„El agua vale más que el oro:” Mining and Social Protest in Latin America

• In Event: Social movements and struggles around natural resources

Abstract

What explains different levels of mobilization against mining projects? And what kind of institutions help to avoid or mitigate social conflicts over natural resource extraction? Mining activities in Latin America have increased dramatically over the past decades, causing widespread social resistance over the past years. This environmentalist activism has become intimately linked to the issue of ethnic group rights as resource exploitation in Latin America disproportionally affects indigenous and African-descendant groups living in peripheral rural areas. However, patterns of social resistance against mining projects differ considerably in form and intensity, both within and across countries, as well as over time. Political responses by governments in the region, too, vary widely. Building on both grievance and social movement theories, we address this research gap based on a theoretical framework that combines motivational and structural approaches to explain ethno-environmentalist mobilization. To this end, we construct a new multi-level dataset on mining conflicts in Latin America between 2000 and 2013, using an innovative, semi-automated strategy of news media event coding. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive quantitative study analyzing the social consequences of resource extraction in Latin America and the possibilities to manage its adverse effects.

Authors

• Livia I Schubiger, University of Zurich

• Manuel A Vogt, ETH Zürich