The Mine or the Mire? - Mobilizing Place and Identity in Resource Struggles

Abstract

In mining, the ideas of consultation and participation together with the frames of corporate responsibility and sustainable development have become the lingua franca of mining conflict resolution. This paper takes post-Gramscian approach to explore how different forms of power and dissent are performed in dialogue processes; and draws from political ecology literature to examine how place and place-based identities are mobilized in the conflicts. The findings show how place is actively utilized as a power resource by both the company, and those who resist it, and that place-basedness becomes a frame for contestation. The local values, meanings and knowledge are connected to the persuasion and control through dialogue. While the place contexts can offer strategic leverage for fringe stakeholders to oppose mining - instead of being disempowered by the hegemonic CSR practices - the power struggles and local dynamics can also silence some of the resistance. The empirical context of the paper is a project by mining multinational in Finnish Lapland. The paper contributeS to the theorization on the often veiled power struggles in corporate-community relations, and the limits of conciliatory mechanism; and to the research on identities in organisation studies by theorising on the significance of place as source of identity and how that influences the corporate-community relations.