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- Convenors:
-
Eleanor Fisher
(Nordic Africa Institute)
Cristiano Lanzano (The Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala, Sweden))
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- Stream:
- Utopias and Temporalities
- Location:
- Elizabeth Fry 01.05
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This Panel examines the Global Challenge of (un)sustainability in Artisanal and Small-scale Mining, considering what anthropology has to offer for understanding possible futures in mining worlds.
Long Abstract:
Commodity booms, and the expansion of mining economies and extractive capitalism, recurrently fuel narratives of development. At the same time, they raise questions of environmental impact, governance and redistribution that are at the core of public debate on Global Challenges and sustainability. The expansion of Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM), especially in the global South, embodies both evolutionary views of economic potentialities and bottom-up entrepreneurship, and anxieties on the harmful character of an informal sector.
Indeed, portraits of (un)sustainability follow a well-worn path: ASM is portrayed as the trope of an unsustainable activity threatening people and planet, one entangled with negative moral judgements. Yet anthropologists have shown that ASM catalyzes change and innovation too. Combining geological fixity and human mobilities, the discovery and exploitation of mineral reserves bring territorial arrangements and resource claims into question while exposing identity politics and modes of authority.
How can mainstream definitions of sustainability be de-centred? What is being "sustained", by whom and for whom? How are futures imagined, and temporalities reframed, in connection with processes of socio-technical change and local political mobilization? What, if any, opportunities exist to shift the terms of dominant debate, including in ways that give credence to mining voices? Aiming to interrogate consolidated representations of ASM through ethnographic contributions, this Panel provides a timely opportunity to question what anthropology can bring to dominant perspectives on sustainability in ASM, including the political economies that marginalize the voices of artisanal miners, and of local communities, in articulating their visions of possible futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 September, 2019, -Cristiano Lanzano (The Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala, Sweden)) Luigi Arnaldi di Balme (Laboratoire Citoyennetés - Ouagadougou)
Paper short abstract:
In Guinea, acceleration of artisanal mining challenges modes of production previously aimed at assuring the perpetuation of the gold economy in the long term. We reflect on the implications of this process for sustainability, focusing on its elements of innovation, temporality, social reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
Artisanal mining has a long and consolidated history in present-day Guinea: the gold placers of Bouré and Séké, located at the north of the town of Siguiri (near the border with Mali), have been known to chroniclers and colonial administrators for the flourishing production and the large workforce engaged in mining activities. Similarly to other areas of the Manden (for ex. in Eastern Senegal and Southern Mali), gold has shaped local economies and social institutions to an important extent.
Recently, though, the adoption of various technical innovations, and the parallel expansion of industrial mining concessions, have shown a tendency both to the acceleration of production, on one side, and to the rarefication of space available to artisanal miners, on the other. The intensification of extraction is increasingly challenging a mode of production previously characterized by spatial and temporal limitations to mining, and by customary regulations accurately disciplining access to the resource. These transformations call into question the principles of long-term "conservation" of the resource, and of intergenerational justice, that inspired the gold economy in the area.
Using our ethnographic material on the Bouré and the Séké (collected in 2013-4 and 2019), we will develop a reflection on the idea of sustainability - as perceived and framed locally - of artisanal mining, focusing on the issues of innovation, temporality and social reproduction.
Robert Jan Pijpers (University of Hamburg)
Paper short abstract:
In Ghana´s artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, environmental impact is a key issue in (un)sustainability debates. This paper focuses on this debate, connecting it to human mobility and technology as well as bringing home some diverging local interpretations of sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
Similar to discourse around artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) elsewhere, Ghana´s ASGM sector is generally regarded as a detriment to the environment and, despite its economic contribution and development potentiality, inherently unsustainable. In this paper I, first of all, trace the rise of the most recent sustainability debate in Ghana. This debate informed a nation-wide ´war on galamsey´ (war on artisanal and small-scale mining) which included a ban on all ASGM activity and generated significant negative attention for artisanal and small-scale miners. While this ´war´ was driven by the environmental pollution caused by ASGM, it is also connected to processes of human mobility and technological innovation, mainly related to Chinese presence. This connection signals that in addition to environmental impact, other dynamics may be relevant to sustainably debates. Consequently, without disregarding the serious problems that ASGM causes in terms of environmental impact, the second part of the paper shows that a narrative exclusively focused on the environment does not suffice to fully understand the diverging understandings of sustainability among different ASGM actors. By highlighting several of these diverging visions on sustainability, the paper stresses the importance of taking a bottom-up approach in order to understand what sustainability means and to whom and to eventually achieve a more sustainable ASGM sector.
Sally Faulkner (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
The varying temporality of translocal ASM livelihoods creates divergent livelihood trajectories and contradictory understandings of sustainability. This paper links these arguments with theories of identity and deviance to provide an understanding of active resistance in mining settlements.
Paper long abstract:
The vast majority of people working and living in mining settlements in Madre de Dios are migrants from the Andes. Yet, the population is not homogenous, neither between different mining settlements nor within them, and the livelihood trajectories they follow diverge and multiple tensions. Sustainability has different meanings to miners who have become rooted in mining towns compared to those that remain highly mobile, as both places and futures are imagined differently when a miner's livelihood continues to be translocal. This paper introduces a temporal dimension to the concept of translocal livelihoods to show how divergent notions of sustainability are manifested in tension within ASM communities.
