Beyond the Lease Boundary: Governing Post-lease Operational Risk Territories in Blasting-based Quarry Operations

Abstract Blasting-based quarry operations often generate safety effects that extend beyond legally defined mining concessions, yet the governance of quarrying remains largely organised around fixed lease boundaries. As urban expansion increasingly brings settlements into closer proximity with active quarries, this disconnect between legal jurisdiction and operational influence has become more pronounced. While concession boundaries determine where extraction is permitted, blasting safety is managed through engineering assessments of ground vibration, air overpressure and other operational parameters that frequently extend beyond those legal limits. This study examines that governance challenge through an exploratory qualitative case study of the Yongwa Limestone Quarry in Ghana. Drawing on statutory analysis, stakeholder interviews, field observations and operational blast-monitoring records, the study investigates how land outside a quarry concession may become functionally constrained by engineering safety while remaining under existing ownership and tenure arrangements. Ghana provides an appropriate setting because mineral rights are vested in the Republic, whereas much of the country's land is held under customary tenure, requiring coordination among mineral regulators, planning authorities, environmental agencies and customary land custodians. Blast-monitoring records from Yongwa indicate that routine measurements were undertaken at receptor locations approximately 230–750 m from active blast sites, illustrating that operational safety management routinely extends beyond the immediate extraction area. Building on these findings, the paper introduces the concept of Post-Lease Operational Risk Territories (PORTs) to describe land located outside legally surveyed quarry concessions but within the operational influence of blasting activities. It further develops diagnostic criteria for identifying PORTs, proposes a classification framework for prioritising governance responses, introduces Renewable Tenure Restraint (RTR) as a flexible land-use management mechanism, and presents an Adaptive Operational Risk Governance (AORG) framework that links engineering evidence with land administration and spatial planning. Rather than treating concession boundaries as the sole basis for quarry governance, the study argues that effective governance should also recognise the changing spatial extent of operational influence. By distinguishing legal extraction space from operational risk space, the proposed framework provides a new way of understanding and managing land-use conflicts associated with blasting-dependent quarry operations and offers a governance approach that is potentially transferable to other rapidly urbanising extractive landscapes.