Social discourses on environmental themes: water and mining in central west Argentina (original) (raw)
Related papers
Die Erde, 2023
During the last decades, social environmental movements (SEM) and protests have been arising in response to emerging social environmental conflicts that have been occurring across the globe. In contrast to the globally predominant neoliberal economic system, they fight for an alternative way of living and coping with nature and its goods and criticize persisting postcolonial power relations between countries of the Global North and South. This paper explores the claim for a right to water in terms of the right to nature, within the context of postcolonial and neoliberal structures in Mendoza, Argentina. Drawing on qualitative semi-standardized interviews with local activists and environmental experts from Mendoza as well as participatory observation and media compilation, we analyze key tools and strategies of the socio-environmental movements. The investigation points out how neoliberal restructuring processes since the end of the 20 th century have triggered water conflicts in the province and in what way those are embedded in postcolonial structures. Zusammenfassung In den letzten Jahrzehnten sind soziale Umweltbewegungen und Proteste als Reaktion auf die weltweit auftretenden Umweltkonflikte entstanden. Im Gegensatz zum weltweit vorherrschenden neoliberalen Wirtschaftssystem fordern sie eine alternative Art zu leben und mit der Natur und ihren Gütern umzugehen. Außerdem kritisieren sie die fortbestehenden postkolonialen Machtverhältnisse zwischen Ländern des globalen Nordens und Südens. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Forderung nach einem Recht auf Wasser im Sinne des Rechts auf Natur im Kontext postkolonialer und neoliberaler Strukturen in Mendoza, Argentinien. Auf der Grundlage von qualitativen, halbstandardisierten Interviews mit lokalen Aktivist*innen und Umweltexpert*innen aus Mendoza sowie teilnehmender Beobachtung und Medienanalyse untersuchen wir die wichtigsten Instrumente und Strategien der sozio-ökologischen Bewegungen. Die Untersuchung zeigt auf, wie neoliberale Umstrukturierungsprozesse seit dem Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts Wasserkonflikte in der Provinz ausgelöst haben und in welcher Weise diese in postkoloniale Strukturen eingebettet sind.
Conflict over water is a significant phenomenon in many parts of the world where globally linked neoliberal economic activities encroach on the lands of indigenous peoples. This case study from Chile examines how water scarcity affecting indigenous agricultural communities in the Chilean Altiplano has been exacerbated by legally sanctioned mining-related practices. Notably, the legal framing of the 1981 Water Code promotes private ownership of water rights and enhanced mining activity usually at the expense of the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous communities. In the case of the Atacameño community of Chiu Chiu, a serious decrease in subsistence and agriculture production has been suffered as a consequence of reduced flow in the Loa River, resulting from the water intensive needs and extraction practices of the nearby Chuquicamata mine owned by Codelco, the National Copper Corporation of Chile. Via an analysis of the political ecology of competing rationalities this paper explores how an economic rationality based on utilitarian and reductionist thinking manifested by Codelco has taken precedence locally over a socionatural rationality grounded in holistic thinking and sustainability concerns as articulated by the Chiu Chiu community.
Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR), 2022
Although many studies focus on environmental conflict and debates around sustainable development, more research is needed to deepen the understanding of the links between the frames upheld by actors involved in environmental conflicts and governance processes. We propose a dialogue between political ecology and governance to study how divergent valuations of the environment shape intense and long-term mining conflicts and impact on environmental governance. Focusing on the case of La Alumbrera in Argentina, we argue that three factors disrupt environmental governance and deepen the conflict: divergent valuations that consolidate a growing distance among the images portrayed by the actors; the unequal emphasis that the actors place on the problems and solutions that mining generates; and the inability of the state and mining corporations to process the notions of difference that emerge from the territories.
