THE challenges of poverty, marginalisation and
vulnerability characterise the livelihoods of the majority of the 20-30 million
artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM) worldwide. Linking these miners to
supply chains and guaranteeing good social and environmental practice via
certification should help to address development issues as well as create
confidence in sourcing products from ASM, and marketing them to businesses and
consumers.
But it is typically the better organised and more
advantaged producers with access to resources who are able to engage with
certification and therefore obtain any benefits. Creating the infrastructure
needed to make ASM certifiable – and for certification to deliver
sustainability successes for ASM – is a challenge and requires innovative
thinking. As sustainability certification schemes develop to address issues
facing ASM, it is important to take into account and learn from other sectors
in regards to what can be done to make certification and its benefits inclusive
and accessible to larger numbers of miners.
This paper seeks to identify existing and emerging
innovations and best practice in sustainability certification that enable fair
and beneficial inclusion of producers. It seeks to learn lessons for artisanal
and small-scale mining from the agricultural sectors, where certification has
been operational for some time. These innovations could increase the
inclusivity of certification to cater for the realities of the majority of ASM.
It also explores the enabling environments or support systems that are
necessary to scale up of certification.
The paper is a first step in exploring this subject area.
It offers initial lessons on what innovations and models exist to maximise
inclusivity and how these might be replicated. These lessons are useful for
those designing, implementing and using certification and also identifies
further research questions that warrant attention.
Responding to the challenge of artisanal and small-scale
mining.
How can knowledge networks help?
Meanwhile, this paper reviews what is known about the
problems and structural challenges facing the 20-30 million artisanal and
small-scale miners and their communities worldwide. Better understanding of
these structural challenges is needed to improve policies and policy
implementation to further sustainable development opportunities for the sector.
The paper explores the current gaps in knowledge to
achieve policy change from researchers, practitioners and artisanal and
small-scale miners themselves. It explores how a ‘knowledge intermediary’,
which acts to link knowledge with policy, could address these gaps and includes
case studies of IIED’s work on knowledge networks and programmes.
The paper concludes by proposing a way forward for
designing a knowledge programme to meet the particular needs of the artisanal
and small-scale mining (ASM) sector, and by inviting ASM sector stakeholders to
share their views on the options outlined. The paper provides the foundation
for a new knowledge programme at IIED for ASM. Key questions IIED would like to
hear views on include:
•What the objectives of a knowledge programme should be,
given the needs in the sector?
•What should be the principal activities to achieve these
objectives (virtual network, knowledge review, learning group, dialogues,
other)?
•What are the priority issues that a programme should
address, and in which countries or contexts? •What is missing: are the other
factors, lessons learned or good practice examples that will be critical to
deliver an effective ASM knowledge programme?
*Emma Blackmore and Caren Holzman with Abbi Buxton
contributed this from IIED
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