Dr Yanfei Hu

Countries that have ratified the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a United Nations-backed international treaty designed to protect human health and the environment from releases of mercury and mercury compounds, are required to produce a National Action Plan (NAP). Each must state, very clearly, how the mercury being used at artisanal and small-scale gold mines will be phased out. In most areas of sub-Saharan Africa, however, devising a comprehensive NAP promises to be an enormous and indeed, challenging, undertaking. Here, the institutional capacity and resources, expertise and at times, commitment needed to capture the level of detail the Minamata Secretariat expects to be included in each NAP are woefully lacking. One of the more challenging tasks ahead, given the shortage of hard data available on the sector’s populations, production and activities, promises to be the design and implementation of appropriate educational, communication and support-related strategies for the ‘vulnerable populations’ who rely on work at artisanal and small-scale gold mines for their incomes. This is especially significant for women, who, despite accounting for at least 50 percent of the region’s artisanal and small-gold mine workforce, mostly carry out the manual work at the lower tiers of the sector’s labour hierarchies. Taking stock of this largely ‘invisible’ work and the circumstances driving individuals to pursue employment in this sector in the first place, this paper reflects critically on the challenges with reducing women’s exposure to mercury at artisanal and small-scale gold mines in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws on findings from ongoing research in Ghana, the location of one of the largest and most dynamic artisanal and small-scale gold mining sectors in the region.

This study examines how highly disruptive issues cause profound dissonance in societal members that are cognitively and emotionally invested in existing institutions. The authors use PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) entrepreneurial advocacy for animal rights to show how this highly disruptive issue interrupted and violated taken-for-granted interpretations of institutions and institutional life. The authors compare 30 YouTube videos of PETA’s advocacy to explore pathways to effective sensegiving and sensemaking of highly disruptive issues. The findings augment the analytical synergy that exists between sensemaking and institutional analysis by unpacking the micro-level dynamics that may facilitate transformational institutional change.

Institutional change is a key topic in organization study, but we know surprisingly little about how such change unfolds in change-resistant authoritarian countries. We use a historical study of the efforts by an international non-governmental organization, the Ford Foundation, to mediate human rights-based change in China. Mediated change is the process through which a mediator uses subtle tactics to broker values and practices from one social world to another. We find that mediated change involves tactics that reduce local actors’ institutional embeddedness in authoritarianism (e.g., disembedding tactics), and tactics that enhance local actors’ embeddedness in rights-based values and practices (e.g., embedding tactics). Overall, the study not only demonstrates the importance of accounting for mediated institutional change processes, but also reveals new insights into under-theorized aspects of the paradox of embedded agency.