Paper short abstract:

In this paper I question the extent to which a moral paradigm is based on conceptions of ‘best practice’ and normative ethics that emerge from (and are influenced by) processes of imperial entitlement and postcolonial guilt framed within a capitalist system of immediate cash exchange.

Paper long abstract:

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development narratives are now largely embedded in the practices of extractive industry companies. A key factor in the operationalisation of CSR is so-called 'social development' where community projects are envisaged to activate 'self-development' at the local level, whilst transparency and reporting initiatives advocate the trickling down of profits at state level. This fulfils multiple moralities for extractive industries, justifying their presence in low-income, resource-rich countries on the one hand and their appropriation of resources on the other. But the characteristics motivating corporate agency have specific historical narratives that differ from the characteristics provoking agency (response) in areas affected by industrial extraction. As such, the way local, indigenous populations accommodate and interpret the discourse and action emerging from the enactment of contemporary moral paradigms has unpredicted outcomes ranging from social disintegration, stratification and subsequent inequities, economic inflation and transformation, intergenerational and intrafamilial conflict, rent seeking behaviour, and exogenous and endogenous violent and non-violent conflict. In this paper I question the extent to which this moral paradigm is based on conceptions of 'best practice' and normative ethics that emerge from (and are influenced by) processes of imperial entitlement and postcolonial guilt framed within a capitalist system of immediate cash exchange. Drawing on case study data from the Kutubu oil/gas project and Ok Tedi copper mine in PNG and the Kafubu emerald mine in Zambia I discuss the relationship between the moral paradigm of CSR and sustainability and the various outcomes of 'negative development' it can incite.

Paper short abstract:

Alongside the Ok Tedi mine is a shadow economy involving the marketing of gold, which is procured semi-legitimately through artisanal mining or illicitly through theft. This paper will address the moral positions of actors involved in the informal gold market by examining their personal narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The Oksapmin live in the rural hinterland of the Ok Tedi mine and the town of Tabubil, PNG. A major social consequence of mining for the Oksapmin has been the transformation and reorientation of social relationships due to high rates of rural-urban migration. In the absence of formal employment, many migrants reside in the informal peri-urban settlements surrounding Tabubil where livelihoods include artisanal mining and the informal marketing of gold that is often procured through illicit means. While these activities are potentially lucrative, they also occupy a morally grey area, resulting in ethical dilemmas for participants.

In this paper, I seek to examine the moral dimensions of the shadow economy in Tabubil by discussing the personal narratives of Oksapmin migrants who are involved in the informal marketing of gold. Very often there is a strong sense that individuals involved in artisanal mining and the informal gold market are staking a claim to what is rightfully theirs based on traditional ideas of resource ownership. While these individuals have failed to secure formal employment at the mine, they are able to accrue monetary benefits in the shadow economy, demonstrating the democratizing dimensions of these activities. Furthermore, how migrants spend the money earned through these activities reveals the changing nature of the moral economy since profits are often spent in huge displays of wealth, rather than being redirected towards social obligations.

Paper short abstract:

When local, small-scale Ghanaian miners compete with large-scale transnational mining corporations, how are arguments about the morality of mining shaped and challenged by local landholders? This paper will analyse moral discourse from the local perspective of mining communities near Obuasi, Ghana.

Paper long abstract:

For many Ghanaian people, mining is not only practiced by 'others' from outside, but is also an activity with strong local historical roots. The term galamsey refers to illegal, small-scale mining undertaken by miners without a concession licence. They are usually Ghanaian, often coming from the community or region in which they mine. Galamsey miners compete for land, resources and local favour against large-scale gold mining companies such as AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) in Obuasi, Ghana. Against a backdrop of colonialism, post-colonialism and globalisation, the mine has transformed from a small Ghanaian entrepreneurial endeavour into a large-scale transnational merger between Ghanaian and South African mining companies, in the process moving further away from local management by Ghanaians. Locals who have been deprived of agricultural livelihoods due to mining concessions see in galamsey a possible income stream when AGA won't hire them. Galamsey is also seen by some Ghanaians as part of their rightful culture.

However, the use of mercury by galamsey miners to process gold severely damages the waterways and environment. Guards with weapons patrol galamsey sites and large-scale official sites alike. When local, small-scale Ghanaian miners compete with large-scale transnational mining corporations, how are arguments about the morality of mining shaped and challenged by local landholders? Does corporate social responsibility trump local employment? Is environmental degradation more or less (im)moral than international profit from local loss? This paper will analyse moral discourse from the local perspective of mining communities near Obuasi, Ghana.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the moral and political qualities of the arguments that have been made by the opponents of seabed mining in Papua New Guinea, where the government has already authorised the development of the first seabed mining project in the Pacific island region.

