Property Rights and Governance in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining

Critical Approaches

Chris Huggins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000011661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Disputes and dispossession of property rights in the mining sector are causes of injustice, violence, and forced resettlement around the world. This comprehensive volume examines mining, particularly what is often called 'Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining', from a perspective of governance and rights. It focuses on rights to land, natural resources, and other forms of material 'property'. Many projects, policies, and laws targeting artisanal and small-scale mining are embedded in problematic conceptual and institutional frameworks that implicitly stigmatise and discipline artisanal and small-scale miners. This collection takes a critical look at notions of property to destabilise some of these frameworks.

The chapters in this book are notable for their recognition of the agency of artisanal miners and 'local communities' within the uneven hierarchies in which they are embedded, and their acknowledgement of the difficulties of state regulation of such a complex set of issues. The authors use a variety of theoretical tools, engaging with political economy, political ecology, classical economic theory, and socio-cultural concepts derived from ethnographic methods.

This book includes insightful case studies from Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Mongolia, South Africa, and Zambia, and is an important resource for academics, development practitioners, and policy-makers. It was originally published online as a special issue of Third World Thematics.

Artisanal and small-scale mining: critical approaches to property rights and governance

Chris Huggins

ABSTRACT

Disputes and dispossession of property rights in the mining sector are causes of injustice, violence and forced displacement around the world. Many artisanal and small-scale mining policy initiatives are embedded in problematic conceptual and institutional frameworks that implicitly stigmatise and discipline artisanal and small-scale miners. This collection takes a critical look at notions of property to destabilise some of these frameworks. Contributions are notable for their recognition of the agency of artisanal miners and ‘local communities’ within the uneven hierarchies in which they are embedded, and their acknowledgement of the difficulties of state regulation of such a complex set of issues.

Introduction

This collection examines mining, particularly what is often called ‘Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining’ (ASM), from a perspective of governance and rights. It focuses especially on rights to land, natural resources and other forms of material ‘property’. ASM is hugely important, in terms of employment and mineral production, in many countries. There are at least 20–30 million artisanal and small-scale miners globally, with more than eight million of them working in Africa.¹ In African states, ASM is often responsible for more mineral production than industrial mining; in Latin America, even in the leftist states, there has been a multiplication of mining sites and an associated increase in conflicts, often violent, between mining firms, artisanal miners, local citizens and other actors over access to mineralised land and environmental impacts; and new mineral industries have recently sprung up in Central Asia, for example, accompanied by ASM. There has accordingly, over the past 15 years, been a rapid growth in academic and policy-oriented research and documentation on ASM. Some of this has resulted in important debates on how miners may be ‘supported’ to work more effectively, safely and profitably. Filling a glaring gap in the literature, the role of women in ASM has recently been critically examined.² However, some of the ASM literature has been criticised for various biases including a pro-industrial mining stance, a statist orientation that tends to privilege taxation and formalisation above the material and social interests of individual miners; and a simplistic conceptual framework that assumes various challenges can be overcome through legislation, ‘formalization’ or moratoriums on mining in certain areas. More fundamentally, given the ‘radical’ challenge that artisanal miners pose to industrial mining and property rights regimes, much of the discourse around ASM is seen by critics as a form of discursive regulation or discipline, ‘a response designed to contain, reframe and re-direct the anticolonial challenge posed by, or potentially posed by, these subjects’.³

This collection takes a critical and multidisciplinary approach. It has resulted from a two-session panel at the conference of the Netherlands Academy on Land Governance for Equitable and Sustainable Development (LANDac) at Utrecht University in 2015. The panel, situated within a conference focused largely on the phenomenon of large-scale commercial acquisition of land in the Global South, or the ‘foreignization of space’,⁴ highlighted the diversity of perspectives and lack of common action on the crisis within mineral-rich zones. With the exception of policies on free prior informed consent (FPIC) which only affect areas with ‘indigenous’ populations (as discussed in this collection), the mining sector has seen not the kinds of a high-profile multi-stakeholder push for global ‘voluntary guidelines’ as has been seen in the land sector.⁵ Instead, a more complex, ad hoc, and regionally specific set of responses to particular challenges (such as ‘conflict minerals’) may be seen.

The ASM sector, and academic and policy responses to the challenges it represents, has numerous conceptual connections to broader themes of natural resources management, and international development more generally. At a general level, some of the key policy questions in the minerals sector revolve around the roles and responsibilities of the state, members of local communities, international NGOs, and the private sector. The first question is whether particular resources should be extracted: do the benefits to local livelihoods, or national public coffers, outweigh the negative environmental, social and health impacts that might result from extraction? Who should decide this, for example through processes of FPIC now required for projects involving indigenous communities? As pointed out by Torres in this collection, the geography of extraction often involves negative impacts at the local level, and capital accumulation in distant metropoles.

