Southern Responses to Fair Trade Gold: Cooperation, Competition, Supplementation

Artisanal gold mining is a Southern subsistence livelihood posing both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development. In 2011, Fairtrade International launched a certification program to address sustainability problems in the sector. Southern activists, miners, and jewelry retailers have responded in three ways: cooperation and complaint, competition and low uptake, supplementation via a weaker standard. Using original data from the authors’ interviews and original database, the paper connects to the literature on global governance regimes by explaining the roles that power, interests, and ideas played in Southern responses. While Southern mining organization the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) initially cooperated with Fairtrade, ARM became a competing program when ideas about strategies diverged and their once complementary capacities became redundant. Yet interests between competing programs and miners are still not well aligned, so uptake levels remain below 1% of the ASGM population and only miners far above the poverty line are participating. ARM therefore created a weaker standard, the CRAFT Code, in 2018 to serve as a supplemental stepping-stone to certification. Overall, these findings reflect some basic intuitions about the conditions that lead to cooperation versus competition among Northern and Southern actors via an understudied but important commodity sector case.