Paper long abstract:

The Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has already authorised the development of the first seabed mining project in the Pacific island region, but controversy continues to swirl around the possible impacts of this practice on the natural environment and the livelihoods of coastal communities. The controversy has now reached the shores of several other Pacific island nations whose governments have granted exploration licences to companies interested in the exploitation of deep-sea mineral resources and have started to develop legal and policy frameworks to regulate this type of activity. However, the intensity of the debate appears to be a function of the size of the national population, as well as the period of time for which it has been going on. This paper will investigate the arguments that have been raised against seabed mining in PNG, especially the case made by some environmentalists, that it should not proceed in the absence of 'free, prior and informed consent' on the part of indigenous communities because PNG is a signatory to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as being a signatory to the UN Conventions on Biological Diversity and the Law of the Sea. It will also consider the question of how questions of morality have invaded the space that would normally be occupied by a more straightforward argument about the distribution of economic benefits between different levels of government, including the local-level governments that contain the 'indigenous people' whose consent is not required by government policy.

Paper short abstract:

The 'rights of nature' form part of a powerful contemporary idiom of resistance to large-scale resource extraction, but in practice they have encountered numerous difficulties. This paper evaluates some of the complexities surrounding the 'rights of nature' in Ecuador and the United States.

Paper long abstract:

Since the mid-2000s, a growing transnational movement for the rights of nature has emerged in Ecuador, Bolivia, South Africa, and the United States. This effort to extend rights-based conceptions of personhood to the natural world is an effort fueled by growing frustration over the narrowly economistic valuations of nature too often relied upon by state and corporate actors. It is also an attempt to decisively shift the moral terrain on which cost-benefit analyses of large-scale extractive projects are waged. However, since the mid-2000s, following the inclusion of such rights in the national constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia and the municipal charters of cities all throughout the United States, there has been, I argue in this paper, a marked shift in struggles against large-scale extraction in both countries. While the meanings, functions, and associations of the rights of nature are considerably divergent in Ecuador and the United States, in both countries the most recent responses to natural gas and mineral exploration have been characterized by a return to more traditionally anthropocentric legal framings and moral assertions. Why? Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in the United States and Ecuador with activists opposed to the extraction of shale gas and gold, I offer a comparative perspective on the use of one of the most powerful contemporary moral idioms of resistance to environmental degradation - the personhood of the natural world - and, in dialogue with Erik Swygendouw, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou, explore what this return to the language of human and community rights might mean in contexts of large-scale resource extraction.

Paper short abstract:

In recent years the people of Lihir, Papua New Guinea, have articulated their concerns around changes in their language due to large-scale gold mining in their islands. This paper examines discourses of morality around language change in Lihir and explores a novel and moral solution proposed.

Paper long abstract:

The people of the Lihir Island Group in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, have experienced twenty years of large-scale gold mining in their islands. In recent years, Lihir people have begun to articulate their concerns around the changes they see to be happening to their Lihir language. These changes manifest themselves primarily in changes in vocabulary and dialect, and an increase in code-switching between Lihir, Tok Pisin (Melanesian Pidgin) and English. Drawing upon recent fieldwork, in particular interviews with Lihir people, this paper examines discourses of morality around language change in the context of the mine and the social transformations that mining has brought to Lihir. Against these discourses the patterns and developments in language use on a local, regional and national level are presented. Proposed solutions are also explored, including the role of the Catholic Church in restoring and maintaining language in the islands.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the extent to which elements of pre-Islamic Tengrianic spiritual beliefs combined with variants of Sunni Islam underpin environmentally-based oppositions to extractive industries in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the extent to which spiritual concerns underpin environmentally-based oppositions to extractive industries in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan. Although this sector is widely considered an essential component of national economic development, a series of violent conflicts during 2011 and 2012 underscored the dissatisfaction with which many Kyrgyzstani citizens have come to regard large-scale natural resource extraction projects there. These conflicts have included a coup attempt in the capital city during 2012, along with several attacks on mining camps that resulted in the destruction of mineral exploration infrastructure between March, 2011, and November, 2012. In contrast to the environmentally-based criticisms which tend to dominate explanations of indigenous opposition movements, I explore the moral frameworks and spiritual worldviews evident in everyday perceptions of the extractive industry's impacts. In particular, I investigate the region's curious syncretic spiritual heritage in which elements of pre-Islamic Tengrianic spiritual beliefs are commonly combined with variants of Sunni Islam, both of which have been resurgent in the post-atheist faith renaissance which swept across the post-Soviet world since the perestroika era.

Paper short abstract:

This case study shows how Thio peoples, New Caledonia, take the notion of corporate social responsibility at face value in striving through various means (blockade, negotiation, agreements) to integrate into the local moral community the main mining company operating for decades in the area.

