Forest Right Act: a way forward to restore ecology in central India
Tejendra Pratap Gautam
Indian Institute of Technology
The mining bargain and natural resources law
Barry Barton
University of Waikato
Towards new forms of environmental democracy: lessons from the popular consultation in Colombia
María Cecilia Roa-García
Universidad de los Andes
Path convergence: explaining the interdiction of illegal mining in Peru and Colombia
Gisselle Vila Benites
University of Melbourne
Comments 11
Welcome everybody to our panel on legal processes or resistance! We have five super interesting and inspiring presentations. Let’s go watch them all and have some good discussion and Q&A.
Thank you all for your great presentations! The coloniality of extraction becomes clear through your presentations and also the need for resistance.
I have some questions to all of you separately later, but would like to start off with one that is relevant to the presentations more generally.
How does resistance, through demands to stop illegal mining, through lawyers’ scholarly work and through popular consultations change the meaning of extraction in your case/material for the group that you are interested in?
Hello Michiel,
In India, lawyers are very active in an issue like mining, at ground level, many civil society organizations are often led by lawyers, with their scholarship it is easy to put forward the demands of indigenous voices in front of the administration and often they help in litigation. Illegal mining is a very common phenomenon in forest areas, these areas are mainly inhabited by the forest dweller communities. Therefore, forest dwellers have to face mining issue on a regular basis. Hence, resistance against such atrocity is the only viable option. However, many times such resistance has to go through strong police brutality.
Best,
Tejendra
Greetings Michiel, fellow panellists, participants
I’m not sure about an answer for your question, Michiel, but I certainly agree that mining has always had a global / spatial dimension to it. I was much taken by the work of David Holterman and Christopher Alton on the annual PDAC Convention, tracing the spatial connections of companies. Likewise the contribution of Maria Dyveke Styve and Paul Gilbert on London as a capital market. Perhaps what I would add from the point of view of the “mining bargain” is that the geographical mapping has to include the capital city of the state or province that owns the minerals. The suppliers of capital and geological expertise come together (in places like the PDA Convention) to equip the operator, who is then in a relationship with the state as owner of the resource (usually) and they make decisions that affect the environment and people where the exploration or development takes place. So it is really triangular.
Barry
Good morning Barry,
But how about the market? Isn’t that a bit missing in your analysis?
best, Michiel
Hello Michiel
Which market, market for what? I’ll be interested to know what’s missing.
BB
Hi Michiel and fellow panellists,
Thank you so much for your presentations. As for your question, Michiel, I’d say that we need to closely observe who demands state responses and for what purpose. Definitely, illegal mining is a damaging activity for society and nature. Yet by exposing that police and military interventions react to large-scale mining companies demands in convergence with other national agendas, it is possible to understand that environmental remediation and the opening of pathways to sustainable livelihoods that depend on artisanal and small-scale mining is rarely the final goal. Understanding how each national political settlement unfolds offers also the opportunity to see how difficult it is for small-scale mining to be differentiated from illegal mining, hence, disqualifying mining in relation to livelihoods and presenting large-scale mining as “the” only valid type of extraction.
Good morning Gisselle,
Thank you. But is it really difficult to distinguish between small-scale mining and illegal mining, or is it business interest that frames it this way, in order to remain indeed ‘the’ only valid type of extraction.
best, Michiel
Good morning, Michiel,
The idea I convey in my presentation is the latter. It is very clear in Madre de Dios, Peru, where miners in the process of formalizing where suddenly excluded from the, let’s say, formalization zone. And in Chocó, Colombia, where small-scale miners have been facing obstacles to procure mining titles for years, yet the same legal system offers mining companies a swift process. Both the legal organisation of mining and livelihood marginalisation discourses equal small-scale miners with illegal mining.
There must be interesting questions of how economies of scale work; when they favour large operations in producing socially optimal results, and when the don’t. Let’s remember that “mining” encompasses a huge number of different resources, some of which seem to require large scale (copper, bauxite?) and others that don’t (sand and gravel, graphite, bentonite?). Operations of any kind need to show that they scrub up in social, environmental, and health and safety terms.
Of course, as in any other mining endeavour. The extent of impacts has to be assessed against the livelihood dependence on activities to issue comprehensive social and environmental safeguards that may include diversification.
[Just wanted to point to two very punctual corrections in my presentation]
*6:27: Slide 7, first bullet, should say “Ministry of Environment”.
*7:10: Slide 7, Ollanta Humala assumed the presidency of Peru in 2011.
Thanks for being an understanding online-participant.