Contested discourses, knowledge, and socio-environmentalconflict in Ecuador
Karen S. Buchanan *
Centre for Development Innovation, Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 5
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 28 October 2011
Received in revised form
11 December 2012
Accepted 14 December 2012
Published on line 20 March 2013
Keywords:
Discourse analysis
Knowledge
Socio-environmental conflict
Political ecology
Ecuador
a b s t r a c t
This paper explores how multiple types of knowledge – epistemic, technical, and anecdotal –
are combined and used discursively within the claim-making process of a long-running
socio-environmental conflict concerning copper extraction and its threat to biodiversity
conservation in Ecuador’s Intag valley cloud-forest. The contentions at play in this highly
polarised dispute are broadly speaking either developmental or environmental in nature.
This article examines the forms of knowledge that are mobilised in environmental discourse
and the ways in which claim-makers deploy different types of knowledge to advance their
political and policy interests. It contends that the success of the environmental claim-
makers in protecting the cloud-forest so far derives from their political mobilisation around
strategic and dynamic combinations of different types of environmental knowledge.
Through including the hegemonic neoliberal biodiversity discourse in their anti-mining
and pro-conservation environmental discourse and policy advocacy, environmentalists
from the local to the global level were able to use neoliberal arguments as counter-claims
against the neoliberal pro-extractives rhetoric of economic development. In practice, this
was achieved both by enacting local environmental policies and practices to protect the
Intag area from large-scale open-cast mining activities, and by leveraging power through
spreading social media based information to undermine the viability of successive mining
concession-owners at the international level. The gap between science and policy therefore
was, and continues to be, transcended by the nature of the urgent political expediency of the
conflict.
# 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci
1. Introduction: socio-environmental conflictand extractive industries
Large-scale mining is one of the most contentious human
activities on the planet, indeed ‘perhaps no single industry has
precipitated more disputes over land use than mining’ (Hilson, 2002).
In the short- to medium-term, extractive industries and their
associated social and economic infrastructure bring certain
economic benefits to the national economy and selected
sections of the local economy and community such as through
* Tel.: +31 317486866; fax: +31 317486801.E-mail address: [email protected].
1462-9011/$ – see front matter # 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reservedhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2012.12.012
employment and land title purchases. Simultaneously miner-
al extraction activities cause the land required by open-cast
mining and surrounding socio-economic communities un-
avoidable alteration through natural resource degradation and
social change (Hilson, 2002). While bringing socio-economic
infrastructure to the area around the mine e.g. medical
facilities, housing, roads, and schools, the socio-environmen-
tal consequences of conflicts can be severe and irreversible,
and even result in ‘violence, resource degradation, the undermining
of livelihoods, and the uprooting of communities’ (Castro and
Nielsen, 2001).
.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 520
Frequently disputes arise in developing countries between
existing land-use policies and practices such as agriculture,
forestry, water catchment, and nature conservation, and new
extractive land-uses such as large-scale open-cast copper
mining. These policy conflicts reflect the irreconcilable nature
of such competing land-uses. Where mineralised deposits of
copper and other metal ores lie beneath the surface, open-cast
mining necessarily involves the removal and destruction of
this surface including the natural resources, human settle-
ments and cultural and economic activities it contains and
affords. These socio-environmental conflicts around mining
activities can be understood as the result of interactions
between different claim-makers who advance a particular set
of interests as part of their struggle for control of certain
natural resources. Often, they are highly polarised where
claim-makers position themselves either in favour of or
against mining activities. Generally, those against mineral
extraction promote environmental and economic alternatives
to mining such as biodiversity conservation, agriculture and
forestry activities while those in favour of mining activities
highlight the social and economic development mining brings.
