All good things come from below? Scalar constructions of the ‘local’ in conflicts over mining

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate how scales are constructed and referred to in conflicts over mining. In an empirical analysis of conflicts over gold mining in Burkina Faso—a paramount example of the recent commodity boom and its pervasive socio-economic effects—the relevance of scalar constructions, particularly of the ‘local’, is explored. It starts from an understanding of the global and the local as constitutively related to one another. The principal question, therefore, is not whether global processes such as the commodity boom result in contentious political action, but rather how they are related to collective social action on various scales.Based on an empirical study, this article seeks to contribute to research on ‘glocal’ conflicts; that is, the ways in which ‘global’ structures and processes relate to ‘local’ collective action. The paper intervenes in the debate on scale in the study of contentious politics by suggesting that global–local relations are not restricted to scale-jumping and re-scaling by actors in socio-political conflicts. Drawing on Georg Towers' (2000) conceptual differentiation between ‘scales of regulation’ and ‘scales of meaning’, it is argued that scalar ascriptions and discourses as such are already an integral part of contestation and conflict. This applies also when conflicts are not specifically characterized by shifts between different scales of political power and institutional arrangements. In the case study, it is demonstrated that the construction of the scale of meaning—what is discursively ascribed to the ‘local’—it intertwined with the struggle over the scales of regulation. The latter, at the same time, are however not fixed and self-evident but are created and contested in social and political struggles.