Cleaning mineral supply chains? Political economies of exploitation and hidden costs of technical fixes

Abstract

Columbia with the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He holds an MBA (Paris 1) and PhD (Oxford). Working on linkages between environment, development and security, he has published widely on natural resource governance and investigates socio-environmental relations and commodity networks linking spaces of exploitation, consumption and regulation. Sam Spiegel is Senior Lecturer and ESRC Future Research Leader Fellow at the University of Edinburgh with the School of Social and Political Science. He holds an MSc (UBC) and PhD (Cambridge). Working on conceptual and methodological debates in development studies, he has published widely on social marginalization and collective mobilization in mining regions and the framing of social justice debates.

Furious depletion—Conceptualizing artisan mining and extractivism through gender, race, and environment

“…This is reflected in supply chain governance policies mobilizing racialized imaginaries of "artisan mining" that legitimize otherwise contested schemes (Le Billon, 2006;Vogel, 2022). Le Billon and Spiegel (2021) for example demonstrate that some the hidden costs of governance schemes aimed at "cleaning" mineral supply chains are borne by artisan mining communities and built upon racialized representations of "dirty" artisanally mined minerals. Within these interventions, artisan mining is portrayed as "risky" for downstream, importing governments and corporations because of the reputational risks they entail, but these representations obscure the actual existential health and environmental risks borne by miners themselves.…”

“…I build largely on a critical review of existing research, as well as about 10 year's ethnographic research on goldmining, in Burkina Faso especially, and two ongoing research projects on artisan mining in Africa and "responsible" gold supply chains. Given the sheer number of people, livelihoods, families, sustained by artisan mining, and the increased demand for minerals under "green transitions" (Dunlap and Jakobsen, 2020;Le Billon and Spiegel, 2021), a sharper conceptualization of artisan mining in extractivism is a pressing endeavor indeed.…”

Undercurrents: illegal fishing and European Union markets

“…Ensuring such 'fair' fisheries is not only the next step after ensuring 'le gal' ones, but one that needs to happen in parallel to prevent negative impacts on local fishing. Supply chain policies and instruments involving formalisation and legalisation can have counterproductive effects, such as increased inequalities among resource users (Le Billon and Spiegel 2021). Parallel efforts at a global level therefore need to be made in order to en sure a level playing field among DWFs from different countries.…”

Transparency in Environmental and Resource Governance: Theories of Change for the EITI

“…The EITI has been a hallmark of international resource governance efforts and a flagship of "governance-by-disclosure" (Gupta 2008;Haufler 2010). Yet, after nearly two decades of existence, the EITI's effectiveness is still questioned (Rustad et al 2017), with regard to both its core objective (improving the developmental impacts of extractive industries) and its long avoidance of dealing with the environmental impacts of extraction (Le Billon and Spiegel 2021). Given the challenges of demonstrating EITI's effectiveness (Lujala 2018;Sovacool et al 2016), many researchers and practitioners have called for an explicit "Theory of Change" (ToC) articulating the steps through which the EITI is expected to bring out improvements (Gillies and Heuty 2011;Neumann et al 2016;Scanteam 2011;Vijge et al 2019)-a "theorization" that the EITI International Secretariat, for a long time, seemed reluctant to establish (Rich and Moberg 2015).…”