Au cours des dernières décennies, l’orpaillage artisanal a pris une place grandissante dans plusieurs pays de l’Ouest africain. Ce développement de l’orpaillage artisanal, principalement informel, suscite diverses inquiétudes quant à sa soutenabilité sociale et environnementale, même si divers travaux récents montrent qu’il est un facteur important de résilience pour de nombreux ménages ruraux. À partir de l’étude approfondie d’un site d’orpaillage au Burkina Faso, nous montrons que contrairement aux préjugés habituellement véhiculés qui font des sites d’orpaillage des espaces de non-droit, l’organisation du site repose sur une gouvernance de proximité très structurée, même si elle est principalement régie par des règles informelles. Cette gouvernance de proximité reste néanmoins fragile et comporte diverses insuffisances qui limitent la contribution de l’orpaillage artisanal au développement territorial. Son mode d’exploitation reste principalement orienté vers la rentabilité à court terme, rendant le travail dangereux, précaire et au détriment de la durabilité sociale et environnementale. Ainsi, cette gouvernance de proximité reposant à la fois sur le marché et sur les structures de pouvoir coutumières souffre de ne pas être suffisamment articulée à une politique publique structurante, accompagnant et respectant tout à la fois les mécanismes locaux de régulation.Over the past decades, artisanal mining has become increasingly important in several West African countries. Various recent studies have shown that it represents a crucial livelihood strategy for many rural households. At the same time, the development of artisanal mining, which is mostly informal, has raised concerns about its social and environmental sustainability.Based on a detailed study of a small-scale mining site in Burkina Faso, we show that, contrary to what is often assumed, artisanal mines are not places of lawlessness. The mining site’s organization depends on proximity-based governance structures even if the rules themselves are informal. However, these governing structures remain fragile and have various shortcomings, which limit the contributions that artisanal mining can make to territorial development. Operations are mostly focused on short-term profitability at the expense of social and environmental sustainability, resulting in dangerous and precarious working conditions. Consequently, these local forms of governance, which are shaped by both markets and traditional power structures, suffer from a lack of meaningful public policies that could accompany, as well as respect, the local regulatory mechanisms in place
This paper based on the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) is to discuss the local governance and labor organizations on artisanal gold mining camps in Burkina Faso; a West African country that in recent years has been increasingly exploiting its gold reserves. Field data were collected from three sites in the villages of Diosso, Siguinoguin and Zincko in accordance with the purposive sampling. One major finding gleaned from the on-site research is that forms of governance vary along a continuum from flexible (enforced by a joint powers: artisanal miners’ union, customary authorities and landowners) to rigid (enforced by landowner). Another finding is that the type of relationship between indigenous communities and miners depend on the importance of the authocthony of the artisanal miners. Indeed, they are harmonious in Zincko, where miners originate from the village, whereas they are tense in Siguinoguin, which is populated by migrants. Eventually, this paper relies on the French school of proximity to enrich the definitions given to the attributes of the physical world and the attributes of the community highlighted by Ostrom’s theory as geographical proximity fails to detail forms of relational proximity that clearly structure the way governance is organized on the mining camps.
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