Know, Measure, and Control: Epistemic and Technopolitical Practices in the Global Project to Eliminate Mercury Use in Artisanal Gold Mining

• In Event: STS Underground - III: Sensing the Underground

Abstract

Drawing on STS literature on knowledge-power formations in global and local environmental governance (Jasanoff & Martello 2004) and global environmental assessments as social processes entailing varied and multi-scalar epistemic practices (Mitchell et al. 2006), my research analyses the UN’s, states’, and experts’ attempts to know and govern artisanal and small-scale gold miners (ASGM) and its role in global mercury pollution. For doing so, I study: (1) different practices of knowledge production/compilation/mobilisation -deployed by actors such as UNEP, states, networks of experts, and local populations- about mercury contamination coming from ASGM activities to the global atmosphere and local environments; and (2) the relationships between these epistemic practices and the socio-technical interventions and regulations that have been developed in countries with ASGM activities and globally through initiatives like the Minamata Convention and the UN Global Mercury Partnership.

Through a multi-site ethnography of the global mercury regime, and recurring also to interviews, legal analysis, participant observation, and process tracing, my research makes visible the assumptions and political claims underpinning how this global regime knows and governs the sector of ASGM through specific technologies and epistemic practices. The repertoire of studied practices of quantification, data compilation, and reporting includes the UNEP’s Global Mercury Assessment reports, national baselines and inventories of mercury pollution, and localised interventions promoting socio-technical changes in ASGM sites. The local dimension of my research is grounded in Colombia, one of the UN’s preferred laboratories of intervention for mercury-abatement initiatives since the 1990s and the third largest mercury polluter in the world.

Author

• Sebastian Rubiano-Galvis, University of California, Berkeley