
The Faces of Labor
World Politics contributors Zaraí Toledo Orozco and Moisés Arce on how Peru’s artisanal miners can change the face of labor
In the October 2024 (Volume 76, Number 4) issue of World Politics, Zaraí Toledo Orozco, assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and Moisés Arce, Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University, argue that regulating the informal mining sector requires policymakers and government officials to consider local contexts and conditions on the ground. For this informal sector to become legal, the miners’ agency must be realized.
Indeed, as Toledo Orozco relayed in our interview: “This article has some policy implications. To regulate this sector, we need to start looking at geographical and socioeconomic factors. For example, Arce highlights the geographical differences between alluvial versus quartz-vein deposits and how they influence socioeconomic dynamics.”
Toledo Orozco and Arce illustrate their case using the example of small-scale mining, or artisanal mining, in Peru.
“In response to serious, negative environmental impacts and social problems associated with its informal status, the Peruvian central state has embraced costly efforts to regulate the activity. But sub-nationally, the results have been mixed. The contrasting trajectories of artisanal miners in Peruvian regions suggest widespread variation across a legality-illegality continuum, prompting the question: Why do informal artisanal mining activities transition to illegality in some regions while they move toward legality or remain informal in others?”
In our Storied Teller series — designed to extend World Politics’ content to a non-academic audience — the journal’s executive editor Emily Babson speaks with Toledo Orozco and Arce about their article and how Peru’s artisanal miners can change the face of labor.
What is the informal sector and why is it important to study informal labor?
Toledo Orozco: We define the informal sector as one whose activities are not regulated and/or protected by the state. In political science, there’s a tendency to focus only on the formal sectors or on elite actors. But in the Global South, the informal sector accounts for 60 or 70 percent of total labor.
We should be studying informal laborers because they form the majority, impact policy outcomes and shape politics. The situation is nuanced. When we look at the type of relationships informal laborers have developed with the State, we tend to only see the negative, the corruption. But these stereotypes are not what we find on the ground. Given that informal laborers can be the drivers of change, giving agency to these actors is important.
Why focus on artisanal mining in this context?
Arce: Particularly in the wake of the commodity boom, large-scale mining and big projects garnered a lot of attention and there was a lot of literature about the nature of resulting conflicts. Artisanal mining was on the sidelines, but it was growing, and in some regions, by a lot. But there was not a lot of attention given to artisanal miners. For example, there was a lot of news about the Madre de Dios region in Peru for the quantity of alluvial gold that was being extracted. But the literature was not looking into this particular case.
You focus specifically on Peru. Why?
Arce: Part of the inspiration came from the literature about diamonds in Africa. Rock diamonds create institutions, taxes and lead to good fortunes. Think Botswana and South Africa. But river or alluvial diamonds — think Angola, Sierra Leone —breed violence, civil wars.
We translated some of those ideas to the artisanal mining of gold. Gold is important right now because its commodity price has been consistently high over many years. There are geographical impacts, too. The gold that comes in rocks is going to produce a different set of institutions and arrangements from alluvial gold. With alluvial gold, the opportunity for profits comes early so you don’t need organizations.
Within these contexts, we chose Peru because it exports more informal or illegal gold [than any other country] in South America. Forty percent of its total gold production comes from the informal sector. And the tensions around the regulation of artisanal mining are more severe in Peru.
Toledo Orozco: Specifically, the regions of Madre de Dios and Ayacucho are the top producers of gold and have the highest number of artisanal miners as well. They are key places to observe tensions around regulation. We also chose Piura, on the northern coast, as a shadow case to test what happens when artisanal mining is not the central activity of the economy.
The driving question of your research is: Why do informal artisanal mining activities transition to illegality in some regions, while they move toward legality or remain informal in others? What did you find?
Toledo Orozco: From a policy perspective, we tend to see legal status as fixed — informal, legal or illegal. In reality, there’s a lot of fluidity between these states. Workers tend to move between legal activities and combine them with informal ones. Artisanal mining illustrates these movements well.
We studied and identified two conditions under which actors can change their status. One is the centrality of the activity to the economy. Is this the only activity that’s producing jobs? Are there other activities such as agriculture or tourism absorbing the rural labor force? When the activity is the only one producing jobs, it exerts an economic influence that translates into political leverage. This is the first condition for artisanal miners to transition to legal status. Without the support of local authorities, it is more likely that informal actors will remain informal.
Second, differences in power within the sector can lead to organizational asymmetries. A mining elite, where a few actors control most of the land and resources, uses subnational officials to its advantage. The mining elite will look to retain an advantage related to land concentration, more access to power, more facilities to export minerals, and so on.
But when there are low organizational asymmetries — meaning there’s no mining elite — most of the miners are more or less on the same ground. Facing national-level regulation, they will push subnational officials to help formalize their activities so they can mine without problems.
To read Toledo Orozco and Arce’s World Politics article, “Informal, Legal, or Illegal?” in full, please visit Project Muse.
This interview was condensed by Poornima Apte for World Politics.