archives@tulane.edu / This dissertation is a study of the legal treatment of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in Colombia. The main hypothesis of this dissertation is that in Colombia, over time, a byproduct of the formal legal system designed to govern mining resources has been the emergence of alternative management systems for mining resources at a small-scale level, which crafted an order without law. This has been the constant through the history of Colombia. Local regulatory arrangements defined by traditional local miners are complex, community-based systems for mining resources management (CBSMRM) that are rooted in the historical defense of rural territories. Their complexity and social legitimacy do not mean that they are ideal systems, and these community systems do not regulate all small-scale mining activities. However, some communities have put in place local orders that are not based on formal institutions, but rather are regulatory frameworks with diverse sources of authority, rules, objectives, actors, and forms of guiding the activity. An ethnographic work done in Marmato, Caldas showed that local miners, over time, and as product of many experiments and social transformations, have crafted CBSMRM. In other words, at the local level, disenfranchised groups gestate their own forms of relating to and using mining resources; over time, this creates community-based forms of mining resources management. The order without law has grown outside the formal institutions and clashes with them. As consequence, stakeholders on the ground are facing a gridlock situation in which none of the orders is capable achieving real effectiveness. To solve this situation, a dialogic platform is proposed with the intention of creating a bridge to connect legalities and trigger an open participatory mechanism in which legalities and stakeholders can define the new rules to govern those resources. In other words, define a governance order as a system of rules that gravitates around social legitimacy and not the source of the norms defining social interaction. This is an effort to open the door to new regulatory alternatives and dialogues among legalities; it is not a final answer to the crisis that extractive activities are experiencing but the proposal of a social laboratory of deliberation. / 1 / juan diego alvarez