Persistent Shadows of Legal Pluralism: Digital Land Governance and Cyclical Land Administration Setbacks in Ghana

Despite ongoing institutional reforms to mitigate longstanding bottlenecks in natural resource governance, persistent legal pluralism complicates and constrains such efforts in Africa. This is evident in post-independence countries like Ghana, where customary institutions have evolved to bear state-like qualities and thus co-govern land-based resources with the state. The shift towards digitised land governance systems within contexts where strong customary land institutions exist introduces complexities or refracts fundamental governance issues. These issues include ambiguous land boundaries and conflicting or competing narratives of land ownership rights, family settlement histories, and dependencies on customary institutions for local citizenship recognition. This paper explores land disputes, rival narratives and competing claims by community members to protect their interests against land dispossession and relocation by a mining company in the Ahafo-North and Prestea Municipalities of Ghana. These municipalities are characterised by intensified gold mining and a history of extractive activities and face deep-rooted competition among stakeholders advocating for sustainable land resource governance. The study reveals that land digitalisation is not a “silver bullet” solution to perennial land governance challenges unless tensions between the co-existing formal and customary institutions are adequately addressed.