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Examining the role of agency in processing practices in Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold mining: a sociotechnical analysis of local perspectives
Rojas, Mateo
Rojas, Mateo
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2023
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2024-10-18
Abstract
The effects of past international development efforts and the increasingly globalized economy continue to affect the realities experienced by populations in the Global South. Scholars have widely recognized the need to understand how economic, political, and ideological forces influence how engineers approach sustainable community development projects to avoid inadvertently facilitating social injustices through well-intentioned efforts. It is especially important to attend to these forces and influences in the Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, where miners and their communities have been marginalized to accommodate multinational large-scale mining (LSM) for decades. As LSM has grown in Colombia, ASGM has been stigmatized due to the environmental and health consequences of the activities in this sector, namely those of the processing plants where miners transform ore from the underground into gold and this coveted metal enters the finance, jewelry, and electronics supply chains. These sites are the primary source of the estimated 2000 metric tons of mercury released into the environment every year by ASGM. One intervention that has gained the interest of practitioners in Colombia is the communal gold processing plant, where miners would be the owners of their own collective clean gold processing instead of relying on processing plants that use inefficient and harmful methods. Unfortunately, this model has not been successful in Colombia, and few have sought to identify some of the factors that have inhibited the success of these plants. To respond to this gap and the limitations of past interventions seeking to improve gold processing practices in ASGM, this thesis provides a sociotechnical analysis of two processing arrangements in the Colombian department of Antioquia by illuminating miners’ perspectives about collective gold processing. The ethnographic research in this study reveals how the unique and dynamic arrangement of gold processing systems reciprocally influences miners’ agencies, forms unique sustainability priorities, and creates opportunities for people to use mining to create meaningful livelihoods in ASGM contexts. This thesis shows that interventions seeking to improve gold processing practices in ASGM would benefit from considering the extent to which miners’ agencies would be preserved or neglected and integrating miners into the projects from the outset.
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