Year of Award
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Name
Forest and Conservation Science
Department or School/College
W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation
Committee Chair
Keith W. Bosak
Commitee Members
Jennifer Thomsen, Sarah Halvorson, Shawn Johnson, Paul Haber
Keywords
Anticipatory Justice, Bauxite Mining, Environmental Justice, Extractive Conflict, Ghana, Social Capital
Abstract
Environmental justice and social capital scholarship have developed largely in parallel, each illuminating a different dimension of community responses to extractive conflict. While justice frameworks explain what communities demand, social capital frameworks explain how they organize to pursue those demands. What neither framework addresses is the relationship between the two, specifically how the relational conditions available to communities shape the justice claims they make, and how the demands of justice mobilization in turn reshape those relational conditions. This study addresses that gap by examining the Atewa forest conflict in Ghana, where 48 communities have sustained organized resistance to a proposed bauxite mining concession for more than a decade. In doing so, these communities have not only resisted an imposed future but constructed an alternative vision.
Drawing on focus groups discussions with men, women, and youth, semi-structured interviews with traditional leaders, and social network mapping interviews with key civil society actors, the study develops the Relational Infrastructure Framework of Extractive Conflict, an integrated analytical approach in which social capital is conceptualized not as a facilitating resource accessed after justice claims have formed, but as the infrastructure or "container" through which those claims are produced, contested, and transformed.
This framework makes four interrelated contributions. First, justice framing and social capital are mutually constitutive. Each produces and transforms the other through the conflict process in ways that neither body of scholarship, applied separately, can fully explain on its own. Second, the study theorizes an anticipatory justice frame where communities contest extraction before harm occurs. This grounds local justice claims in collective historical knowledge of comparable extractive landscapes as opposed to harm already experienced. Third, it shows that resistance coalitions can move from critique to construction through the same relational infrastructure that sustains opposition. This is demonstrated by the community-defined national park and ecotourism vision which is co-produced and sustained across demographic groups. Fourth, it argues that linking capital deficits in extractive conflicts are not only structural but manufactured conditions created through the deliberate removal of institutional allies by state actors exercising hidden power. These findings advance environmental justice theory, extend social capital scholarship into West African extractive governance contexts, and carry direct implications for just transitions policy and conservation civil society practice.
Recommended Citation
Tuolienuo, Isaiah, "JUSTICE, SOCIAL CAPITAL, AND THE PURSUIT OF ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN EXTRACTIVE CONFLICTS: EVIDENCE FROM THE ATEWA FOREST, GHANA" (2026). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12686.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12686
© Copyright 2026 Isaiah Tuolienuo