Re-assembling Informal Gold Mining for Development and Sustainability? Opportunities and Limits to Formalisation in India, Indonesia and Laos

This chapter draws upon empirical fieldwork conducted in three understudied locations in India, Indonesia and Lao PDR, as part of a multi-country research project aimed at understanding the role of new technologies in artisanal and small-scale (ASM) gold mining, and the relationships between informal miners, farmers and rural-agrarian transitions in Asia.Analysis focuses on explaining variations in material, social, economic, political and technological ‘assemblages’ of informal mining. I locate these variations in relation to local socio-political struggles for rights to livelihood by both local miners and resource-dependent communities, and the state institutional governance and capital relations that re-produce vulnerability and establish conditions of informality. It is recommended that public policies supporting formalisation need to take better account the connections between local processes, state institutions, the scale and use of technology, ecological externalities, and the functioning of informal gold markets and commodity chains. If evacuated from a political responsiveness to both miners’ and local communities’ livelihoods, social mobilisations and collective actions, formalisation is likely to remain on the margins of ASM policy development in Asia.