Mapping contention: Mining property expansion, Amerindian land titling, and livelihood hybridity in Guyana’s small-scale gold mining landscape

Abstract

Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Hook, Andrew (2019) Mapping contention: mining property expansion, Amerindian land titling, and livelihood hybridity in Guyana's small-scale gold mining landscape. Geoforum, 106. pp. 48-67.

Guyana in the Eye of the Storm in 2021: Convergence, Stasis and Reverberation

“…Eventually, gold mining started to attract large-scale investment. By 2013, it had become the national income earner of choice, representing a significant source of revenue to the state, despite its negative environmental and social effects in the forested interior, and to indigenous lands in particular (Hook 2019).…”

Evaluating the impact of small-scale mining on the achievement of the sustainable development goals in Guyana

“…The negative environmental impacts from the sector have been identified as being exacerbated by imperfect institutional conditions, informality and issues around enforcement (Clifford, 2011;Hook, 2019b). These issues have also contributed to social impacts such as conflict between miners and indigenous communities (Hilson & Laing, 2017b;Hook, 2019c). Further social issues, and health disparities such as crime, prostitution and trafficking have also been identified as being linked with the sector (Austin et al, 2007).…”

The extractive embrace: shifting expectations of conservation and extraction in the Guiana Shield

“…'To the state' here is particularly important because mining provides direct employment to 13,800 people and indirectly to 19,000 (The Government of Guyana 2015). Gold mining is one of Guyana's most significant and difficult to manage (Hook 2019b) income earners. Further, while REDD+ may indeed have been able to outperform gold in providing income to the state, this performance is being weakened by current developments.…”

“…Differences aside, Hook (2019b) writes that, 'Perhaps the most serious long-term effect of the gulf between the exaggerated rhetoric associated with Guyana's REDD+ programme and the minimal delivery has been the unwarranted raising of expectations' (Hook 2019a(Hook , p. 1019, expectations that Massarella et al (2018) define as 'imagined ideas about the future that are produced, circulated and mediated through social interaction, resulting in social change' (Massarella et al 2018, p. 376). I outline the means for marking out expectations as a site for analysis through Foucauldian discourse analysis and governmentality in the rest of this section.…”

“…Like the development discourse, the social justice discourse exists along a continuum with diverse groups drawing on and contributing to its formation, including representatives of forested communities and civil society groups, such as collectives formed by gold miners or forest workers. They make frequent and overt calls for addressing the historical injustices they see as continuing to affect them, even though these calls often conflict, for example, in conflicts between miners and indigenous groups (Hennessy 2013, Collins 2019b, Hook 2019b). The social justice discourse is one of resistance, characterized by a response to domination and to sovereign power, and partly, to the implicit development imaginaries of the development discourse.…”