These divergent livelihood trajectories and notions of sustainability must be understood within their context of informality and illegality, in which high-levels of violence and government intervention create broader problems for sustainability, far beyond notions of the environment and natural resource depletion. This paper uses concepts from the deviance literature to show how criminalisation and persecution continue to a collective mining identity, which is reflected not only in the actions of miners but also in the discourses of criminality that are utilised to justify actions, both in relation to other miners and the dominant society. By linking these arguments to the concept of translocal livelihoods, this paper reflects on a key source of tension within ASM communities. It is only by appreciating the heterogeneity of "sustainability" within mining sites that we can move towards a more inclusive debate on the future of ASM.
Smita Yadav (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
The paper will discuss the various ways in which ASM based livelihoods has come to be at the intersection of both formal and informal economy and the development in India.
Paper long abstract:
How can an ethnography of ASM in a small remote village in India help understand the dynamics of the changing rural in India? Given the scales of economic growth dependence on mode of production through exploitative labour conditions, this paper looks At the various ways, mostly illegal, that ASM has become a mainstay of a stationary tribal population. It discusses how the government regulatory frameworks of environment and poverty gets balanced or challenged in an extremely poverty context coupled with water scarcity. The mining in concern here are both stone quarries and diamond mining. Diamond stones are highly priced and only the tribal population has the skill and know how of how to extract such stones.
Boris Verbrugge (University of Antwerp)
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically assesses ongoing efforts to make global gold supply chains more sustainable. It argues that as long as sustainability initiatives fail to recognize that ASGM revolves around the use of cheap informal labor, they risk leaving intact or even reinforcing exclusionary dynamics.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, we have witnessed a proliferation of initiatives that attempt to make global gold supply chains more sustainable. Examples include voluntary standards such as Fairtrade gold or the LBMA's list of good delivery; but also full-blown regulatory initiatives like the EU's conflict minerals regulation. Most of these initiatives implicitly or explicitly target ASGM, which is considered notoriously unsustainable due to, amongst others, the presence of child labor, the involvement of armed rent-seekers, and the abundant use of mercury. This paper critically interrogates this sustainability drive against the background of structural trends in global gold production. It argues that the dramatic expansion of ASGM since the 1980s, its adverse incorporation into global supply chains, and the emergence of unequal revenue-sharing arrangements on the ground, are all products of the (partial and geographically unequal) informalization of gold production. More precisely, by mobilizing a cheap and flexible informal workforce to extract easily accessible gold deposits, ASGM-expansion provides a response to several systemic challenges facing global gold production, such as declining ore reserves, rising cost pressures, and tightening regulatory frameworks. While sustainability initiatives may well result in cosmetic changes to global gold supply chains, as long as they fail to recognize these structural forces, they risk leaving intact or even reinforcing exclusionary dynamics on the ground.
Joshua Sandin (Royal Holloway)
Paper short abstract:
Debates on financial inclusion are disconnected from the diversity of motivations and social perceptions surrounding formal, and informal, financial mechanisms. This paper highlights the conflicting understandings amongst ASM stakeholders regarding the sector's financing and development trajectory.
Paper long abstract:
Financial inclusion has become a mainstay of global development agendas, becoming axiomatic as a pillar of poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth. Yet, billions of the world's 'unbanked' are financially included, albeit via informal means. Despite its popularity, and research on the wider informal economy drawing considerable attention, debates on informal finance have failed to gather considerable attention since the 80's and 90's.
One sector that is underpinned by finance is artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) - labour-intensive, low-tech mineral extraction and processing. A string of interventions have proved unable to sustainably finance the sector, with undercapitalisation noted as impeding the sector's development and reinforcing its association with socio-economic and environmental harm. However, informal financiers, often the only source of much-needed credit to mining operations, have been continually persecuted. This research looks to merge current debates on the informal economy and informal finance to re-examine the 'parasitic' financiers of the ASM sector, who could be more symbiotic than widely believed.
This paper draws on the experiences from fieldwork conducted from September 2018 to August 2019, including interviews and participant observation from numerous case studies in the Malawian ASM sector. The motivations and social perceptions surrounding both informal, and formal, finance are questioned by drawing on the experiences of a range of local and international stakeholders. From this, reflections are made, inter alia, on the socio-economic sustainability of differing financial mechanisms and how this is, and could, effect the development trajectory of the ASM sector and its sustainable financing.
Eleanor Fisher (Nordic Africa Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how futures are (re)imagined in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining, challenging conventional views on the dynamics of sustainability while bringing questions of moral responsibility and political accountability to the fore.
Paper long abstract:
Transformative approaches to sustainability have gained traction in contemporary policy debates. Given how sustainability challenges are societal and not (just) environmental, anthropology has a role to play in the generation of politically engaged understandings of the potential for society-driven processes of sustainability to emerge. De-centring mainstream understandings of Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) and (un)sustainability, this paper explores how futures are (re)imagined in ASGM. Taking a materialist approach, gold matters are located as involving lively materialities, geo affects, challenging conventional views on the dynamics of change in ASGM while bringing questions of moral responsibility and political accountability to the fore. The paper emphasizes the need for an agenda on trans-disciplinary engagement on ASGM and new mining futures that shifts the terms of dominant debate to give greater credence to heterogeneous knowledge and practices, in the process giving expression to the voices of marginalized mining actors in debates on sustainability transformations.