In my case, I was getting this error despite registering an existing instance for the interface in question.
Turned out, it was because I was using Unity in WebForms by way of the Unity.WebForms Nuget package, and I had specified a Hierarchical Lifetime manager for the dependency I was providing an instance for, yet a Transient lifetime manager for a subsequent type that depended on the previous type - not usually an issue - but with Unity.WebForms, the lifetime managers work a little differently... your injected types seem to require a Hierarchical lifetime manager, but a new container is still created for every web request (because of the architecture of web forms I guess) as explained excellently in this post.
Anyway, I resolved it by simply not specifying a lifetime manager for the types/instances when registering them.
i.e.
container.RegisterInstance<IMapper>(MappingConfig.GetMapper(), new HierarchicalLifetimeManager());
container.RegisterType<IUserContext, UserContext>(new TransientLifetimeManager());
becomes
container.RegisterInstance<IMapper>(MappingConfig.GetMapper());
container.RegisterType<IUserContext, UserContext>();
So that IMapper can be resolved successfully here:
public class UserContext : BaseContext, IUserContext
{
public UserContext(IMapper _mapper) : base(_mapper)
{
}
...
}