Activities per year
Abstract
Small-scale gold mining sustains millions of people's lives and yet it stimulates environmental harms and social conflicts. Global environmental crises drive calls for fundamental change to how people live on the planet. For small-scale gold mining, this raises questions about whether current dynamics can provide a basis for sustainability transformations. Proposing the notion of gold lifeways to focus on the lived experience of mining and gold resources as relational phenomena, we ask what sustainability looks like from different miners’ perspectives and probe the practice dynamics of current transformation. Our methodology is social science-led and transdisciplinary. From multi-sited and trans-regional research between South America and Africa, we draw cases from Suriname, Guinea Conakry, and Uganda. Our study finds that gold lifeways give expression to different strands of sustainability: sustaining everyday life in mining; discourses framing mining practices; and government repression of mining. Hence, as our empirical data demonstrates, miner perspectives on sustainability gain content not in isolation, but as part of gold lifeways embedded within different contexts and shaped by societal dynamics. Ultimately, the transformative potency of small-scale gold mining is located in personal lives and precarious dynamics rather than glittering promises of a sustainable future.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 102724 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Global Environmental Change |
Volume | 82 |
Early online date | 29 Aug 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Belmont Forum and NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Transformations to Sustainability, co-funded by DLR/BMBF, ESRC, FAPESP, ISC, NWO, VR, and the EC through Horizon 2020 (grant number: 462.17.201) under the project ‘Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: Trans-regional and Multi-Actor Perspectives’ (‘Gold Matters’) (2018 – 2022). Eleanor Fisher and Cristiano Lanzano acknowledge the support of the Nordic Africa Institute.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s)
Funding
This work was supported by the Belmont Forum and NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Transformations to Sustainability, co-funded by DLR/BMBF, ESRC, FAPESP, ISC, NWO, VR, and the EC through Horizon 2020 (grant number: 462.17.201) under the project ‘Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: Trans-regional and Multi-Actor Perspectives’ (‘Gold Matters’) (2018 – 2022). Eleanor Fisher and Cristiano Lanzano acknowledge the support of the Nordic Africa Institute.
Funders | Funder number |
---|---|
Economic and Social Research Council | |
European Commission | |
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo | |
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung | |
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt | |
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | |
Horizon 2020 | 462.17.201 |
Horizon 2020 | |
Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of Tasmania |
Keywords
- Gold lifeways
- Materiality
- Small-scale gold mining
- Sustainability transformations
- Transdisciplinary
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'The lifeways of small-scale gold miners: Addressing sustainability transformations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Activities
- 1 Expert meeting
-
National Raw Materials Strategy: expert session civil society
Marjo de Theije (Participant)
8 Jul 2024Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Expert meeting › Societal