Abstract
This article discusses the notion of economic sustainability from an ecological modernization perspective. The main thesis is that the pursuit of sustainability may reinforce socio-ecological conflicts. In this context, we propose that ecological modernization is based on four interrelated characteristics of sustainability, which, jointly, increase the pressure on local ecosystems: (i) land achievement or territorial expansionism and (ii) unequal environmental role distribution, both of which are territorial orientations; (iii) sustainable economic entrepreneurship and (iv) goal-oriented sustainability, both of which are motivations for social action. The latter has a paradoxical effect, which becomes apparent when sustainable extractive enterprises acquire regional extensions and multiply the socio-ecological conflicts at the local level. Applied to the mining industry in Chile, the analytical model reveals the necessity to redefine sustainability from a multi-scalar perspective by showing how the expansion of extractive clusters reinforces the local competition for water, energy, land, work, and living conditions. The main argument disentangles the notion of sustainability as a normative referent – an ideal state of sustainability that should be pursued socially – from sustainability as factual phenomena, which are the different forms to materialize sustainability in a particular place and time. This distinction allows us to propose the thesis of the depoliticization of the socio-ecological conflicts associated with the search for sustainability in the framework of global productive restructuration.
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Notes
- 1.
In Latina America, the environment institution transformation in the 1990s was enforced by different laws commonly known as the “environmental bases” because a UNEP report with this title influenced them strongly.
- 2.
This is a specific word used in Chile.
- 3.
See Speth and Haas (2006), as well as Haas et al. (1995) for an integrated perspective of the principal events and concepts that have influenced the global environmental agenda over the past decades. To observe global environmental governance from an international law perspective, which is prevalent in the process of social learning, see Akhtarkhavari (2010). See Winter (2006) for an explanation of global environmental governance as a system of multilevel institutions and how they adopt the Earth system analysis derived from the natural sciences. For an account on the connection between the global and local forms of environmental governance, see Jasanoff and Long Martello (2004). See Park et al. (2008) for a critical perspective of global environmental governance in terms of the connection between sustainability and globalization and the effects of the environmental policies’ marketization.
- 4.
Campos and Larenas (2012, 6) regard the ecological modernization in Chile as depoliticization because it implies a “constant decline in the public and social character of the ecological debate. The new environmental institution represents modern procedures’ access to the ecological management, as well as the exclusion, of previous forms of socio-ecological conflict regulation.” (Translation by the author.)
- 5.
Mining activity was responsible for 10 % of the national GDP in 1993; it achieved a peak of 20 % from 2006 to 2007, becoming stable at about 15 % in 2010 (based on the Chilean Central Bank’s (n.d.) data, historical statistics, and the percentage of the GDP calculated at current prices).
- 6.
For a more detailed view of the analysis of socio-ecological conflicts in Latin America, see Galeano 2004.
- 7.
Here, we analytically distinguish between “action orientation” and “territorial orientation” in order to describe the difference between activities that primarily mobilize actions pertaining to entrepreneurialism and market-oriented logic, and those activities geared toward rearticulating the territory for regional specialization. Max Weber coined the action orientation concept in his classical book Economy and Society (2002), in which he defines the types of action orientation in the concepts as: usage, custom, and self-interest. Giddens’s (1986) structuration theory provided possible variants in terms of action orientation. Giddens’s (1986) book was one of the first sociological attempts to incorporate the notion of time-space in a theoretical explanation, using the idea of regionalization. This distinction is totally analytical because, from a comprehensive perspective, every action spacializes and every meaningful space is constructed by territorially unfolding actions. For this integrative framework, see Werlen’s (1993) “everyday regionalization” concept.
- 8.
In both cases, the analysis determines a territory under study and a territory of reference as a total universe (national state or supranational level). The relationship considers the percentage of employment in a particular economic activity in that region in relation to the total universe. Values around 0 show the non-presence of the activity in the territory, a value of 1 indicates equal distribution of the activity in the regional and in the total universe, while values above 1 represent the specialization of certain activities in the region.
- 9.
Translation by the author.
- 10.
Translation by the author.
- 11.
This refers to the tension between the mining industries and agricultural activities; mining projects compete with preexisting agricultural activities because they are located in the same areas, or use the same water sources. The Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts and the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts (OLCA/OCMAL 2012) have identified 25 environmental conflicts that the mining industry has caused in Chile. All of these conflicts have occurred in the Atacama Desert region. In Latin America, 161 conflicts are recognized, affecting 212 communities; 5 of these conflicts occur on transnational borders. See OLCA.
- 12.
Here, the cluster notion is used in a very broad sense as the aggregated effects of different single mines located in the Atacama Desert region. For a critical perspective of this concept, see Martin and Sunley (2003).
- 13.
Among many others, the uranium exploitation in Argentina and that of the oil sands in Canada are examples of other socio-ecological conflicts emerging from different types of mining activities. These activities require large regional production restructuring and have important consequences for the local communities.
- 14.
For an in-depth discussion of the water conflict in Chile, see Larraín and Poo (2010).
- 15.
