Routledge
178 pages
The scholarly debate on deliberative democracy often suggests that participatory processes will contribute to make environmental governance not only more legitimate and effective, but also lead to the empowerment of marginalized social groups. Critical studies, however, analyse how technologies of governance make use of participation to draw boundaries that separate technical knowledge from political concerns, direct the focus towards procedural aspects and contractual obligations, and reinforce hegemonic understandings of development and of local people’s relationships to their environment. This book focuses on the dynamics and use of participatory mechanisms related to the rapid expansion of the extractive industries worldwide and the ways it increasingly affects sensitive natural environments populated by indigenous and other marginalized populations. Nine empirically grounded case studies analyse a range of participatory practices ranging from state-led and corporation-led processes like prior consultation and Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), compensation practices, participatory planning exercises and the participation in environmental impact assessments (EIAs), to community-led consultations, community-based FPIC and EIA processes and struggles for community-based governance of natural resource uses. The book provides new insights through a combination of different theoretical strands, which help to scrutinize the limits to deliberation and empowerment on the one hand, and on the other hand to understand the political resistance potential that alternative uses of participatory mechanisms can generate.
The chapters originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.Introduction: New mechanisms of participation in extractive governance between technologies of governance and resistance work
Esben Leifsen, Maria-Therese Gustafsson, Maria A. Guzmán-Gallegos and Almut Schilling-Vacaflor
1. Who controls the territory and the resources? Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) as a contested human rights practice in Bolivia
Almut Schilling-Vacaflor
2. Weaving hope in ancestral black territories in Colombia: the reach and limitations of free, prior, and informed consultation and consent
Marilyn Machado, David López Matta, María Mercedes Campo, Arturo Escobar and Viviane Weitzner
3. Claiming prior consultation, monitoring environmental impact: counterwork by the use of formal instruments of participatory governance in Ecuador’s emerging mining sector
Esben Leifsen, Luis Sánchez-Vázquez and Maleny Gabriela Reyes
4. Between oil contamination and consultation: constrained spaces of influence in Northern Peruvian Amazonia
María A. Guzmán-Gallegos
5. A vote to derail extraction: popular consultation and resource sovereignty in Tolima, Colombia
John-Andrew McNeish
6. The struggles surrounding ecological and economic zoning in Peru
Maria-Therese Gustafsson
7. The politics of planning: assessing the impacts of mining on Sami lands
Rebecca Lawrence and Rasmus Kløcker Larsen
8. Shaping projects, shaping impacts: community-controlled impact assessments and negotiated agreements
Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh
9. ‘Nosotros Somos Estado’: contested legalities in decision-making about extractives affecting ancestral territories in Colombia
Viviane Weitzner
THIRDWORLDS will focus on the political economy, development and cultures of those parts of the world that have experienced the most political, social, and economic upheaval, and which have faced the greatest challenges of the postcolonial world under globalisation: poverty, displacement and diaspora, environmental degradation, human and civil rights abuses, war, hunger, and disease.
THIRDWORLDS serves as a signifier of oppositional emerging economies and cultures ranging from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and even those ‘Souths’ within a larger perceived North, such as the U.S. South and Mediterranean Europe. The study of these otherwise disparate and discontinuous areas, known collectively as the Global South, demonstrates that as globalisation pervades the planet, the south, as a synonym for subalterity, also transcends geographical and ideological frontiers.