Drivers of environmental permitting delays: implication for costs and rapid mining landscape changes in Ghana

Delays and disputes in environmental permitting cause significant land-use and land-cover changes and economic costs, yet remain underexplored in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) discourse. This study assessed the drivers and impacts of permitting delays in mining using Landsat imagery (2017–2021), supervised classification, and structured interviews with 300 stakeholders across six mining communities, involving two mines in Ghana. The interrelationships among influencing factors were analyzed using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) model. Results revealed a substantial decline in cropland from 59% to 24%, with increases in built-up/speculative structures (327.44%) and vegetation/plantations (50.98%) over the extended permitting period. These land-use changes were induced responses to marked speculative development under the prolonged permitting condition. The delay extended the project's gold pour timeline from 2021 to 2025, increasing compensation and financial burdens. PLS analysis showed that digital technology issues in stakeholder and project information management were the foremost driver of permitting delay ( p = 0.000), followed by internal EIA issues ( p = 0.001), poor stakeholder engagement ( p = 0.004), negative local perceptions ( p = 0.006), land ownership and access issues ( p = 0.018), bureaucracy ( p = 0.092), and baseline data issues ( p = 0.742). Speculative development was an inverse driver. The results demonstrate that permitting delays drive land-use change, escalating project and socio-economic costs. The study recommends fit-for-purpose digital tools for project transparency and landscape assessment, strengthening community EIA capacity and engagement to resolve power and information asymmetries, and integrating systems to manage permitting delays and consequential landscape changes and socioeconomic costs.