Dr Boris Verbrugge
Small Group Project 2016-17
Centering Labor at the Artisanal- and Small-scale Mining Frontier: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives
Over the past decade artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has witnessed a massive expansion, with an estimated 20-30 million people in over 80 countries now involved in labor-intensive, low-tech, and predominantly informal mining activities. There exists broad agreement among scholars that ASM is ‘poverty-driven’ and that, given the right policy environment, it can make important contributions to development (Gamu et al., 2015). To unlock this development potential, scholars and policymakers often emphasize the need to provide ASM-operators with secure access to mineral-bearing land, through the issuance of formal mining rights (Siegel & Veiga, 2007).
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Biography
Boris Verbrugge works as a research expert on business and human rights in the research group Sustainable Development at KU Leuven. For his PhD (Ghent University, 2011-2015), he conducted long-term field research in artisanal mining areas in the Philippines. Having worked as a researcher and lecturer at Radboud University Nijmegen, and as a post-doct at the Institute for Development Policy (IOB) at the university of Antwerp, in 2017 Boris joined HIVA. At HIVA, he is conducting policy-oriented and action-oriented research on human rights in global value chains. In particular, Boris is interested in understanding how human rights and environmental due diligence processes reverberate through the supply chains of companies, generating positive and negative impacts for different actors. Based on this understanding, he engages with a wide variety of stakeholders (public buyers, civil society, companies) to help them develop effective responses to human rights challenges in their value chains.
Biographical details correct as of 21.05.26