Accepted Panels

The research examines how informalization is an outcome of neoliberal state restructuring processes and at the same time enables and maintains it. Specifically, how these processes create constraining regulations and legalities which establish formalization processes that favour capitalist accumulation, while limiting access to resources and livelihood opportunities for the poor. While the poor are pushed into margins of precarity, they serve as residual labour that not only act as a cheap surplus labour but do so through an established regime of illegality and informality. The Legalist Approach and Economic Reformist Approach pin informalization as a livelihood adaptation which formal capitalist growth would soon correct and a means to circumvent bureaucratic state regulations respectively. Both these approaches fail to explain the fluidity between formalization and informalization processes. Addressing this gap, the research uses the Structural Approach to explain how neoliberal state restructuring processes of Structural Adjustment Programmes from 1980s to 2000s in Ghana led to the informalization and growth of Artisanal Mining (ASM). The research shows that these processes are mutually dependent. The formalization processes in the mining sector during this period led to displacement, marginalization, destruction of livelihoods, etc. which all fit in to create the labour and economic precarity required not only to generate cheap surplus labour for large scale mining MNCs but also to established economic and socio-cultural conditions needed for its expansion.