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). Countering this mining rights-centered approach to ASM, this research proposal instead takes as its starting point the existence of a massive ASM-workforce does not (at least in the first instance) need rights-based access to mineral-bearing land, but requires access to viable opportunities for (wage) employment. Put differently, by emphasizing the importance of formal mining rights, existing analyses and policy interventions risk glossing over the needs and concerns of the informal ASM-workforce (Verbrugge, 2015). In addition to having important societal consequences, this neglect has far-reaching theoretical-analytical ramifications, because an entire range of issues, actors and relationships remain hidden from academic scrutiny. Recognizing this gap, we aim to convene a number of ASM-experts from different disciplinary backgrounds, working in different geographical contexts, around the following research question: What is the (changing) role of labor as a mechanism to derive benefits from mineral wealth for different actors involved in ASM?