Governing parties’ regulatory responses to informal miners

How do governing parties regulate informal miners and what explains regulatory response variations? Drawing on Ghana and leveraging original and secondary data, this paper shows that National Democratic Congress (NDC) incumbents tolerated most local miners even when President Mahama raided the informal mining sector. By contrast, while the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) Kufour and Akufo-Addo attacked local miners, Akufo-Addo largely let off Chinese miners and their local collaborators. These dissimilar regulatory responses arise because most local miners appear electorally more salient to the NDC. By contrast, NPP political entrepreneurs cultivated economic ties with Chinese miners while this governing party got hugely indebted to China and was accordingly constrained from sanctioning Chinese miners and their local collaborators. Taken together, I argue that the differential electoral relevancies of local miners to Ghana’s dominant and rival parties, economic ties between domestic political entrepreneurs and Chinese miners, and indebtedness to Beijing can make mining groups more or less salient to parties, producing targeted responses of repression and forbearance. Such instrumental responses undermine ASM formalization, beckoning international financial institutions to tie credit and loan facilities to concrete formalization indicators, which could compel governing elites to adopt non-partisan, holistic, practical, and long-term formalization approaches.