Abstract:

For several decades the mineral wealth of West Africa’s subsoil has increasingly attracted large- and small-scale investors and miners. This has not only led to a mushrooming of new mining projects (e.g. for gold or bauxite), it also involves (future) abandoned mine sites. These are (temporarily) left to themselves when resources are depleted, or when mining is no longer considered economically or socially feasible.  In this presentation the temporality of both the mining activity itself, and of its governance in Burkina Faso and Guinea will be discussed. In doing so, mining’s rhythms, cycles and seasonality, and the very moments when mine closure becomes an issue (or not) will be addressed. Rather than constituting a simple object of concern to be fixed through “good governance” and techno-scientific interventions we propose that negotiating mine closure above all, is about anticipating the future. Therefore, we will discuss some of the uncertainties (post)mining raises, such as the responsibility for the various environmental and social impacts it creates, and (future) access to land, resources and infrastructures in contexts of (post)extraction.   

Tongnoma Zongo is a Burkinabè researcher based in Ouagadougou. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Geography from the Université Paris 1 Sorbonne Panthéon. Tongnoma Zongo has a long-standing research interest and experience in analyzing the political economy of industrial as well as artisanal- and small-scale mining in Burkina Faso.

Diana Ayeh is a Research Associate at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig (Germany). From 2016 to 2019 she was a member of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” at Leipzig University where she completed her PhD on industrial gold mining in Burkina Faso. Her current research focuses on company-state-community relations in West African and German (post)mining regions.