In the Andean regions of Latin America mining conflicts are
multiplying (Urkidi and Walter, 2011) with anti-mining social
movements emerging alongside (Bebbington et al., 2008). In
Intag, the case study of this paper, a broad range of claim-
makers1 express their contested visions of the future
development of the cloud-forested slopes of the Intag valley
by drawing on selected environmental discourses. Mobilising
around shared values and identities, Intag’s society is now
characterised by social divisions that ‘reflect deep-seated conflicts
over power and resources both between groups and (more pertinent
still) within groups’ (Hildyard, 1999). In the Intag valley, these
conflicts have resulted in people developing a clear sense of
identity, as mineros and ecologistas.2 The pro-mining faction
argues that the rural area is economically under-developed,
that local people are under-served by public health, education
and transport services and infrastructure, and also have few
business and employment opportunities outside small-scale
farming and logging. They contend that implementing a policy
of large-scale open-cast copper mining can only improve
living conditions in the rural communities. The environmen-
talists assert the global, national and local significance of
keeping the cloud forest intact, with the ecosystems services
and local livelihoods it provides. Implementing a policy of
protecting this unique environment from irreversible destruc-
tion by large-scale mining would not only preserve environ-
mental goods for the benefit of the planet but also defend and
maintain local quality of life3 and minimise damage to the social
fabric and general well-being of local farming communities.
This illustrates that what is at stake here is not just a matter
of objectively assessing the effects of the mining project and
1 Local communities and local level ‘grassroots’ groups; thewider community of interested parties which includes non-gov-ernmental organisations (NGOs); the State; the municipality andprovince; local level and multi-national business, including themining exploration company; national and multi-lateral institu-tions, and international organisations.
2 Miners and environmentalists respectively.3 ‘Defensa de la vida y la naturalesa’(defence of life and nature).
accuracy of the different claims, but also the way in which the
ecological and social conditions in Intag valley are framed.
Sociologists investigating environmental issues highlight how
claim-makers try to influence policy by convincing decision-
makers of the validity of whatever is being defined as an
environmental problem (Morris and Wragg, 2003). They show
how in these issues ‘it is not an environmental phenomenon itself
that is important, but the way in which society makes sense of this
phenomenon’ (Fortmann, 1995). Following these insights, this
article analyses the ways in which the claim-makers in a
contentious proposed open-cast copper mine in Intag mobilise
different environmental discourses and deploy types of
knowledge to advance their policy and political interests. As
such, it addresses the intricate dynamics between knowledge
politics, discourse and power as they took place in encounters
between pro- and anti-mining groups and the negotiation and
re-negotiation of their respective positions as the conflict
unfolded.
2. The discursive use of environmentalknowledge
The Intag valley’s scattered rural farming communities live in
the Choco-Andean range of north-west Ecuador. For nearly 20
years since the discovery of valuable mineral deposits in the
hills several of these communities have been under the threat
of their lands being lost to a succession of firstly private
mining interests, from Japanese, to Canadian, and then to
today’s Ecuadorian-Chilean alliance between the 2 countries’
state owned mining companies. Throughout this time
combinations of different forms of environmental knowledge
and different environmental and developmental discourses
were strategically deployed by the claim-makers contesting
the future of the Intag valley. Consequently, the mining
conflict has developed into a complex and multi-scalar
struggle for power. The anti-mining coalition continues to
resist the ever-present threat of mining, with the support of
the Canton Cotacachi People’s Assembly which annually
renews its resolution to reject mining in Intag, a resolution
which must be adhered to by the local authority.
This article is framed within a political ecology approach
where the goal is ‘to explain environmental conflict especially
in terms of struggles over ‘‘knowledge, power and practice’’ and
‘‘politics, justice and governance’’ (Robbins, 2012), and to seek ‘‘to
understand the complex relations between nature and society
through a careful analysis of what one might call the forms of
access and control over resources and their implications for
environmental health and sustainable livelihoods’’ (Watts,
2000). It also applies a discourse analytical perspective to
investigate these struggles. It considers discourse as ‘a shared
way of apprehending the world. . . [which is]. . . bound up with
political power’ (Dryzek, 2005). The struggles between the claim-
makers involved in Intag are thus understood as struggles to
get specific discourses accepted in policy while others are
ignored or rejected.
