Globally, the IMF and World Bank-led liberalization of the mining industry in the 1980s and 1990s was a significant milestone with billions of dollars invested across the developing world. Importantly, it promised jobs, revenue and community development to affected countries. In many countries including Ghana, however, there remain concerns about how to bring real development to local communities after more than three decades of establishing the Minerals Development Fund (MDF) in 1993 and its parliamentary approval in 2016. Continued concerns about revenue management include political control of the allocation process, corruption and the lack of transparency in the use of funds. Given these issues, this article proposes participatory budgeting as the framework/solution to address these challenges and ensure that local communities maximize the benefits from mining since they are the most affected by the negative impacts of mining such as environmental pollution and displacement of people. Participatory budgeting is a process that allows local communities to identify and allocate resources to address their unique needs publicly. It has been successfully used in many cities globally including Porto Alegre, New York, Dundee, etc. It involves several stages (timelines) including forming a proposal collation team and the guiding rules, collating proposed projects by community members, organizing public voting on projects and funding (implementation) and evaluation. Its strengths over the current mechanism contained in the Minerals Development Fund (MDF) Act of 2016 include grassroots participation and consensus building leading to implementing community-chosen projects, enhancing transparency and accountability and promoting community acceptance of mining activities.

In this paper, I provide insights into the extractivist pressures on the southern Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and what this means for ecological communities, rural livelihoods, and collective social action. Stretching from southern Costa Rica into western Panamá is the Cordillera de Talamanca Mountain range, a global biodiversity hotspot that has been stewarded for over 12,000 years by generations of Indigenous communities. Forty years ago, this region was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Transboundary Protected Area to be managed by both states as a symbol of peace and friendship. La Amistad International Park and its surrounding Biosphere Reserves, Indigenous territories, Buffer and Transition Zones have not only garnered the attention of conservationists, researchers, and tourists, but of developers. Primary factors affecting the Park include encroachment, agricultural plantations and cattle ranching, timber extraction, the Trans-Panamá Pipeline, and hydroelectric dams. Guided by the wisdom and objectives of Ngäbe leaders, with whom I have established relationships, this research seeks to co-create and mobilize knowledge in support of Indigenous food sovereignty, rural economies, and governance that enable biocultural diversity and sustainable development. A theoretical framework grounded in political ecology, agrarian political economy, and cultural ecology will be operationalized through a mixed-methods approach combining primary and secondary data from official government and corporate reports, legal and policy frameworks, NGO and conservation project documents, academic and newspaper publications. Ethnographic research and community-based digital storytelling will be carried out through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and oral histories with key counterparts and community members from areas near extractive industries as well as those promoting and practicing forms of food sovereignty. Applying the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, Ngäbe counterparts will create their own stories that express the convergences and contradictions for sustainable development and food sovereignty in and around UNESCO La Amistad Biosphere Reserve.

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) represents an important source of livelihood across the Global South. ASM is usually outside of the formal economy and associated with various challenges. Lately, these challenges have been mainly attributed to its status as an informal activity. Various countries have implemented national formalization policies aiming to alleviate the issues in this sector. In this paper, I use the case study of the Peruvian (in)formalization process to argue that the formalization of ASM is a frontier moment. This is supported by qualitative field research conducted in 2023 in informal copper ASM operations in Peru, with a following the thing methodology, from inside the mines to port of export. Borrowing from political ecology’s understanding of frontiers, I illustrate the challenges and implications of this frontier moment, as ASM producers are both formal and illegal at the same time, working under an artificial formalization status. Under this status, ASM producers experience the challenges involved with operating in the informal market, but their products enter the global supply of “critical” minerals in legal form. I conclude with a discussion over the implications that this frontier moment can have in terms of resource governance and global development.