Burden without benefit: Examining environmental injustices in stone extraction in Buoku, Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ghana’s strategy of partnering with multinational and transnational corporations to extract natural resources has often yielded unevenly distributed benefits, while leaving host communities burdened by significant environmental costs. This paper focuses on stone quarrying in Buoku, Ghana, to examine the dimensions of distributive and procedural justice in such extractive contexts. Using qualitative in-depth interviews with eight key community stakeholders, we explored how residents understand, experience, and respond to the unequal allocation of environmental benefits and burdens in the context of quarrying operations in Buoku, Ghana. Our findings indicate that profits and advantages accrue primarily to quarrying firms and external authorities, while the host community bears the brunt of environmental degradation and related social harms. Moreover, meaningful local participation in decision-making is largely absent, reflecting a lack of procedural justice and further entrenching community marginalization. These results highlight the critical need to integrate distributive and procedural justice considerations into environmental policy frameworks. We recommend policies that ensure community members’ active involvement in environment-related decisions, and that directly address their unique needs, perspectives, and values. Such measures can help establish a more equitable distribution of resource benefits, mitigate harms, and contribute to more just and sustainable extractive practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".