Negotiating values and development at the mining frontier. Private, public and civil society interactions over El Mirador mine in South-East Ecuador

Abstract

A booming mineral market, technological innovations and recent shifts in geographies of demand and investment have led the mining frontier to expand towards the non-traditional mining environments of the Latin American continent. At this frontier, geographies of transnational mining companies and large-scale capital investment overlap with geographies of local communities and rural livelihoods, often causing conflicts. In Ecuador, the government of Rafael Correa introduced series of changes in its extractive politics, creating an explicit link between an expanding mining sector and the aspired equitable social and economic development of the country, defined as ‘el Buen Vivir’. These changes resulted in a conflictive debate that goes beyond the environmental and social impacts of mining, addressing profound questions regarding the country’s development model, the valuation of the natural and cultural resources and society-nature relations. A case in which this “struggle over meanings” becomes prominent is El Mirador, the first large-scale copper mine of the country, where a mining company, different government bodies, NGOs, indigenous communities and colonos got in conflict over mining and local development. This case study of El Mirador aims to analyse the diverse discourses, actions and interactions the actors employ in their struggle over mining and development. Research findings affirm a highly polarized discursive field regarding the future of mining and development in the country. The discourses employed by the researched actors are underpinned by very different and sometimes conflicting sets of meanings of development, territory and nature-society relations. Discursive strategies are used to gain support for certain representation of ‘the truth’ or cover up particular (planned) interventions, which place the actor who uses them in a position of power to intervene and materialize concrete changes. State discourses for example accompany normative and institutional changes, asserting a growing role for the national state as a regulator of the extractive sector and a repositioning of the state at the center of the country´s development agenda. The local indigenous population use discourses to inform and legitimize their struggle for territory, forming strategic coalitions with colonos and NGOs. The findings endorse that discourses and actions and the relation between these two are subject to continuous reflexivity, contestation and renegotiation. This dialectic relationship between meanings and discourse at the one hand and practices and interactions at the other can determine the course of the conflict and outcomes in terms of territorial change and development.