CoCAM is a collaboration with Cambodian artisanal mining communities, local researchers and NGOs. Through this collaboration, CoCAM has created resources to share data that supports better mining futures.
Award: Flexible Funding
Academics: Professor Harriet Hawkins
Department: Geography
Summary
Context and Underpinning Research
Officially, the numbers of artisanal and small-scale miners working in Cambodia are very low. NGOs report a concerning lack of data on miners’ lives and practices, yet Professor Hawkins' previous research suggests that artisanal mining is a valued solution to economic precarity. Without sharing high quality data, Cambodian NGOs believe artisanal miners will continue to face increasingly bleak futures, possibly including: social exclusion; criminalisation; eviction from mining sites & ancestral lands.
Project Overview
This project was conducted in two phases.
Phase 1: Co-Design
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Over 50 miners, alongside ten Cambodian researchers participated in co-creation workshops. This involved selecting and refining key stories and reviewing design and image selection.
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Meetings with key local, national and international stakeholders including NGOs, jewellers and designers, as well as local educators and creators.
Phase 2: Resource sharing
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30 miners and 20 local people from the Pailin community attended an event with the goal to take the book ‘back’ to the miners and get their final thoughts before wider circulation.
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Individual stakeholder meetings were held to share the photobook, discuss a future launch, and plan further valuable resources adapted to the context.
Outcomes and Impact
- Produced two dual language photography books on artisanal mining in Cambodia.
- Sharing activities in communities and with stakeholders.
- Website and NGO reporting will be launched more widely when local stakeholders advise it is safe.
Preliminary impact:
- Counteracting miners’ feelings of shame, valuing cultural heritage and building family legacy, supporting intergenerational relationships within miner’s families, rebuilding local community relations through resource creation.
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Safe and appropriate circulation of the miners’ stories; within Cambodia, across South-East Asia and beyond through partnership building.
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Local benefit-sharing whilst ensuring the negotiation of changing political contexts to enable wider sharing of resources in due course, achieved by working with miners and their local communities.
Next steps
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Continue to share resources with the miners’ local communities. This will include data collection on immediate and long-term impact.
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When stakeholders consider politically appropriate, continue with plans to share the resources more widely within Cambodia [publics, NGOs] and launch the website
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