Assuming that resources are to be mined, the second question concerns which stakeholders should extract and/or process them. This is often posed as a legal issue (who has the ‘right’ under the existing legal framework) but is also an issue of values and ethics, informed by the often troubling history of mineral exploitation; as well as an issue of technical and institutional capacity: do local communities, cooperatives and small companies have the ability to extract strategic resources safely, without damaging the environment? Or can large-scale companies (most of them multinationals registered in the Global North) more efficiently make use of minerals, providing greater amounts of tax revenue to the state, which can be reinvested in public services? Can state agencies or NGOs enable communities to build their own capacities to manage and improve extractive processes, or are such initiatives merely tokens, to distract from larger patterns of dispossession of communities in favour of industrial mining companies?

These are inherently political questions, of course (though with ‘technical’ aspects) and the ways in which the questions are posed, and answered, depends on the prevailing political climate, whether at the local, national, or global level. It becomes important to examine the political economy of decision-making – that is, the overt and covert relationships between politicians, policy-makers, lobbyists, donors, business people, leaders of cooperatives or associations, and members of regulatory institutions charged with monitoring, evaluating or certifying resource use. Where politicians and policy-makers have vested personal interests, for example, due to a weak regulatory environment, or failure to systematically enforce existing laws, these questions are likely to be answered in ways that benefit them or their political allies and business partners. While in most cases the policy framework has been developed over long periods (as described in Campbell’s paper in this collection), in some cases – following landslide election victories, for example, or in the aftermath of political or economic crisis – it may be possible for governments to make policy changes very rapidly, without popular consultation.⁶

These questions resonate with ongoing debates and policy processes in the forestry sector and wildlife conservation sphere, to give two examples, where models for co-management by communities and state agencies are common, but controversial. While they still have considerable support on the basis that they provide local people with some decision-making power and material benefits, they are often criticised as a fig leaf for state control; or because they place extra burdens on communities while providing few local benefits; or on the basis that they sometimes become corrupt; or that they are ineffective in controlling environmental degradation.⁷ Controversies over community roles in natural resource management have become fiercer since the start of the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) process and the establishment of a global market in carbon credits; which is the most visible of many schemes involving the commodification of ‘environmental services’ and resources.⁸

There are also strong similarities with the ways in which multinational companies have acquired large areas of farmland across the globe, especially since the food price crisis of 2007/2008; whereas in past decades, agrarian reform has often been characterized by a ‘land to the tiller’ approach (ie local people should be granted rights to own resources based on their historical use of them), the so-called global land grab was sometimes justified by companies and governments on the basis that communities did not have the capacity to produce high yields from farmland (with implications for food security and national economic growth). Alternatively, like ‘green grabbing’ in the name of conservation, acquisition of fertile land was based on the assumption that large areas of land – particularly in Africa – are ‘vacant’ and uninhabited.⁹ When policy-makers try to determine whether there are ‘local’ communities with claims to resources, these discussions may aggravate existing tensions over territorial claims of self-defined ‘autochtone’ and ‘migrant’ communities.¹⁰ The shift towards multinational acquisition of land was also possible due to decades of legal and policy reforms aimed at creating liberal land markets, similar to those described by Campbell in this collection.¹¹ These similarities, then, remind us that any discussion of property rights issues in the ASM sector should be informed by broader patterns in contemporary ‘international development’, such as the prevalence of market-based approaches, public–private partnerships, and the dominance of very large organisations (whether for-profit or non-profit) or coalitions of actors which are able to achieve ‘impact at scale’.

The theme of property rights and ASM is not a new one. Strengthening the rights to land and resources of communities and indigenous populations was recommended more than a decade ago by Striking a better balance: the World Bank Group and extractive industries, the final report of the extractive industries review.¹² A more recent UN and African Union (AU) report notes that even when rights to access land are granted to artisanal and small-scale miners, these rights are rarely of sufficient duration to be deemed ‘secure’ rights for mining.¹³ Despite these reports, ‘the relationship between ASM and surface land tenure arrangements remains under-researched’,¹⁴ and this theme is particularly important today. It is a period of rapid change in the mining industry. For example, many mining companies have, for the first time, committed themselves to FPIC approaches¹⁵ (though FPIC is still highly problematic and contested) and there h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Artisanal and small-scale mining: critical approaches to property rights and governance
• 2. Revisiting the interconnections between research strategies and policy proposals: reflections from the artisanal and small-scale mining sector in Africa
• 3. The politics of artisanal and small-scale mining in Mongolia
• 4. Property rights and large-scale mining: overlapping claims at and around mining sites at the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia
• 5. ‘Custom’ and fractured ‘community’: mining, property disputes and law on the platinum belt, South Africa
• 6. Disputes over gold mining and dispossession of local afrodescendant communities from the Alto Cauca, Colombia
• 7. Different faces of access control in a Congolese gold mine
• 8. Artisanal gold mining in Kejetia (Tongo, Northern Ghana): a three-dimensional perspective
• Index