological transformation at resource frontiers (Rasmussen and Lund 2018). The Mau Forest in Kenya sustains several rivers such as river Mara that traverses the world-re-known Maasai Mara conservation area. The paper, which is based on six months of empirical research in Kenya in 2019, analyses the positioning of various actors towards the rehabilitation of Mau Forest: International conservation agencies, such as UNEP, who have initiated a frontier of conservation in the early 2000s; Kenyan politicians; the Kenya Forest Services (KFS), a state body, that started an afforestation project in 2011 under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and has implemented for the past years a wave of evictions affecting thousands of irregular settlers in the Mau Forest area; the different forest-adjacent communities, centrally the Ogiek who won a regional court case in 2017 affirming their indigeneity to the Mau Forest area; and international environmental and human rights NGOs.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the adaptation of corporate practices by Chinese companies and professionals in three industrial mining projects in Guinea. It argues that the controversies have spurred the seeking of authority over dispossession and the cultivation of corporate disciplinary power through CSR.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the adaptation of corporate practices by Chinese companies and professionals in the midst of contested large-scale industrial mining projects. Specifically, it examines how these professionals adapt corporate practices, particularly in the areas of land acquisition and corporate social responsibility (CSR), in response to evolving expectations, frustrations and contestation on the ground. The study approaches the adaptation of these practices by zooming in on how Chinese professionals perceive and interpret unfolding situations, and zooming out to understand how and which practices are enacted. The paper draws on three greenfield bauxite mining projects in Guinea, where Chinese professionals play an important role in their operations. It argues that despite the divergence in practice performance between different Chinese-invested projects, the controversies surrounding these investments have spurred the seeking of authority over dispossession and the cultivation of corporate disciplinary power. In doing so, the paper uncovers a range of practices through which corporate actors assert authority in the midst of conflict and negotiation to secure their foothold on the land and carry out land acquisition. At the same time, it shows how CSR is translated into a disciplinary mechanism and used to mitigate conflict, cultivate local acceptance and align business operations with the socio-political fabric of the host society. It provides insights into how Chinese companies adapt to investment controversies, thereby contributing to broader debates on transnational governance and multinational corporate practice in Africa.

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Paper short abstract:

How do Chinese firms and the Chinese state in infrastructure construction adapt to African politics? To answer this question, I process-trace the involvement of Chinese firms with the Chinese state’s coordination in a specific case, the construction of Konza Technopolis in Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

How do Chinese firms and the Chinese state in infrastructure construction adapt to African politics? To answer this question, I process-trace the involvement of Chinese firms with the Chinese state’s coordination in a specific case, the construction of Konza Technopolis in Kenya, a flagship project in Kenya Vision 2030 to establish a futuristic technology city. This investigation dialogues with burgeoning studies on African agency demonstrating Chinese infrastructure construction being caught up in the politics of African states. However, it transfers the perspective from how Chinese activities being conditioned to the adaptations of the Chinese state and firms to Kenyan politics. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with five key informants from 64 interviewees during a three-month field trip to Kenya in 2022 and secondary news on the Konza construction and operations of Chinese companies. In this paper, I disaggregate how the participations and operations of Chinese firms in the Konza construction and the Chinese state’s coordination to direct or support these firms are contingent on the politics constituted by the president and bureaucratic officials of the Kenyan government.