Transnational Mining Corporations Research Articles

Foreign investment, mining conflict, and contested development in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the conflict over the most contentious resource development project in Bangladesh, a proposed coal mine in its northwest region. Moving beyond the rationale of place-based local struggles against transnational mining corporations, it examines the macro dynamics of resource extraction, i.e. the institutional context and deal-making culture, to emphasise the ability of popular power from below to confront extractive industry practices on the ground. Drawing on Overland’s theorising of the role of civil society in natural resource management, it argues that in a political context characterised by extractive institutions, robust debate in the public sphere and social mobilisation at local and national levels can strengthen popular power from below to safeguard the benefits of energy resources in a poor country.

Obstacles to mining formalization in Colombia

The central argument here is that a number of factors conspire to impede the initiation of a serious, State-led formalization process. The most important of these is the vast profits to be gained from illicit mining on the part of a wide array of armed groups, and the potentially corruptive influence of bribes to government officials to perpetuate this incredibly lucrative illegal trade. It is important to underscore that it is not the informal miner accruing massive profits, but rather that illegal armed groups that organize and preside over the trade. There also has been tight connections between government officials and mining executives, some of whom gained from the process of privatized, corporate-led privatization. Who benefits most from illicit mining and the failed model of privatized formalization? The clear answer is illegal armed groups and transnational mining corporations. Given the vast and empowering profits associated with illicit mining, the situation is not likely to change anytime soon. This highly complex issue is perhaps best addressed conceptually through an intersectional approach with an emphasis on class politics.

Resistance, repression and elite dynamics: Unpacking violence in the Guatemalan mining sector

Guatemala is one of the most mining conflict prone countries in the world, with disproportionately high levels of violence accompanying the sector. Starting in the early 2000's, the rapid spread of mining projects throughout the country’s rural areas engendered widespread popular opposition among affected communities. Anti-mining activism in turn elicited a reaction from the government and the mining sector that was overwhelmingly characterised by violence, repression and criminalisation, making Guatemala one of the most dangerous countries in the world per capita for environmental activists. Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2017, this article examines why mining – an industry of relatively limited economic importance in Guatemala - is accompanied by such high levels of violence and repression. We suggest that mining, rather than having a high economic value, holds strategic value to the country’s powerful elite, and that violence is part of securing control over land more generally and operationalising the mining sector in particular. In recent years, Guatemala has witnessed the entrance of new transnational elites associated with multinational mining corporation. While these new elites control access to international markets and technology, they remain in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the old, local elites because the latter still exercise control over crucial political resources, networks of information and land. By forming alliances with and providing services to transnational mining corporations, a faction of the economic elite strengthens and secures its position as a powerful political actor and its access to profitable business, i.e., infrastructure development or selling energy to mining companies.

The politics of baselining in the Grants uranium mining district of northwestern New Mexico

During the second half of the twentieth century, northwestern New Mexico served as the primary production site for one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals. From 1948 to 1970 the “Grants uranium district” provided almost half of the total uranium ore accumulated by the United States federal government for the production of nuclear weapons, in addition to becoming a national source for commercial nuclear energy from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. By the twenty-first century, after a prolonged period of economic decline that began in the late 1970s, all uranium mining and milling in New Mexico had ceased, leaving a legacy of environmental health impacts. What was once referred to as “The Uranium Capital of the World” now encompasses over a thousand abandoned uranium mines and seven massive uranium mill tailings piles, which are associated with airborne and soil contamination as well as groundwater plumes of uranium and other contaminants of concern, in a landscape that has been fractured by underground mine workings and punctured by thousands of exploratory boreholes. This article presents an ethnographic study of the diverse forms of expertise involved in monitoring and managing the mine waste and mill tailings. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic research, I describe the relationship between different stakeholders from local communities, government agencies, and transnational mining corporations as they deliberate about the possibility of cleaning up the former mining district. My thesis is that the possibility of cleaning up the Grants district hinges on the “politics of baselining”—a term I introduce to describe the relationship between stakeholders and their competing environmental models and hydrogeological theories; each accounts for a different geological past prior to mining that can be deemed “natural,” as the background against which to measure the anthropogenic impacts from mining.

Using local content policies to engender resource-based development in Zambia: A chronicle of a death foretold?

