Monitoring the Impacts of Extraction: Science and Participation in the Governance of Mining in Peru

Abstract

In Peru the recent growth of the mining economy has generated conflicts that often revolve around the environmental impacts of extraction. This paper examines a regulatory mechanism that has emerged as a response to these conflicts: participatory environmental monitoring. Focusing on a monitoring committee in the region of Ancash, I assess the committee's efforts to generate shared understandings about mining's environmental impacts, while also analyzing the consequences of the committee's work for the claimsmaking efforts of affected populations. I find that, while the work of the committee has not led to a cohesive environmental knowledge community, it has shaped the dynamics of mining-related struggle. Through its privileging of an expert framework for knowing and judging water quality, the committee has helped to demarcate the boundaries of credible environmental knowledge in ways that tend to constrain the capacity of area residents to hold the mining firm accountable for observed impacts on downstream water resources. My analysis points to the ongoing need to examine the uneven social effects that may fiow from the privileging of particular knowledge systems and administrative rationalities within resource governance frameworks.

Chronicle of a disaster foretold: scientific risk assessment, public participation, and the politics of imperilment in Bristol Bay, Alaska

“…Similar observations have been made about the role of science in decision‐making generally speaking (e.g. Himley ; Sarewitz ), and of EPA science in particular (Jasanoff ).…”

“…2 Similar observations have been made about the role of science in decision-making generally speaking (e.g. Himley 2014;Sarewitz 2004), and of EPA science in particular (Jasanoff 1992). 3 This study relied on the work of a research team that included K. Alexandra Tuddenham, Kendall Barbery, Samara Brock, and Austin Lord to conduct more than ninety semi-structured interviews in the summers of 2013 and 2014.…”

“…Cooke & Kothari ). Recent work highlights how common instruments for facilitating participation often reinforce existing power relations, depoliticizing struggles by framing problems and procedures in technical terms (see, e.g., Burke & Heynen ; Himley ; Holifield ; F. Li ; T. Li ). Analysing the EPA's risk‐assessment practices, for instance, Ryan Holifield finds that certain consultative mechanisms neutralize more radical efforts to redistribute risk by drawing reductive boundaries around target communities, among other factors (2004: 296).…”

“…Studies show how participatory forums are disrupted and delegitimated as frustrated opponents of resource development schemes refuse to engage, staging protests outside public hearings (F. Li ); as actors on the margins take up technoscientific tools or roles to pursue their own ‘counter’‐projects (Hébert & Brock under review; Holifield ; Reno ); and as plans simply fall flat when unruly subjects fail to heed attempts to remake them into participatory players (Welker ). Contestations seem to bubble up amid inclusionary efforts to pin down environmental impacts (see, e.g., Bond ; Cepek ; Himley ; Holifield ; Howe ; F. Li ; Mathews ; Reno ; Vaughn ). Given the persistent ways in which constraints upon participation are subject to overflows like these, tensions over knowledge and authority are likely to be manifest even within the most tightly organized public forums, and perhaps only more so.…”

In Defense of Water: Modern Mining, Grassroots Movements, and Corporate Strategies in Peru

“…Ultimately, the Combayo conflict produced alliances that enabled negotiations between company, community, and state representatives, and transformed the wide‐ranging demands of Combayo residents into an agreement centered on employment contracts, water monitoring programs, and a hydrological study. This reliance on expert knowledge (including techno‐managerial strategies such as environmental audit and monitoring) can lead to a depoliticization of conflict that undermines the concerns of local communities while furthering the state's extractive model of development (see Himley ; Li ; Velásquez ). In the broader context of international development, James Ferguson () describes a similar process when he calls the development apparatus an “antipolitics machine” that suspends the political aspects inherent in the workings of state bureaucracies and the implementation of aid programs, and suppresses challenges to the status quo.…”