Institutional coalescence and illegal small scale gold mining in Ghana

Across sub-Saharan Africa powerful sites of illegal gold mining challenge and change the workings of a range of statutory and non-statutory institutions, providing rich contexts for investigating institutional complexity. In Ghana, illegal mining contributes an increasing share of gold produced, attracting a large and diverse body of scholarship. This article provides an original and critical analysis of the emerging institutional forms and processes of social accept around the illegal extraction. In so doing it contributes to scholarship on two fronts: By exploring the interconnectedness and changeability of institutions it contributes empirically to understandings and evidence of social processes around the illegal extraction of gold in the Global south, and more broadly about contested sites of resource extraction. Second, it introduces the concept of institutional coalescence to explain and interpret the sociopolitical landscape of shifting power relations at the local level, which successfully meld and change the workings of formal state law, officialdom, and customary norms. In a broader perspective this contributes to understandings of relations between individual agency, organisational behaviour, institutions, and social context.