The commodity super cycle, shifting terms of trade, new oil discoveries, and altering geographies of supply and demand have restored confidence in resource-based development in the Global South. A central element herein is local content policies, which are thought to enhance host country participation in resource extraction and thus lay the foundation for structural transformation. This article analyses the extent to which local content policies trigger resource-based development. It uses Zambia as a critical case and argues that while, in theory, these policies could further domestic market formation, this is hampered in practice by local suppliers’ inability to meet the quality requirements of transnational mining corporations. It also argues that the Doing Business Indicator ranking drives the Zambian government to adopt policies that work against domestic market formation; and that power relations between transnational mining corporations and the Zambian state are imbalanced. The most likely result is that Zambia’s new Local Content Strategy has as little chance of transforming the Zambian economy as previous attempts to engender resource-based development.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Transnational Mining, and Resistance: A Political Ecology Contribution to Green Criminology

This article draws on discourses in political ecology and green criminology to critique the ways in which transnational mining is legitimated and advanced with significant impacts on natural environments and local communities in the Global South. It examines an ongoing case of environmental conflict related to Australian mining in South Africa and explores processes of ecologically unequal exchange. It identifies how the corporate tentacles of transnational mining corporations circumvent and subvert regulatory oversight to exploit people, land and natural resources—with devastating environmental and social impacts. Finally, it discusses the perils and prospects faced by affected communities, as well as localized movements of resistance and environmental activism when confronting state and corporate power.

Northern Crises

Using feminist disability studies and intersectionality, this article draws upon the ongoing resource extractions in Labrador, Canada to argue for examining local communities and relationships as one way to understand gender and global social, economic and environmental crises. The article explores how crises in Labrador have been constituted and maintained around global agendas of economic and resource development, historical and current colonial practices and a limited and constrained international relations with local Indigenous nations. The lives of women and their communities in Labrador illustrate one wave of a global crisis that extinguishes diversity and connection to the land in a race to extract natural resources, maintain global military power and gain profit in the global economy. The actions over the past thirty years by NATO and the Canadian federal, provincial and municipal governments, coupled with transnational mining corporations such as Vale, have “normalized” crisis in the communities and reduced the capacity of these communities and Indigenous nations to respond to the issues arising as a result of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric development project. Yet the women and their communities illustrate their agency and reject an analysis of them exclusively as victims. Together with researchers and activists, the women in Labrador have built a community of practice in the Feminist Northern Network.

Social Struggle and the Political Economy of Natural Resource Extraction in Peru

In the period 2002–12, the Peruvian economy almost doubled in size. This growth was mainly the consequence of the commodity boom in these years. The importance of the mining sector for the Peruvian Treasury is politically translated in the immense difficulties Peruvian Governments have in closing the doors to transnational mining corporations. The government of Ollanta Humala actually inserted the fiscal contribution of extractive industries into the cornerstone of its social policies. In Peru, a growing body of literature is emerging regarding mining issues. However, it lacks an analysis of the development of the mining sector in relation to the general workings of capitalism. In this article we analyze the development of mining in Peru from a critical political economy perspective as this enables us to identify the forces that are advancing the capitalist development process as well as the forces of resistance to this development.

Resistindo ao desenvolvimento neocolonial: a luta do povo de Andalgalá contra projetos megamineiros

A América Latina vem experimentando uma nova era de declarada fé dos governos no mito do desenvolvimento, em articulação com a expansão de políticas extrativistas exportadoras em um contexto de renovada dependência. A face mais dramática do extrativismo na região tem sido a crescente presença de corporações mineiras transnacionais apoiadas por governos nacionais e regionais e por instituições internacionais financeiras e de apoio ao desenvolvimento, e intensamente resistidas por movimentos sociais populares. Neste artigo apresentamos o caso de Andalgalá (uma pequena cidade na Província de Catamarca, na Argentina) e as lutas do povo contra corporações mineiras transnacionais e seus aliados. Na tradição da Filosofia da Libertação e do método ana-dialético de Dussel, nos engajamos com o que tem sido denominado "comunidades argentinas do NÃO", expressando sua oposição a formas neocoloniais de desenvolvimento e gestão. Neste artigo estamos especificamente interessados em compreender como dois dispositivos gerencialistas usados pelas corporações mineiras, responsabilidade social corporativa (RSC) e pactos de governança, impactam a luta do povo. Acima de tudo, este artigo oferece instantâneos de batalhas na linha de frente do extrativismo. Esperamos ter dado voz àquelas pessoas que normalmente não são ouvidas, criando um espaço para suas visões sobre um tipo diferente de desenvolvimento.

The trans-national gold curse of Papua New Guinea

This paper reviews gold and copper mining in Papua New Guinea (PNG) along the “triad stakeholder model” (Ballard and Banks 2003) proposing a triad relationship between (1) trans-national mining corporations, (2) the nation-state of Papua New Guinea, and (3) indigenous local communities, their socio-ecological environment and claims. Gold mining could be a huge asset, but turns out to be a curse to the independent part of the world’s second largest island known as “a mountain of gold in a sea of oil.” Our paper is based on research that began during our year-long residency at the country’s only Technical University in Lae. We are discussing several issues related to the nation’s gold resources and their exploitation: varied mining technologies and locations, the environmental impact, economics, human cost and gender issues, indigenous culture versus international corporate culture, state interferences, and urban development. One example is the industrial port city of Lae, founded during the gold rush of the 1920s that inaugurated rapid urban development. Once gloriously known as the “Pearl of the Pacific,” the town experienced administrative expansion and suffered from the subsequent exhaustion of nearby gold mines entailing a reverse development.

Continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana: the real-life stories of dispossessed peasants in three mining communities

The purpose of this article is to provide an opportunity for the peasants in three mining communities in Ghana to voice their experiences of primitive accumulation under contemporary global neo-liberalism. There is a plethora of literature on the exploitation of Africa, drawing on theories of new imperialism or ‘accumulation by dispossession’. However, there is not much grassroots empirical work on how different social groups experience accumulation by dispossession. It seems that NGOs and journalists do better on this than intellectuals. I seek in this article to contribute to filling this lacuna, by focusing on the hardest hit social group, namely, the peasants. I also argue that the existence of this lacuna has major theoretical and political implications for the struggle for alternatives to capitalism and ‘development’ that is distinctly anti-imperialist. The article is based on data collected through focus group discussions and in-depth personal interviews with peasants affected by surface mining activities of transnational mining corporations in three mining communities in the resource-rich Western Region of Ghana: Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie.

Transnational mining corporations and sustainable resource-based livelihoods in Sierra Leone

This paper draws from world-systems and sustainable livelihoods approaches to analyze the connections between multinational exports of rutile (titanium oxide), diminished ecological resources and resource-based livelihoods, and gendered household dynamics in a peripheralized mining region in Sierra Leone. The discussion focuses on how the extraction of mineral resources instigated by exogenous capital investors forces links to household transformation, particularly the vulnerability context of women. Using archival records and field survey data, the case study of rutile mining in southwestern Sierra Leone connects the low-waged mining labour of traditional resource-based subsistence communities and deepening marginalization of and financial pressures on women in mining households to global mineral markets. The study focuses on women's coping mechanisms that are embedded within traditional social networks in relation to an external intervention, a low-tech mechanical cassava grater, intended to strengthen their livelihoods. It finds that the potential for this transformation is impeded by sociocultural, environmental and financial limitations.

Mining Migrants: Transnational Mining and Migration Patterns in the Peruvian Andes*

This article evaluates the linkages between transnational mining corporations and local migration dynamics in Peru. Changes in migration patterns in the Cajamarca region of Peru over the past decade are examined via a case study of the gold mining operations of Newmont Mining Corporation. The study considers household migration behavior in communities surrounding the mine as well as transformations in regional, national, and international migration patterns. Also examined are the temporal nature of these changing patterns across short, medium, and long-term time periods. *This research was conducted with the support of a National Science Foundation Regional Sciences DDRI (BCS-0002347) and the United States Fulbright Commission. All opinions, data, omissions, and errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Livelihoods, Mining and Peasant Protests in the Peruvian Andes

This paper explores the relationships between Andean Peru's new mineral-based neoliberal political economy, protests against transnational mining corporations and the transformation of livelihoods taking place in the region. It evaluates how new transnational mining operations are dramatically altering livelihood resources in two case-study areas of the Peruvian Andes and in what ways they are linked to community mobilizations against mining operations. The paper argues that the utilization of frameworks based on resources and livelihoods can contribute to analyses of the spatial relationships between transnational mining corporations and local livelihood transformation. Through a comparative case study of two peasant protests that began in late 1999 and continue today in the Cordillera Huayhuash and Cajamarca, the paper illustrates how transnational mining corporations are transforming the environmental, social and economic contexts for livelihoods in the region and how these changes are linked to household engagement in protests against mining operations. Resumen Este estudio explora la relación entre la nueva economía política neoliberal del Perú, las protestas contra corporaciones mineras transnacionales y la transformación de los medios de subsistencia que tienen lugar en la región. Evalúa como las nuevas operaciones de la minería transnacional están alterando estos medios en dos áreas-caso en los Andes peruanos y de que manera están relacionadas con las movilizaciones comunitarias contrarias a las operaciones mineras. El autor argumenta cómo el uso de marcos basados en recursos y sustentos podría contribuir al análisis de las relaciones espaciales entre las corporaciones mineras transnacionales y la transformación del sustento local. A través de un estudio comparativo de dos protestas campesinas que comenzaron en el año 1999 y se continúan hasta hoy día en la cordillera Huayhuash y Cajamarca, el estudio muestra como tales corporaciones están transformando los contextos ambientales y socio-económicos de los medios de subsistencia dentro la región.

Environmental Harm in Developing Countries Caused by Subsidiaries of Canadian Mining Corporations: The Interface of Public and Private International Law

SummaryThis article addresses the responsibility of Canada for ensuring that Canadian transnational mining corporations do not cause environmental harm in other countries. The author discusses the liability of parent companies under Canadian law for the actions of their subsidiaries abroad and considers the jurisdictional and choice of law problems in bringing a tort action in Canadian courts. The author also considers the implications under international law of any extraterritorial application of Canadian law.