Rethinking Social Conflict Management and Mining Extractive Industries in Peru and Latin America

• In Event: Extractive Industries and the Resource Curse

Abstract

Environmentalists (Naess, 2009) argued that any natural object is exclusively a natural resource. Hence, environmental problems can be solved under the framework of capitalism, the industry and human intervention as long as the human kind understands that they have the land only to live in, it is not a resource of their own, and also that they must use the necessary resources that satisfy their vital needs.
The concept of the relationship between society and natural resources at a global, Latin American and Peruvian scale is contextualized. Likewise, the rationality behind the socio-environmental conflict management in Peru is deepened and analyzed. With a closer approach to the business actors, especially the mining sector that have set the pattern of economic development in recent years in Peru, this reading discusses the reasons that move the socio-environmental conflict in the much poorest and most vulnerable districts in Peru at present.
This approach is necessary to redesign the management and prevention of socio-environmental conflicts in Peru and in Latin America. The agency of the entrepreneurial sector is at question in this realm because as an actor, the private mining sector urgently needs to make a personalized and contextualized diagnosis and critique of its real meaning and role in this context, provided its growing and powerful role for the economic development of the country. This perspective, therefore, contributes to rethink in the academia the topic of management and prevention of social conflicts facing extractive industries in Peru today.

Author

• Kristel Castillo Cucalón, CENTRUM Católica