Entering the critical era: A review of contemporary research on artisanal and small-scale mining
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Views on ASM have changed over time. Four literature eras are presented. • ASM and development is due to revenue sharing and local resource governance. • Challenges to interventions, including formalization efforts, are analyzed. • Focus on ASM as supplier of critical minerals and risk of elite capture. Over the past 50 years, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has been associated with development. Despite this importance to rural livelihoods, it presents challenges that have garnered attention from the international development sector, both within academia and international policy spaces. Definitions of development have shifted over time, and with these, so have the framings of ASM, the problems it represents, and the interventions needed to govern it. This review paper offers a conceptual framework to understand ASM as a development issue. To do this, I propose the classification of contemporary approaches to ASM into four time periods to illustrate changes of the framings of ASM within development interventions: Entrepreneurial, Survival, Formalization, and Critical Era. I argue that while the framing of ASM has evolved through four distinct eras, each shaped by an overarching development narrative, across these, ASM has been associated to two characteristics: widespread revenue sharing, and local resource governance, both of which are affected by factors identified during the Critical Era. This paper focuses on this Era where academic work (i) critically evaluates efforts to “fix” the sector, including environmental and regulatory interventions, (ii) shows ASM's heterogeneity and transformability, with a diversity of organizational and financing structures, levels of mechanization and technology use, and the expansion of cyanidation, (iii) highlights the risk of elite capture, and (iv) situates ASM as a supplier of critical minerals. Lastly, this paper proposes future areas of research to inform policies that retain the characteristics that make ASM a contributor of development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".