Linda Mensah

SCELG PhD Member

Linda joined Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance(SCELG) in 2018 as a Strathclyde Excellence Awards recipient. Her research focuses on exploring alternative legal frameworks for Ghana’s artisanal and small-scale mining sector using decolonised socio-legal and Afrocentric research approach. In January 2020, Linda was awarded a Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) PhD Fieldwork Grant to conduct her ethnography at selected small-scale mining sites in Ghana. Linda is interested in exploring the extractives industry through legal pluralist theories as well as examining the tensioned intersection between customary land tenure systems, mineral rights and the state-centric mining formalisation schemes. Her research also focuses on the politics of knowledge production on Africa’s mineral resources and the epistemologies that frame the discourses on indigenous artisanal and small-scale mining. With the aid of African feminist standpoint theories, Linda’s research also pays focused attention to the gendered struggles in artisanal and small-scale mining and highlights how the lived experiences and stories of women in artisanal and small-scale mining could be mobilised for legal and policy reform. Prior to joining SCELG, Linda worked as a legal officer and adjunct law lecturer at Ghana’s University of Energy and Natural Resources. Linda was admitted to the Ghana Bar in 2011and holds an LLM in International Law and Sustainable Development from the University of Strathclyde which she obtained under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Chevening Scholarship in 2016.

Linda’s Area of Expertise: 

• Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge
• Land, Food and Agriculture
• Legal Theory
• Extractives
• Legal and Political Anthropology