Southern Responses to Fair Trade Gold: Cooperation, Competition, Supplementation
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is a subsistence livelihood in the global South posing both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development. In 2011, Fairtrade International launched a voluntary sustainability standard (VSS) to address the low wages and pollution associated with the sector. Southern actors have responded in three ways: cooperation and complaint, competition and low uptake, condemnation and supplementation. Using original data and connecting to the literature on regimes, this paper explains the roles that material power, interests, and ideas played in Southern activists, producers' and retailers' decisions. It finds that the initial complementary capacities and aligned ideas and interests between Southern and Northern actors broke down when Southern activists developed divergent ideas about the best strategies for certifying gold. Three years of cooperation and mutual learning generated redundant capacities between Fairtrade and Southern activists, so Southern activists wanted and were able to form the Alliance for Responsible Mining, a competing VSS program. Yet interests were still not well aligned with Southern miners, so a weaker supplemental standard, the CRAFT Code, was launched in 2018. Overall, the paper helps balance the VSS literature by providing an account of Southern agency through an understudied but important commodity sector case.
Keywords: eco-labeling; extractive industries; emerging economies; Fair Trade; Environmental Sustainability; Standards; Programs; Governance Compliance; Competition; Adaptation; Mining Industry;
Citation:
Sippl, Kristin. "Southern Responses to Fair Trade Gold: Cooperation, Competition, Supplementation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-055, November 2018. (Revised April 2019. Revise and Resubmit.) View Details