The importance of discourse is increasingly recognised in
studies of political ecology, human–nature relationships and
environmental conflicts. They emphasise the relationships
between discourse and power as central dialectic ‘moments’ of
4 ‘‘. . .estamos defendiendo lo que es de medio ambiente. . . esque nosotros luchamos en defensa de nuestra naturaleza es por-que necesitamos para sobrevivir aquı’’.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 5 21
the social process (Harvey, 1996) of environmental claim-
making. In the so-called ‘discursive turn’ in political ecology,
discourse is described as how ‘‘desires, imaginaries, ideologies
and metaphors work to produce textual products that both reflect and
shape relations of power.’’ (Neumann, 2005). Thus, for the study
of environmental politics and policy-making it is important to
focus on the ‘different ways in which the environment is interpreted
and explained by the various people involved in its management,
including government officials and policy-makers, local civil society
[and] how these views inform (or fail to be heard in) environmental
policy-making in the developing world’ (Blaikie, 2001).
Technical knowledge about the state of the environment
and its connection to human activities plays an important role
in environmental struggles (Wesselink et al., 2013; Turnhout
et al., 2008). Environmentalists recognise that ‘truth talking to
power’ Wildavsky (1979), can aid their cause and that
knowledge lends credibility to certain claims and can be used
to criticise or advocate specific courses of action. As
environmental knowledge informs and constitutes the dis-
courses in which it is used, it is pertinent to reflect that: ‘whose
discourse is accepted as being truthful is a question of social struggle
and power politics’ (Castree and Braun, 2001). In a similar vein,
Bingham (2003) emphasises the relationship between dis-
course and knowledge when he identifies the following three
requirements for successful claim-making in the public arena:
(1) a generalised argument or discourse designed to justify the
claim-maker’s position; (2) evidence of some sort to back up
the claim; and (3) an assemblage of resources to support the
claim. He argues that these are ‘‘. . .components that different
interests can bring together and display in order to exert leverage,
influence or force’’ (Bingham, 2003). Ockwell and Rydin (2006)
show how analysing the discursive nature of environmental
policy conflicts can lead to a fuller understanding of ‘how
contested knowledge claims become accredited and established in
policy’. Importantly, environmental claim-making not only
involves the use of technical knowledge – access to which
often is privileged by power – but also local and anecdotal
knowledge. In some cases these forms of knowledge can even
be used to reject hegemonic discourses (Neves-Graca, 2004).
Consequently, it is important to focus the analysis on the use
of different forms of knowledge including epistemic, technical
as well as anecdotal knowledge (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Tenbensel,
2008).
This article presents the results of an analysis of the
different environmental discourses and forms of knowledge
used by the claim-makers in the Intag mining controversy.
The findings are based on interviews with all actors involved
undertaken during 9 months of fieldwork in 2005–2006. In
addition to the interview transcripts, the analysis is based on
fieldwork notes, policy documents, local newspapers, web-
sites and other media sources. Qualitative Data Analysis
Software was used to support the management and analysis of
the data. To typify the different positions in the debate, the
article uses Hajer’s (1995) concepts of discourse coalitions and
storylines. In Intag the claim-making groups have each
formed a ‘discourse coalition’ as mineros or ecologistas. These
coalitions present themselves as united voices to key institu-
tions but they comprise a wide variety of claim-makers
including activists, scientists, politicians, and their represen-
tative organisations. These coalitions are politically powerful
because their constituent claim-makers unify around partic-
ular ‘story-lines’, which they however may interpret differ-
ently (Hajer, 1995). The analysis of the coalitions and the
claims they make focuses on identifying the types of
knowledge used and assessing how these forms of knowledge
are deployed in environmental discourse.
3. Knowledge, discourse and claim-making inIntag valley
Typically, environmental ‘truths’, such as critical species lists
based on field data collected by natural scientists who
establish supposedly objective facts using scientific methods,
are accepted in a style of policy-making described as ‘top-down,
state-led, and authoritarian’ (Blaikie, 2001). Scientific data about
trends in the distribution of species and the functioning of
ecosystems have prompted worldwide concerns over the
extinction of species and the critical functions of biodiversity
to support all life forms on Earth. The UN Convention on
Biodiversity Conservation (1992), together with large global
conservation NGOs, popularised the term biodiversity. Subse-
quent environmental education and political campaigns have
established this as a dominant environmental discourse used
almost universally in local to international policy-making
processes. Intag’s ‘tremendous and unique biodiversity’ is
expressed discursively by national and local environmental
NGOs in Ecuador.
