Anticipating futures through enactments of expertise: A case study of an environmental controversy in a coal mining region of Colombia

Abstract

In a water-scarce, coal-producing region of Colombia, frictions are intensifying over the environmental impact of the diversion of a creek. Through ethnographic observation, this article examines the different positions on what this article refers to as the Bruno Creek Controversy and the enactments of scientific expertise deployed to influence decision making. On the one hand, there are officials from the mining company, who believe the risks associated with the creek diversion are negligible and manageable, potentially offset by interventions implemented under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs. On the other hand, a group of activists, equipped with local knowledge and partnered with experts, claims the project would cause unacceptable damage, furthermore arguing that the creek is a part of a sensitive broader ecosystem. At the same time, environmental authorities reveal how their enactment of expertise is bounded to political relations. This article argues that expertise is a performative, ideological, and interactional phenomenon that is authorized by existing power relationships. Controversies such as Bruno Creek, therefore, are highly productive sites for shaping environmental governance, whether through the increasing influence of local communities in decision-making, activist scientists' ability to inform policy, or through a shifting of temporal and geographical scales to better understand the implications of resource extraction.