Beyond licensing: pathways to environmental compliance and livelihood stability in formalised artisanal and small-scale mining

Purpose – This study explains when formalised artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) delivers joint environmental compliance and livelihood stability in Nigeria, treating formalisation as a conjunctural bundle of enabling conditions rather than a single net-effect intervention.

Design/methodology/approach – Using a multi-respondent, six-state survey of 212 formalised ASM sites integrating operator, community and regulator assessments, this study validates a multi-attribute Formalisation Quality construct and applies a measurement-then-configuration design. Fuzzy sets are calibrated for formalisation quality, institutional support and trust, mechanisation and clean-technology adoption, community embeddedness and legitimacy, and gender inclusion. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is employed to identify sufficient configurations for high environmental and socioeconomic performance and for their negations.

Findings – Results show equifinality and causal asymmetry. High environmental performance arises via (1) a governance-technology pathway, combining formalisation quality, trusted institutional support and cleaner technology adoption, and (2) a governance-community-inclusion pathway, combining trusted institutions, community embeddedness and gender inclusion, even under moderate mechanisation. High socioeconomic performance arises via (1) a market-community-inclusion pathway, combining formalisation quality, embedded local relations and women’s participation, and (2) a state-service technology pathway, combining institutional support and mechanisation. Underperformance follows non mirror causal structures: weak institutional support and low cleaner-practice capability are associated with environmental underperformance, while weak community embeddedness and limited gender inclusion are associated with livelihood underperformance.

Research limitations/implications – The cross-sectional design constrains temporal inference on sequencing and path dependence; longitudinal renewal-cycle and inspection-history designs are recommended. Future research should combine panel calibration, traceability records, transaction data and more fine-grained gender inclusion measures, including pay equity, task segmentation, leadership authority and gender-based safety exposure.

Practical implications – Formalisation programmes should be designed and monitored as assemblable “recipes” that combine governance credibility with either capability-upgrading or legitimacy-and-inclusion mechanisms, supported by a replicable audit framework. Rather than treating licences as sufficient policy instruments, regulators and development agencies should diagnose which complementary conditions are absent at the site level and assemble intervention bundles accordingly.

Originality/value – This study advances ASM formalisation theory by specifying testable configurational pathways, repositioning gender inclusion as an enabling condition, and demonstrating a replicable measurement then-fsQCA workflow for resource-intensive governance contexts. It also integrates political ecology and sustainability-transition reasoning by showing that ASM performance depends on how authority, capability, cleaner technology, community legitimacy and inclusion are assembled at the mine-community interface.