Local institutions and artisanal mining: Governance forms in the goldfields of Madagascar

This paper contributes to recent debates on the socio-political dynamics of ASM in rural communities meant better inform formalization efforts by centering question local-level governance. While popular accounts and policy discussions targeting sector often portray mining sites as contexts unregulated chaos, I join counter such narratives through an excavation varying institutional forms which govern extractive activities. To do so, draw evidence from gold areas across island Madagascar elaborate range arrangements shaping life work diggings. identify key elements community mineral governance regimes, offer a flexible typology for purposes identification analysis. These include extended pre-existing customary institutions; syncretic institutions (or adapted, external impositions); bricolage novel, locally-generated constructions). then concise, ethnographically-informed three sites—Sandrazaha, Antanimbary, Betsiaka—to illustrate ways these exist, operate, overlap, well they emerge take hold. Recognizing interrogating is, argue, critical generating fuller understanding sector's functioning embeddedness societies world over, improving interventions that fail systematically examine before seeking transform it.