Seminario CEDE - Fernando Fernandez

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Millions of people depend on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) for their livelihoods, yet transitions toward cleaner and more formal mining business models remain rare despite decades of policy interventions. We study the sources of this persistence in the Peruvian Amazon using novel survey data collected from concession owners and workers in Madre de Dios. We document substantial heterogeneity in miners’ economic conditions, exposure to risk and insecurity, access to finance and markets, trust in public institutions, and beliefs about mining and development, and examine how these characteristics relate to stated intentions to adopt clean technologies, pursue formalization, and invest in alternative business models. We then use two complementary survey experiments to discipline interpretation. A randomized conjoint experiment elicits preferences over multidimensional policy bundles, while a vignette experiment isolates the relative importance of liquidity constraints versus downside risk in adoption decisions. Together, the analysis highlights how interacting financial, institutional, and belief-based constraints shape both initial take-up and subsequent follow-through, helping explain why single-instrument policies often fail and informing the design of bundled approaches to support durable mining transitions in environmentally fragile contexts.