Locked in: How formal institutional design sustains extractivism and ecological decline in Ghana’s mining–water sector

Mining-related water pollution persists despite repeated legislative reforms and regulatory interventions. Yet, existing explanations largely attribute this persistence to weak enforcement, political patronage, or socioeconomic pressures driving artisanal small-scale mining (ASM). We argue instead that the problem is fundamentally one of institutional design. Drawing on institutional theory and institutional grammar analysis, we examine how Ghana's mining-water legislation allocates authority and embeds incentive structures that shape environmental governance. We find that the legislative framework privileges regulative over constitutive institutional elements, producing governance arrangements that are procedurally elaborate yet functionally weak. At the same time, it embeds economic and political incentives that favor extractivism while providing comparatively weak social and regulatory incentives for environmental stewardship, reinforcing fragmented authority, symbolic governance, and executive overreach. These institutional arrangements generate intertwined common-pool resource and public-bad dilemmas that lock Ghana's mining-water sector into a gilded trap, in which short-term extractive gains systematically outweigh long-term socioecological sustainability. The findings suggest that persistent mining-related water pollution is not simply a failure of enforcement but a consequence of institutional architectures that privilege extractivism while weakening environmental governance. In reconceptualizing the gilded trap as an institutionally produced condition, the paper demonstrates how imbalances between constitutive and regulative institutional elements generate symbolic governance and position the state as an active producer, rather than merely a failed regulator, of extractivist outcomes.