Paper long abstract:

Local/indigenous peoples can deal with mining corporations in two opposite ways: by adjusting themselves to external rules (in terms of property and development) or by calling the firms for abiding by local norms and duties. In the case studied in Thio, New Caledonia, the historical depth of the mining activity has made SLN, the main mining operator, part of the local cultural and social landscape. Recent weather events have had strong environmental impacts (flooding, limited landslides) and triggered a social movement directed against SLN. A local association was born out of this action, whose name means "taking care of our home" in Xârâcùù language. This association is overtly trans-ethnic and its members belong to the Kanak indigenous people as well as to people of European and Asiatic descent and Polynesian and Wallisian migrants. Many of them also work for the SLN or local subcontractors. The association's discourse puts forward a shared communal belonging and concern for future generations. In negotiating with SLN the restoration of environmental damages and different forms of compensation, local peoples take the discourse of corporate social responsibility at face value and ask SLN to behave as a morally responsible local citizen caring for the well-being of the community. By so doing, they question the frontier of the mining enclave and strive to integrate it into the local moral community.

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes looking at the Frieda River Mine as a social relation through which life itself travels through form, distance and time. It provides an account of those relations and argues that although from the corporate and legal perspective the Mine may not yet exist, it is already happening.

Paper long abstract:

Hidden from view by the thick green overlay, and tucked behind the vast waters of the mighty Sepik River, Frieda River area of Papua New Guinea is home to a one of the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposit in the world. Frieda's mineral wealth was first officially noted during a regional mapping exercise in 1966. Three years later, in 1969, a Prospecting Authority was granted to an Australian mining company allowing for the exploration of Frieda's gold and copper deposits to begin. Work at Frieda has been ongoing ever since. Despite the over forty years of industry's on-site presence, from the corporate and legal perspective Frieda River is not a Mine, but a resource extraction Project at an exploration stage of development. This paper provides an ethnographic account of stakeholder relations as they were unfolding on the steep banks of the river over forty years after the first company began working at Frieda. Putting to the test the linear, corporate model of the Mining Project Life Cycle it argues that, in order to truly understand what is going on at Frieda, we must go beyond looking at a mine as a physical manifestation of maturity of geological and economic factors. Instead, we should look at a mine as a social relation, which shift would allow us to see that although it may not yet exist, the Frieda River Mine is already happening.

Paper short abstract:

For the Wampar in Papua New Guinea, their current engagement with mining and industrial tree plantation is taking place in an increasingly heterogeneous sociocultural context and is influenced by historically-informed moral evaluations of earlier encounters with modernity and capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

The Wampar in Papua New Guinea's Markham Valley have a century-long history of engaging with projects of modernity and capitalism. The planned Wafi-Golpu gold and copper mine and a eucalyptus biomass project for electricity generation are the most recent of these projects that are now becoming part of their social world. The moral choices that the people make and the positions that they take in their engagements with these two large-scale projects are historically informed and shaped by the current sociocultural context.

Based on fieldwork undertaken in 2009, I present some preliminary data on how the engagements with these two large-scale resource extraction projects are informed by negotiated moralities. In the context of substantial economic change and increasing heterogeneity due to intermarriage, in-migration, and denominational pluralism, moral obligations and moral positions are both being challenged and reaffirmed by engaging with the projects on their own terms. An example is the decision whether to include or exclude specific individuals from membership in the Incorporated Land Groups that are being organized in expectations of material benefits flowing from the mine and the timber biomass project.

Paper short abstract:

Corporate Social Responsibility and a notion of environment as ‘giving’ underlaid the respective moral positions of company representatives and Kubo people when the latter hosted the exploratory ventures of the former. These disparate moral positions meant there was no ‘social commensuration’.

Paper long abstract:

Arrogance, complicity or resistance may often be read into the actions of actors on one or the other side of encounters between representatives of resource extraction companies and the local communities on whose lands they operate. Attempts to understand, or excuse, those actions as pragmatic and strategic endeavours are rarely sufficient, in that they ignore the moral dimensions of choice. The present case study explores moral imperatives that underlaid the encounter between companies associated with the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Project and Kubo people on whose lands they established a base camp. Those imperatives may be understood, on the one hand, as informed by the trope of Corporate Social Responsibility and on the other by the trope of the 'giving environment'. The former prioritized a rhetoric of 'progress', 'development' and 'helping the underprivileged' that ensured a sense of superior knowledge and superior social position in relations with Kubo people. The latter prioritized exclusion of Company from a social domain while continuing to affirm reciprocal relations through on-going exchanges with fellow Kubo. These profound differences in moral position meant that though the parties maintained cordial relations, and each achieved desired objectives, there was, ultimately, no 'social commensuration'. In the final analysis, Kubo people were positioned by the representatives of an ontological schema that was grounded in certainty and who (mis)understood other life worlds to be either inferior variants of their own or striving to participate in, and join, their own.