GCRO hosts Carleton University anthropologist on informal mining and formalization in Africa

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory, together with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, the Wits Mining Institute, and the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), hosted Professor Blair Rutherford on Wednesday, 19 August 2026. Rutherford, an anthropologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, presented on "Artisanal and small-scale mining, formalization, and the social infrastructure of work: Some ethnographic observations from Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Kenya."

Artisanal and small-scale mining, known variously as informal mining, illegal mining, or zama-zama in South Africa, has drawn growing attention from the public, policymakers and authorities across the continent in recent decades. The label itself is rarely neutral: it signals a stance. But most assessments converge on the same themes: the livelihoods the sector sustains, its informality, and its costs to the environment, to gendered safety, and to economic development. The usual prescription, regardless of framing, is formalization or securitization. Tighten the rules, the thinking goes, and you reduce the harms while boosting state revenue and growth.

Rutherford pushed back on that framing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and critical legal studies, he proposed a different lens: the "social infrastructure of work." Rather than treating formalization as a technical fix, this approach surfaces the gendered, classed, and power dynamics embedded in how mining work actually gets done.

His argument: the routines and relationships that organise artisanal mining, including who holds authority, who does what labour, and who bears the risk, shape how technological and environmental shifts play out on the ground, with widely different consequences depending on the site. Formalization and securitization efforts don't land on a blank slate. They're shaped by these existing arrangements, and in turn reshape them.