Short Abstract

Africa's critical minerals boom is remaking artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). By conceptualising a just transition from below, this panel asks what is new in ASM and what continues older extractive patterns. To do so, it invites multidisciplinary case studies across Africa’s mining regions.

Long Abstract

Africa holds roughly 30% of the world's critical mineral reserves, and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) plays a vital role in multiple value chains. From industrial development to environmental initiatives, debates about critical minerals on the continent have been animated by the hope of reversing decades of poor developmental outcomes from extraction. Yet this transformative promise has been thin on the ground.

While the geopolitics of critical minerals attracts sustained attention, far less is understood about how the boom is remaking artisanal mining itself. From women gathering lithium waste in Zimbabwe to tunnel collapses in Congolese cobalt pits, ASM registers the costs of an unjust transition and unsettles a sustainability narrative authored from above.

This panel seeks to understand ASM through the conceptualisation of a just transition from below. It explores the continuities and disruptions within ASM, asking: what is genuinely new in ASM under the critical minerals paradigm, and what continues older extractive patterns? How have critical minerals influenced what gets mined and where? How are gendered and generational divisions of labour being reshaped? What political claims do miners themselves advance? By analysing these changing patterns of ASM, this panel foregrounds plural prisms that position Africa within the changing global political economy of critical minerals. We invite multidisciplinary contributions exploring the interplay between ASM and critical minerals, welcoming single and comparative case studies from across Africa in a variety of critical minerals that explore these issues to bring greater nuances to our understanding of ASM.

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