Understanding the discourse of the “Community” in community development in Ghana’s mining industry

Community development (CD) is widely accepted within the mining industry as a major part of the industry’s sustainability strategy. Consequently, over the last two decades, community development has gained root in the mining industry, providing a framework for mining company interactions with local communities around the world. Dedicated CD departments stocked with development specialists have since become a common fixture of mining company structures at all levels. This development has naturally triggered an avalanche of scholarly interest in the mining industry CD practices and outcomes. However, current literature on the subject has rarely explored mining companies’ discourse on the “community” as is applied within the context of CD practice. Based on Wiering and Arts' three-level analysis of discourse, the paper interrogates the concept of the “community” as is understood and applied within the Ghanaian mining industry, at the ontological, normative, and strategic levels. The paper shows that mining companies hold three simultaneous ontological conceptualizations of the community: communities as victims; as enclaves of poverty; and as owners of social license, each differing slightly in its underlying logic to CD. Of all three conceptualizations, the owners of social license view, which is driven by an instrumentalist logic, dominates CD practice, allowing mining companies to approach CD largely as a risk management tool. At the normative level, companies have advocated “value creation” (for communities). At the strategic level, company–community partnerships have been proposed as the preferred method of accomplishing CD. These views of the community and their accompanying industry practices are dissected and policy proposals suggested.