(7)Understanding Collective Action in Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining

摘要

Millions of people worldwide are involved in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Many of them live in conditions of poverty and insalubrities due to the mercury amalgamation of gold and the application of other rudimentary techniques. In particular, there is a rising global concern about mercury use in small-scale gold mining because of its harmful effects on ecosystems and human health. Associative entrepreneurship has been promoted as a way of accessing to alternative techniques to deal with this mercury pollution in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. By associative entrepreneurship, we mean the creation of local associations between small-scale gold miners in order to acquire more environmentally-friendly technologies. We built a behavioral simulation model to assess the feasibility of associative entrepreneurship (collective action)in the context of the public-good dilemma that gold mining communities face. The model construction is based on results from economic experiments in Colombia, and properly replicates the observed behavioral patterns; thus, it reveals that sustained collective action is possible when miners completely understand the social dilemma they face, but that self-organization is not possible. Features such as reciprocity and temptation to free ride partially explain why self-organization fails. In such a case, external intervention has a key role in promoting programs that improve the understanding of the social dilemma faced by artisanal and small-scale gold miners.