Beyond Local Invoices: Capability-Conditioned Localisation and Supply Resilience in Ghana's Mining Sector

Local content policy in mining is assessed almost entirely through domestic expenditure, ownership and employment. This article asks a question those measures cannot answer: when does policy induced domestic participation change what happens after a supply interruption, and when does it relocate the contractual interface while leaving the operative dependency offshore? Local content research explains whether procurement generates linkages and upgrading; resilience research explains how networks recover from disruption. Neither specifies when the first produces the second. The article develops capability conditioned localisation as a conditional mechanism: local content instruments expand domestic market access, and the participation this produces improves category recovery performance only through the accumulation of supplier capability depth, a conversion conditional on category economics, buyer development practices and the effective independence of the domestic supply base. Four capability domains are derived as jointly necessary enablers of a restoration task, and capability depth is formalised as the coverage based minimum across the applicable domains, a necessity conjecture anchored in constraint and necessary condition reasoning. The linear localisation ladder is replaced by a configuration of capability depth against effective supplier independence. The framework is illustrated through three Ghanaian procurement categories, drawing on a coded corpus of 107 documents, 23 of them primary and 84 secondary. Each case is a plausibility probe separating what the record establishes from what the framework infers, and naming rival explanations. The article specifies auditable metrics and states five testable propositions. This manuscript is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review.