The Atacameños and Aymaras are two pre-Columbian native groups; the Atacameños inhabit the Atacama Desert in Chile and Argentina, while the Aymaras inhabit the Andes in North Chile, South Peru, and Bolivia. It is estimated that the Atacameños have been around since the fifth century while the Aymaras’ origins can be traced back to around 2,000 years BC, even before the Inca Empire ruled the region.
- 16.
Chilean water code.
- 17.
Radio Station, University of Chile (2012). Translation by the author.
- 18.
Translation by the author.
- 19.
Translation by the author.
- 20.
In some ways, all the critical literature on ecological modernization recognizes this characteristic.
- 21.
“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850 (see Figure SPM.1). In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years (medium confidence)” (IPCC SPM: 3).
- 22.
In respect of Chile, see Campos-Medina and Campos-Medina (2012).
- 23.
Ecological modernization gives rise to a particular form of rationality, which some authors have subsumed under the economic rationality concept, while others have considered it independent of other social spheres. Nevertheless, the particular characteristics of this “ecologic rationality” should be the object of empirical research. Describing the integrative character of all the material and symbolic interactions between society and nature, Leff (1986) argued that “[e]very society creates its own environmental rationality.”
- 24.
The arguments presented here are based on sociological critique of the theories of modernity, which regard the modernization in Central Europe and North America as an unavoidable track that every other society has to follow. The modernization process can differ from society to society because the core of this sociological explanation is not the result, or the last stage, of modernization tendencies, but, conversely, the requirements that every society confronts in a growing and unavoidable modern context (see Touraine and Bixio 2000). In another variant, this argument is based on the idea of universalistic integration as presented by Chernilo and Mascareño (2005). Here, environmental international integration is compelled by universalism and particularism in a normative, as well as functional, context.
- 25.
Traditional living conditions do not refer to a conservative perspective. On the contrary, it means that, in order to support extensive industrial activity, ecological modernization dramatically and daily reorganizes social practices. Examples are the transformation of the labor market, the intensification of immigration flow patterns, increasing housing prices and informal urbanization, as well as the trade and supply of products, energy, and services.
- 26.
In order to better understand the relevance of Chile in the copper international market, it can be compared to the world’s petroleum production, with the two main producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, only contributing around 12 %.
- 27.
Currently, the operations in the mine are closed and Pascua Lama could be considered an emblematic case of socio-ecological conflict in Argentina and Chile.
- 28.
Constitutional Organic Law on Mining Concessions.
- 29.
The environmental bases law.
- 30.
Translation by the author.
- 31.
For a complete analysis of the Chilean democratic transition in the context of the socialist government, the coup d’état, and the dictatorship regime, see Boeninger (1997).
- 32.
For example, the coastal city of Tocopilla where two big hydroelectric plants are located.
- 33.
The Chilean central government only passed the regulation to operationalize the new environmental framework in 1997; surprisingly, three years after Law 19,300 “Environmental Bases” was approved. It is important to take this into account if one considers the start of a new environmental institution a non-regulated intermission, during which the extractive orientation of the economy is exacerbated.
- 34.
Translation by the author.
- 35.
“Ecological modernization uses the language of business and conceptualizes environmental pollution as a matter of inefficiency while operating within the boundaries of cost-effectiveness and administrative efficiency” (Hajer 1995, 31).
- 36.
In Chile, The energetic matrix is based on thermoelectric plants, which supply energy to the Big North Interconnected System (SING), and hydroelectric plants that do so to the Central Interconnected System (SIC).
- 37.
Chuquicamata is the world’s biggest open mine and belongs to the National Copper Corporation of Chile (CODELCO).
- 38.
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” World Commission on Environment and Development (1987, 43).
- 39.
“Ecological sustainability is achieved […] where there is recomposed and/or introduced information, matter, and energy while the volumes (biomatter), the rate of change, and the circulation rhythms are kept constant, all of which characterize a constant system” (Gligo 2006, 18); translation by the author.
- 40.
As many authors suggest, this conflict demonstrates the struggle between an understanding of nature’s “value of use” and “value of change,” to use classical Marxist terms. Here the criticisms of environmental modernization rely on the pressure required to stabilize an understanding of nature in terms of the value of change, thus rejecting any reference to substantive and transcendent values. Many of this research project’s interviewees stated that the Chilean ecological modernization stabilizes a form of abstract monetary compensation that is incapable of internalizing or reflecting all natural values – value of use – for the local and native populations, while, it is simultaneously also incapable of considering the total amount of environmental services that nature delivers.
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Interviews
The interviews quoted in this article, belong to the authors PhD thesis fieldwork, considering more than 25 interviews with academics from the so-called Chilean traditional universities, policymakers, representatives of NGOs, the local community and the mining sector. In terms of keeping the anonymity of the interviewees the reference are only general.
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Campos-Medina, F. (2015). Could the Search for Sustainability Reinforce Socio-ecological Conflict?: The Mining Industry in Chile and Its Impact at the Local and Regional Level. In: Werlen, B. (eds) Global Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16477-9_14
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