A study from the Wyss Academy follows ten mining leaders in Madre de Dios, Peru, and finds that values, leadership styles, trust, and legitimacy shape whether bottom-up change can take hold – and where it stalls. 

In Madre de Dios, in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon, artisanal and small-scale gold mining sustains roughly half the regional economy and accounts for the largest area of forest lost to gold mining anywhere in Peru. For two decades, top-down formalization has struggled to ease that tension. A new study asks a different question: what do the people who lead mining collectives actually do, and when does their leadership open room for more responsible practice? 

Drawing on qualitative interviews with ten leaders of mining collectives and ten key informants, conducted between December 2024 and January 2025, the researchers traced how leaders' inner dimensions – their values and ways of leading – connect to outward practices within collectives and in policy arenas. Some values appeared widely shared across the mining community, including well-being tied to formalization, transparency, honesty, and spiritual and customary practices. Others were more distinctive to leaders: an emphasis on compliance and accountability, collective unity, dialogue over confrontation, and a stronger sense of responsibility toward the Amazonian forest. That last divergence has roots: many miners migrated from the Andean highlands, where the forest is understood differently, which helps explain why a close connection to it is less widely shared. The study also found a range of leadership styles at work – from those who bridge local and national arenas to those who drive momentum or reinforce institutional credibility – while the self-interested operator, the figure often assumed to dominate mining politics, was notably absent from this group. 

These accounts matter beyond mining. They show that change in contested landscapes cannot be read through policies, technologies, or formal institutions alone – it also turns on values, relationships, and the conditions under which local actors can take part in governance. The study is careful about what it claims: it does not measure outcomes, but identifies observable practices that may support longer-term shifts. One leader described inviting a government minister to see riverbank mining first-hand, arguing that "with good management it was possible to work" – an exchange the study links to a later ruling that eased certain restrictions for small-scale miners. Others worked to promote cleaner techniques, build external trust, strengthen coordination within collectives, and form a new regional federation oriented toward more inclusive and environmentally responsible policies. 

The work is grounded in one of the Amazon's most contested extractive frontiers, in the Solutionscape "Resilient forested landscapes, promoting high-value multifunctionality," where the Wyss Academy and Hub South America engage alongside local partners. It reflects a way of working that pairs grounded evidence with attention to governance as much as practice. It also sets a clear limit. Leaders are contested on two fronts – by the broader mining community and by rival leaders, sometimes branded "environmentalists" for their positions – and their room to act remains constrained by fragmented collective identities, power imbalances, and broader regulatory and political conditions. Leadership alone is not enough; bottom-up change and supportive policy have to move together. 

The article, Inner dimensions, outer change: exploring the transformative potential of leadership in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon, is available in The Extractive Industries and Society (open access). Led by Kattia Diaz-Ydones, it is co-authored by Fernando Fernandez, Clara L. Diebold, Ronny M. Condor, Jan Göpel, Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel, Dominique Schmid, Armando Valdés-Velásquez, Arne Weiss, Gabriela Wiederkehr-Guerra, and Julie G. Zaehringer, bringing together researchers at the Wyss Academy for Nature, the University of Bern.