Guyana's gold sector is really two sectors in one country. Alongside the large-scale operations that command the headlines, investor briefings, and international standards sits a far larger number of artisanal and small-scale miners — individuals, families, cooperatives, and small operations working the same mineral-rich interior, sometimes on the same ground and always in the same communities. For a long time, the large-scale sector has tended to treat that presence as a nuisance: something to be managed around, complained about, or wished away. It is none of those things. It is a fact of the landscape, and how the sector responds to it is one of the most consequential governance questions Guyana's mining industry will face in the years ahead.
I have spent the better part of a career where those two worlds meet. During my years as a liaison officer at a large-scale Guyanese mining operation, my seat sat precisely at the boundary where an operation's perimeter, the communities around it, and the regulators who oversee both come together. That position taught me that the small-scale sector is not an inconvenience to be contained but a neighbour to be managed with a discipline — boundaries, water, land, markets, and communities that overlap. This article makes the case I have carried from that vantage: that coexistence between large and small operators in Guyana is a governance issue, and formalising the small-scale sector is an opportunity for the whole country, not a problem for the large-scale sector to endure.
Two sectors, one country
It helps to state plainly what coexistence actually means in Guyana. The interior does not divide itself into tidy concession lines that match the distinction between "large" and "small." The large-scale operation, the artisanal miner working a claim, the small family operation, the community living around both — they share rivers, roads, land, and labour. The same young Guyanese who moves through the environment and safety management of the modernized operation may come from a family that has mined small-scale for generations. The two sectors are not separate economies; they are one economy seen from different scales, and they share one watershed and one set of communities.
Once that is seen, the framing changes. The question is not how to keep the two sectors apart — they cannot be separated, any more than a river can be divided into its uses. The question is how they are going to share the same ground, water, and communities without each becoming the other's hazard. That is a coexistence problem, and coexistence is a discipline that has to be designed, agreed, and maintained. It does not happen by ignoring the other sector; it happens by governing the relationship deliberately.
Why coexistence is a governance issue, not a nuisance problem
It is tempting to treat artisanal and small-scale mining as a nuisance — something to be policed rather than managed, a problem of disorder rather than a question of design. But nuisance framing produces nuisance outcomes: conflict at boundaries, disputes over water, pressure on communities, and a regulator left to referee incidents after they happen. None of those is inevitable, and none of them is really about the small-scale miner as a problem. They are symptoms of an ungoverned relationship.
The governance view starts somewhere else. It treats the boundary between large and small operations as a managed interface, like any other regulated interface. Who holds which land, and on what terms? Whose responsibility is the water quality at a shared point? How do formal and informal activity coexist in the same community without one undermining the safety or legitimacy of the other? These are questions with answers, and the answers live in the same places answers to every other governance question live: in clear boundaries, in agreed rules, in documented decisions, and in consistent enforcement. When those are in place, the conflict that everyone assumed was inherent turns out to be, mostly, a failure of governance. When they are absent, no amount of goodwill resolves a dispute, because there is nothing concrete for either party to stand on.
The formalisation opportunity
The most important shift available to Guyana is not to oppose the small-scale sector but to formalise it — to bring its participants inside a system of licensing, standards, and structured markets rather than leave them outside it. The institutions exist: the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission already licenses activity across the sector, and there are established channels, associations, and cooperatives through which small-scale operators organise. The opportunity is to make the formal path the one that works — the one that offers a clear claim, clear obligations, and a clear route to market for an operator who complies.
I will be careful not to invent policy specifics here; that is for the sector and its regulators to design, and every jurisdiction's answer will differ. What I can say from experience is what formalisation is for. It is how a small operator becomes legible — to the state, to buyers, to communities — and legibility is the precondition for responsible conduct. An operator who is outside the system cannot be held to standards, cannot be reached by support, and cannot convert good practice into a better outcome. An operator who is inside it can. The formalisation opportunity is therefore not about squeezing the small-scale sector out; it is about giving its participants a standing to which responsibility can attach, and a market in which responsibility is rewarded. That is how a sector that is currently treated as a problem becomes a governed part of the national economy.
What responsible large-scale operators can do
The formalisation of the small-scale sector is not only the state's work. Large-scale operators have a part in it, and it is a part that begins close to home, at their own boundaries. The relationship a large operator manages with the small operators who share its watershed is a working relationship, and like every working relationship it is built on clear terms, repeated conduct, and a reputation for fairness. Operators who treat their small-scale neighbours as counterparts to be negotiated with on defined terms build a different kind of stability than those who treat them as trespassers to be reported.
There are practical disciplines that responsible large-scale operators already bring to their own operations and can bring to the boundary: clear and documented agreements over shared land and water; consistent, verifiable reporting that both sides can rely on; and an approach to safety and environmental standards that does not begin and end at the perimeter. When a community sees one standard inside the fence and another outside it, the boundary becomes the fault line where trust breaks. When the standard is consistent across it, coexistence is proven. Operators need not manage the small-scale sector; they need to manage the interface well — and doing that is one of the surest contributions any large operator can make to the stability of the whole.
Local content meets the small-scale sector
I have argued throughout this site that Guyanese local content is best measured not by a percentage but by capability — by what remains in Guyana, in the skills, firms, and institutions that outlast any single project. That test has a natural application to the small-scale sector, because the small-scale miner is, in a very real sense, local content personified. Every job a small operation supports, every piece of equipment it sources from a Guyanese supplier, and every trained technician it produces is value that stays in the country. When those operations are formalised and brought inside the standards system, they become capable local participants rather than an informal shadow economy.
Seen this way, the small-scale sector stops being the problem and becomes part of the answer to the question every Guyanese asks of the mining industry: what remains in Guyana when the ore is gone? A formalised, capable small-scale sector is exactly the kind of thing that remains — skills, enterprise, and livelihoods that do not depend on a single corporate decision. The country that treats its small-scale miners as internal capability to be developed, rather than as a nuisance to be contained, is building the very thing its local-content ambitions claim to want.
Coexistence as national development
Guyana is at a point where the question is no longer whether it will build a modern, responsible mining sector, but how broadly the benefits of that sector will be shared. Coexistence between large and small operators is, at bottom, a national-development question. The large-scale sector brings scale, capital, and international standards; the small-scale sector brings reach, livelihoods, and deep roots in the interior's communities. A country that can make the two work together on governed terms is a country that has turned its mineral wealth into a broad and durable base of development rather than into the isolated prosperity of a few.
This is why I have written before that responsible mining in Guyana means coexisting with artisanal and small-scale miners whose practices cannot simply be wished away — responding to the sector as it is, and governing the relationship accordingly. The choice before Guyana is not between a large-scale industry and a small-scale one. It is between a disordered coexistence, in which the two sectors trip over each other and mineral wealth is spent managing conflict, and a governed one, in which boundaries are respected, operators are formalised, capability is retained, and the whole contributes to the nation.
If you are an operator, a policymaker, or an organisation navigating the relationship between large and small operators in Guyana, the Advisory and Stakeholder Engagement route is the right door for support on stakeholder and government-relations problems where boundaries, communities, and regulators meet. If the conversation is better suited to a forum with a broader audience, the Speaking and Media route is open as well. And the fuller story of how I learned to see these boundaries — from behind a counter to a seat at the boundary between an operation and its communities — is in the book.