Despite its initial international origin and association with
top-down policy, this biodiversity discourse is now used in the
everyday rhetoric of Intag’s anti-mining communities as an
international political weapon to oppose destruction of their
natural environment by large-scale copper mining. However
the different actors involved in the coalition have different
interpretations of the story lines used. While for conservation
NGOs, they may reflect their commitment to protect the
intrinsic values of nature, this may be different for other
actors. As one resident of the rural communities said, their
environmental protection claim is a question of survival ‘‘. . .we
are defending the environment. . .we are fighting to defend our natural
environment as this is what we depend on to survive here’’.4
The ecologistas discourse coalition, that has formed around
common ground of pro-conservation and anti-mining inter-
ests and has organised itself around the global story-line of
biodiversity and its conservation translated to their local
level, is characterised by links between local and interna-
tional levels from local communities to international envi-
ronmental NGOs. This connection has opened up new
sources of different types of environmental knowledge for
the local communities, and also provided an additional media
outlet for publicity of and advocacy on behalf of the anti-
mining campaign. Early studies of environmental claim-
making over biodiversity focus on the role of the media in the
production and representation of environmental claims,
their delivery and the creation of meaning, seen as a cyclical
process (Burgess and Harrison, 1993). More recent research
6 Y luchamos para las futuras generaciones, que han de venir.Nosotros ya estamos a media edad, pero los ninos que estan por
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 522
shows ‘how the advent of the world-wide web and digital media
tools has since added to the tactical arsenal available to groups
wanting to infiltrate and disrupt government and corporate
networks of power’ (Lester and Hutchins, 2012). In the Intag
conflict the internet has been the main medium used for local
to global communication. The autonomous local environ-
mental organisation that was set up to represent the local
communities used their bi-lingual website to access not only
the Spanish-speaking but also the English-speaking conser-
vationist world. Thus using bi-directional information chan-
nels, the local environmentalists gained exposure to
concerned environmentalists and NGOs in developed coun-
tries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. Equally these
environmental NGOs used empirical data from the Intag case
as epistemic information to bolster their campaigns to
change the policies and practices of the mining companies,
many of which are stockmarket-listed in their own countries
when operating in developing countries. However, as Lester
and Hutchins point out (Lester and Hutchins, 2012), while the
visibility that social media offers is a politically valuable tool
for less empowered groups such as in the Intag case, the exact
opposite is often sought by the companies and governments
on the other side of an environmental conflict. For these
parties, the ‘function of invisibility or the coordinated avoidance of
media communication, attention and representation in order to
achieve political and/or social ends’ is a most sought-after feature
of contemporary environmental politics. As was the case
during the fieldwork period where the exploration company
website provided minimal information, only in English, and
for its shareholders, with minimal reference to the ongoing
conflict and difficulties the company’s staff and consultants
were having in gaining access to their property in Intag and to
being able to communicate the findings of their EIS5 as
required by law to secure the mining concession.
Closely linked to environmental knowledge and discourse
are the ways that claim-makers see themselves and each
other and the reasons why. For example, the reasons for which
people self-identify and want to be seen as environmentalists
or miners in this conflict. Civil society in Intag is being
restructured as interested individuals, families and groups
align themselves in discourse coalitions along their position in
the conflict. This results in a simultaneous process of fissures
forming throughout the existing social fabric while deep
bonds are forming across communities. As we have seen in the
composition of the discourse coalitions, both the divisions and
the connections are multi-scalar in nature. Within these
coalitions, strong links are forged between shared, adopted
identities and this forms the basis for the sharing of
knowledge, predominantly epistemic and technical in nature.
The mineros discourse coalition expresses scepticism about
how the rural anti-mining claim-makers developed their
apparently deeply held convictions of the importance of nature
and biodiversity conservation. One informant referred to the
four main families opposing the mining project as ