Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has experienced an explosive growth as a result of rising international gold prices. Today, forty million people in all corners of the world are directly engaged in ASM. Although it has the potential to alleviate rural poverty and unemployment, ASM is mostly conducted in the informal sector through social or customary norms. Hernando de Soto, one of the world’s most influential economists, claims that developing countries should revisit U.S. history on how to successfully integrate the extralegal into the legal sector. During the California Gold Rush, thousands of miners devised their own mining codes to distribute rights to the gold deposits and avoid chaos, which eventually were recognized and codified by the U.S. Congress. This is why, in de Soto’s view, the U.S. federal mining law is an example of how secure property rights can emerge from the bottom-up. Nonetheless, the California Gold Rush history is far from being the happy tale he depicts. This article analyzes the application of de Soto’s property rights recipe to the ASM sector. Using examples from the California and Peruvian gold rushes, it argues that granting formal title risks turning into a cynical government gift or a right to pollute if governments overlook the existing socio-economic discrepancies, power asymmetries, and regulatory bottlenecks underlying in the ASM sector. In this line, it contends that the ASM sector is unlike other informal settings where de Soto’s ideas have been implemented (i.e. shantytowns, street vending, urban transportation).