Ghana’s Militarized War on Illegal Gold Mining Is Failing, Researchers Say

Ghana’s gold fields have become the stage for one of the most persistent and polarizing governance battles in West Africa. For more than a decade, successive governments have deployed soldiers, police officers and task forces to eject miners accused of operating illegally, burning equipment, sealing shafts and, in some cases, using lethal force. Yet the practice known locally as galamsey — an anglicized contraction of the phrase “gather them and sell” — has not disappeared. It has adapted, relocated and, in many regions, intensified. A new viewpoint article published in SN Social Sciences by Ata Senior Yeboah and Charles Gyan of McGill University’s School of Social Work, together with Murat Okumah of the University of Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute, argues that this cycle of crackdown and resurgence is not a policy accident but the predictable outcome of a governance model built on militarization rather than inclusion.

The authors draw on field-based insights from Ghana’s mining regions and on the wider scholarly literature to make a deceptively simple claim: the state has been fighting the wrong enemy. By framing artisanal and small-scale mining, or ASM, primarily as “illegal” activity and a national security threat, policymakers have reduced a complex, heavily informal livelihood system to a law-and-order problem. That framing, the researchers contend, licenses command-and-control responses — military raids, evictions and bans — that treat millions of coping strategies as criminality rather than as economic behavior responding to poverty, land dispossession and limited alternatives. The result is a policy posture that fails to address the underlying drivers of informality while deepening social tensions in mining communities.

The technical literature on Ghanaian ASM helps explain why the militarized approach has underperformed. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Ghana employs large numbers of people directly and supports hundreds of thousands more in ancillary trades, from equipment dealers and gold buyers to food vendors and transport operators. Studies cited in the article document how informal mining absorbs labor displaced from agriculture, particularly in districts such as Asutifi North, where mining has shrunk farmland and altered livelihoods. When soldiers destroy a mining camp, they do not remove the economic pressures that created it. Miners typically return, often farther from oversight, using more rudimentary and more polluting techniques, and sometimes paying new layers of informal protection. Research on military interventions in informal gold mining communities in Ghana has documented cases in which militarized enforcement itself expanded environmental destruction, as displaced operators moved into forest reserves and river headwaters that had previously been less disturbed.

The environmental stakes are considerable. Informal ASM in Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa is associated with land degradation, deforestation, sedimentation of rivers, and mercury contamination of water and food chains. Peer-reviewed case studies from Kenyasi in the Ahafo Region and elsewhere document measurable impacts on water quality, soil and human health in mining-adjacent communities. The authors do not minimize these harms. Their argument is instead about mechanism: crackdowns have consistently failed to deliver environmental improvements because they do not change the incentive structure that makes informal, low-technology mining the rational choice for people without licenses, capital, credit or secure tenure. Formalization, in their reading, is not a concession to illegality but the precondition for environmental stewardship, since only actors who feel secure enough to invest in a site have reason to mine it responsibly.

Central to the article’s proposal is the model of Community Mining Cooperatives, or CMCs. The idea, which builds on cooperative-based formalization schemes discussed across sub-Saharan Africa, is to organize miners at the community level into legally recognized entities that can hold designated concessions, access technical training and financing, and submit to participatory regulation. Cooperatives, the authors argue, offer a governance vehicle that matches the social reality of ASM: work is organized through dense local networks, kinship obligations and shared equipment, rather than through the corporate structures that formal licensing regimes typically assume. Evidence from mining cooperatives in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere shows both the promise and the pitfalls of this route — cooperatives can anchor formality, but they can also be captured by local elites if the design is careless. The article’s contribution is to insist that cooperative formalization must be embedded in a broader package of economic inclusion, environmental safeguards and community participation to avoid reproducing exclusion under a new name.

