Muriel Cote
| Muriel is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, looking at the mobilisation of decentralised institutions through ethnographic case studies of changing land governance, and the impacts on the emergence of local democracy in rural Burkina Faso. She is also currently affiliated to a research programme (Reponsive Forest Governance Initiative) that assesses the democracy effects of decentralised forest governance across different African countries. She has recently published papers in Ecologie et Politique and in Progress in Human Geography. Email:M.Cote@sms.ed.ac.uk |
Research on Land-grabbing:
What's in a right? A case of land governance at the intersection of neo-liberalisation and decentralisation in the gold mining sector of Burkina Faso
In Burkina Faso the industrial gold mining sector has rapidly become a motor of the national economy, with gold passing from 3r to first export product in the last three years. This is a result of recent global financial market crises that have resulted in an increase in the value of gold, but also a consequence of a couple of decades of neoliberal state reforms that have facilitated foreign investments, including the acquisition of mining rights. Artisanal miners on the other hand, operate on the basis of locally embedded customary land ownership and use rights, which current decentralisation reforms aim to formally recognise. What this means is that local decentralised institutions face the difficult mission to accompany foreign investors in their activities, while at the same time trying to secure their constituents' livelihoods that large land deals currently put in jeopardy. The paper argues that an analysis of the contradictions that emerge at the intersection of neoliberal and decentralisation state reforms pertaining land governance in the gold mining sector, help to identify the institutional and power relations that contribute to the recognition of certain rights and to the neglect of others. This paper draws on current doctoral research in the northern region of Burkina Faso where a recent research permit for a transnational mining company and long-standing artisanal mining activities overlap in a village. Mapping out stakeholders' claims, how these are justified and the institutions mobilised (or not) to back up their claims sheds light on the constraints to the realisation of state sovereignty, local rights and authority that are fuelling current dynamics of 'land grabbing'.
