Mining in Latin America


Book Description

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion and intensification of mineral resource exploitation and development across the global south, especially in Latin America. This shift has brought mining more visibly into global public debates and spurred a great deal of controversy and conflict. This volume assembles new scholarship that provides critical perspectives on these issues. The book marshals original, empirical work from leading social scientists in a variety of disciplines to address a range of questions about the practices of mining companies on the ground, the impacts of mining on host communities, and the responses to mining from communities, civil society and states. The book further explores the global and international causes, consequences and innovations of this new era of mining activity in Latin America. Key issues include the role of Canadian mining companies and their investment in the region, and, to a lesser extent, the role of Chinese mining capital. Several chapters take a regional perspective, while others are based on empirical data from specific countries including Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.










A History of Mining in Latin America


Book Description

For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm. All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences. Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.




International and Comparative Mineral Law and Policy


Book Description

This book covers a broad spectrum of issues shaping the current paradigm of minerals sector governance. The ultimate aim of the book is to understand trends and developments in mineral law and policy occurring at international, regional, cross-border and in some selected cases at national level and also to identify some of the challenges lying ahead. With these objectives in view, the book brings together a representative selection of the most knowledgeable authors on the subject. The contributions deal with a diverse range of issues tackled from interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics are divided into five main chapters: international and comparative aspects of mineral law; actors and policies in the minerals industry; investment prospects, financial and fiscal issues; sustainable development and regional outlooks. The book aspires to serve as a useful reference for scholars, practitioners, students and all those with an interest in current developments in the areas reviewed. Elizabeth Bastida is the Rio Tinto Research Fellow and the Director of the Mineral Law and Policy Programme at the Centre for Energy, Petroleum, Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee (CEPMLP/Dundee). Thomas W?lde is the Professor of International Economic, Natural Resources and Energy Law and was (until 2001) the Executive Director of CEPMLP/Dundee. He currently runs TWA, his private consultancy firm, which provides advisory services in natural resources and energy law, regulatory reform, investment promotion, state enterprise/agency appraisal and restructuring, privatisation, contract assessment, negotiation and dispute management. Janeth Warden-Fern?ndez is a Research and Teaching Fellow, an advisor of the Mineral Law and Policy Programme and the Manager of the Distance Learning Programme at CEPMLP/Dundee.







Mining in the New World


Book Description




Environmental Governance in Latin America


Book Description

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.




Illegal Mining


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the illegal extraction of metals and minerals from the perspectives of organized crime theory, green criminology, anti-corruption studies, and victimology. It includes contributions that focus on organized crime-related offences, such as drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, extortion, corruption and money laundering and sheds light on the serious environmental harms caused by illegal mining. Based on a wide range of case studies from the Amazon rainforest through the Ukrainian flatlands to the desert-like savanna of Central African Republic and Australia’s elevated plateaus, this book offers a unique insight into the illegal mining business and the complex relationship between organized crime, corruption, and ecocide. This is the first book-length publication on illegal extraction, trafficking in mined commodities, and ecocide associated with mining. It will appeal to scholars working on organized crime and green crime, including criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars. Practitioners and the general public may welcome this comprehensive and timely publication to contemplate on resource-scarcity, security, and crime in a rapidly changing world.




Community Rights and Corporate Responsibility


Book Description

Canadian mining activity in Latin America has exploded over the past decade and a half. Investors have responded to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, state-downsizing, and export promotion encouraged by leading capitalist nations and international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The result, predictably, has been sharp conflicts between the communities affected by mining and their advocates on one side, and the transnational mining companies supported by the local state and the Canadian government on the other. This collection, the most comprehensive in the English-language to date, investigates these conflicts in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Contributors address the related sustainable development, community, corporate, legal, and social issues. A valuable contribution to Latin American development studies, this collection will prove of interest to students and specialists in the field, journalists, NGOs, and policymakers.