The authors are careful to situate their argument within Ghana’s long and uneven history of ASM policy. Four decades of support programs for small-scale miners across sub-Saharan Africa have, according to critical reviews, largely failed to deliver meaningful formalization, and Ghana’s own licensing regime has been criticized for producing legal pluralism in which customary land tenure and statutory mining law collide. Grassroots studies of formalization in Ghana report that many miners view the licensing process as slow, expensive and geographically inaccessible, while credit constraints documented across the sub-Saharan sector make it difficult for small operators to purchase the equipment and safety measures that compliance demands. A license on paper, in other words, does not automatically produce formal behavior on the ground. The article cites emerging research asking whether formalization facilitates environmental improvements at all, concluding that formal status without enabling conditions — finance, extension services, secure land access and fair gold markets — risks becoming a heavy burden rather than a pathway, a lesson also drawn from the Colombian experience.

The resource-curse literature provides a further analytical frame. Scholars since Richard Auty’s foundational work have documented how mineral dependence can distort institutions and development trajectories, and Ghana’s experience with gold illustrates the tension between large-scale industrial mining and the artisanal sector. Research on changes in large-scale gold mining in Ghana shows how the expansion of industrial concessions has pushed artisanal miners onto smaller and more contested plots, sometimes through agreements with the very companies that hold the surface rights. The viewpoint article’s authors and related recent studies suggest that constructive partnerships between large-scale mining companies and small-scale miners — rather than mutual eviction — could relieve pressure on land and create supervised spaces for ASM. This is one of the practical levers, alongside cooperatives, through which an inclusive governance approach could be operationalized.

What makes the argument timely is the accumulating evidence that militarization is not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive. Recent analyses of Ghana’s repeated bans on small-scale mining document the socio-economic toll on local communities that depend on the sector, and political science work published in 2026 explains the failure of militarization as a product of cyclical enforcement that ignores structural drivers. Studies of “militarized conservationism” — the fusion of environmental rhetoric with armed enforcement — show how such campaigns can criminalize poverty while leaving the political economy of illegal gold intact, including the role of politically connected financiers and foreign-operated operations that formal enforcement has struggled to reach. The authors of the new article argue that the framing of ASM as a security threat has allowed the state to substitute visible force for the harder work of institutional reform, and that this substitution has costs: it erodes trust between mining communities and the state, breeds new forms of illegality, and leaves environmental degradation largely untreated.

The alternative the researchers propose is deliberately multi-dimensional. Economic inclusion means providing the credit, training and market access that allow miners to operate legally and safely. Environmental stewardship means embedding mercury-reduction techniques, land rehabilitation obligations and water-protection measures within cooperative governance, so that compliance becomes feasible rather than punitive. Participatory regulation means bringing chiefs, district assemblies, miners, farmers and women’s groups — whose north-south migration into ASM has been documented as a significant livelihood strategy — into the design and monitoring of rules, rather than imposing them from Accra. The language of the article’s conclusion invokes the sustainable-development imperative of leaving no one behind, and the authors frame formalization as a question of justice as much as efficiency: the people who dig Ghana’s gold are, in their account, marginal citizens whose exclusion from both formal mining and formal employment produced the informality the state now condemns.

The research carries implications well beyond Ghana. An estimated millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa depend on artisanal mining, and governments from Liberia to Sierra Leone to Peru have experimented with formalization strategies of varying ambition, some explicitly linked to environmental peacebuilding. The Ghanaian case, precisely because it has seen some of the region’s most sustained military interventions, functions as a natural experiment in what enforcement-led governance can and cannot achieve. The evidence assembled by Yeboah, Gyan and Okumah suggests the answer is: very little, and often at significant human and ecological cost. Whether Ghana’s policymakers will trade the political visibility of soldiers in the gold fields for the slower, less photogenic work of cooperative institution-building remains an open question. What the new article makes clear is that the technical ingredients of a workable alternative — community cooperatives, enabling finance, participatory oversight and land-access reform — are already on the table. What is missing is the political reframing that treats artisanal miners as partners in stewardship rather than enemies of the state.

Subject of Research: Governance and formalization of artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Ghana

Article Title: Looking beyond militarization: rethinking artisanal mining governance in Ghana

Article References: Yeboah, A. S., Gyan, C., & Okumah, M. (2026). Looking beyond militarization: rethinking artisanal mining governance in Ghana. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01713-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01713-0

Keywords: artisanal and small-scale mining, Ghana, galamsey, militarization, formalization, community mining cooperatives, informality, gold mining, environmental governance, resource curse, West Africa, mining policy