Mining for Mother Earth. Governmentalities, sacred waters and nature's rights in Ecuador
Geoforum, 2019
Getting public opinion to see 'mining' and 'Nature's Rights' as non-contradictory and even equivalent and harmonious, calls for far-reaching power strategies. Nature was entitled to rights by Ecuador's Constitution at about the same time that the Government began promoting mining as central to Ecuador's future. Building this equivalence to make 'mining mean nature', and materialize large-scale mining in the Quimsacocha páramo wetlands, the State and its institutions tested new tactics to manage territory, coined new imaginaries and subjectivities, and limited indigenous/rural political participation. In response, communities started to dispute these governmentality strategies through political practices that framed new meanings of territory and identity. They use formal political and legal arenas but, above all, their day-today practices. This article analyzes forms of power and counter-power in the Quimsacocha páramo mining conflict, through the four different, interrelated 'arts of government' (Foucault, 2008) and mutual strategies by promoters and detractors of extractive industry who, in apparent paradox, both appeal to Nature's Rights. We conclude that using Nature's Rights to promote mega-mining manifests the limitations of social and environmental rights recognition under neoliberal gov-ernance, and the tensions inherent in Nature's Rights themselves. However, anti-extraction struggles like Quimsacocha's critically make visible as well as challenge the development model and economic system that is implicit in the debate over Nature's Rights, inviting us to rethink the socio-natural order and foster more just, equitable alternatives.
2016
A b s t r a c t This article examines indigenous responses to the extractive encroachments of mining in Atacama. It looks at how they reveal the existence of competing systems of meaning and value in which we can identify opportunistic shifts in the conceptualization of water. Specifically, it examines two ethnographic examples that show how Atacameño indigenous people in the communities of Toconce and Turi in northern Chile treat water as a commodity when leasing water to—but not when defending water from—a mining company. As argued by Kopytoff (1988:69), the perfectly commoditized world would be one in which everything is exchangeable or for sale. By the same token, the perfectly decommoditized world would be one in which everything is unexchangeable. This case 130 J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y
Geoforum, 2016
Scholars who have critically analyzed the commodification of nature have explored how the specific bio-physical features of the objects to be commodified can shape the outcome of the commodification process. Thus, the establishment and behavior of a market system is closer to a political struggle than it is a simple technical and spontaneous process. Despite their contributions, these approaches have not focused on the resistance that cultural exegesis, self-identification, and the affective connection between the human and non-human pose to market systems. In this paper, I show how the Atacameño people from the Atacama Desert (Chile) have subverted the radical pro-water market model imposed by the Chilean military dictatorship in 1981 by relying on their water-related cultural values. In some Atacameño communities, the water market has not operated to ensure that water rights are put to those uses with the highest economic value (e.g., mining or urban water consumption). Indeed, in these communities , internal rules both forbid the sale of water rights to the mining sector and regulate the distribution of water within the community in terms that operate as barriers to other transactions. These rules form part of a moral economy of water that is a concrete ethic based on shared values and affective connections between humans and non-humans, mandating how people should relate to one another in relation to water. Together, these relations have decommodified water and contradict the neoliberal explanation of how a free water market should work.
Socio-environmental Conflict in Argentina
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2012
ABSTRACT Socio-environmental conflicts are those focused on the incompatability of the use of natural resources and their impacts on the environment by different social groups. The number and importance of such conflicts has increased significantly in Latin America during the last decade, and here the focus is on the specific case of Argentina, analyzing their characteristics which, for some, have prevented to date a solution that is beyond "sum zero". Resumen: Los conflictos socio-ambientales son aquellos enfocados en el incompatibilidad del uso de los recursos naturales y sus impactos en el ambiente por parte de las diferentes sectores sociales. Su número e importancia ha aumentado considerablemente en América Latina durante la década pasada. Aquí el foco se centra en el caso específico de Argentina, analizando sus características que, para unos, han impedido hasta ahora una solución que esté más allá de la "suma cero".
Social Conflict in Argentina: Land, Water, Work
Latin American Perspectives, 2014
Social conflict in postcrisis Argentina can be divided into three kinds: that concentrating on land issues and the ability to subsist beyond the market, that confronting the environmental degradation resulting from mining, and that focused on the current dilemmas of labor and union organization. Workers did not disappear as collective subjects in conflict but, starting from their positions in production or in “unproductive” activities such as government services, challenged the dynamics of capital from both old and new social spaces. Their singular practices are part of the conflictual scenario that Our America is currently experiencing and of the resistance in the region that brings new urgency to “living with dignity.” El conflicto social en la Argentina posterior a la crisis se puede dividir en tres tipos: el que se centra en cuestiones de la tierra y la capacidad de subsistir más allá del mercado, el que enfrenta la degradación ambiental resultante de la minería, y el que se cen...