Becoming a friend of the foe: The evolving perspectives on the ‘cohabitation’ strategies of large-scale and artisanal and small-scale mining operations

As mining governance regimes become far more welcoming to foreign investors, the dispossessed and disenchanted small-scale miners have staked their own claims to part of the mining wealth in the majority of mineral-rich regions across the globe. Alongside large-scale mineral extraction, there has been a proliferation of smaller mines operated by artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) actors. The coexistence of all forms of mining – large and small, formal and informal – have often come at the cost of significant socio-economic and environmental impacts. Thus, the concept and the practice of ‘cohabitation’ and ‘autonomy’ have dominated the policy and scholarly discourse on large-scale mining (LSM) and ASM interactions for decades, with an upsurge in the amount of scholarly literature reporting on the conflictual relations. In this vein, we review the LSM-ASM research and integrate it with the stream of theoretical scholarship: the ‘partnership’ perspective. Our perspective holds that the failure of past cohabitation arrangements, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, can be attributed to i) legitimacy and legality issues, ii) a focus on containment over collaboration, and iii) environmental remediation oversights. LSM companies often have to negotiate with informal or unlicensed ASM operators. Consequently, cohabitation agreements frequently overlook the legitimacy and legality of these arrangements, resulting in a lack of legally binding contracts. Hence, of critical importance, attention to ‘partnership’ principles, encapsulating among other things, attention to LSM economic-related interests, and ASM environmental-remediation obligations could help both scales and types of mining partner to flourish together. Our work has important implications for research and policy decisions on the mining landscape and suggests important directions for the practice of both LSM and ASM.