In this episode of Voices of Transformation, DPI Executive Director Florence Drummond speaks with Dr Robin Smith, geologist, environmental scientist and project manager at the World Resources Forum in Winterthur, Switzerland. Robin has spent most of her career working on the fate and transport of contaminants in mining environments, with related work in remediation, waste management and community engagement. At the World Resources Forum she works on responsible sourcing and on the position of the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector in global mineral value chains.

Tune in to understand:

• Why repeated consultation without visible follow-through fatigues communities and puts a company’s social licence at risk.
• Why the global race for transition minerals such as copper, lithium, cobalt and graphite carries a paradox, with the minerals needed to decarbonise often extracted under conditions that harm local communities and ecosystems.
• How the ASM sector supplies an estimated 20 to 26 percent of various critical raw materials, and why disengaging from ASM when it appears in a supply chain tends to worsen conditions on the ground rather than resolve the risk.
• Where Robin sees the greatest need for innovation: participatory governance, and systems that treat socioeconomic data from mining communities as seriously as estimates of mineral reserves or export logistics.
• What changes when capacity building is co-designed with miners themselves rather than delivered as a fixed curriculum written elsewhere.

Robin is direct about what is at stake for the next generation. Without investment in education, geological information, financing cooperatives and youth-led advocacy, she expects the current boom to repeat the inequalities of the last one. She describes a hunger for knowledge among young people in the sectors she works with, and quotes a woman miner from Zimbabwe speaking at the recent European Partnership for Responsible Minerals conference: “ASM is a business. I am looking for investment where we both win.”

Her call to action is for multi-stakeholder coalitions that cross sector and national boundaries, built on shared objectives for what constitutes good due diligence and with risk and benefit sharing designed in from the start. She names the Responsible Business Alliance, the Responsible Minerals Initiative and the European Battery Alliance as steps in that direction, with deeper integration still to come.