Modern artisanal gold mining practices and livelihood dynamics in Shurugwi, Zimbabwe

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is increasingly central to rural livelihoods in Zimbabwe amid unemployment and declining agricultural viability driven by climate change. However, in a context characterised by uneven access to technology, capital, and contested resource governance, ASGM assumes a socially differentiated and politically contested character with far-reaching implications for livelihood trajectories. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews, focus group discussions, and archaeological surface survey walks in Shurugwi, Zimbabwe, this article analyses how everyday mining practices, technological adoption, and socio-political relations shape livelihood dynamics. Using a historical materialist lens, the study shows that differential access to processing technologies and means of production structures participation and reward within the mining economy. Informal arrangements function as adaptive governance mechanisms regulating access to labour, markets, and claims amid regulatory ambiguity. Overall, ASGM emerges as a contradictory livelihood system that simultaneously enables accumulation, survival, and precarity, underscoring livelihoods as contested processes embedded in evolving socio-technical and political relations of production.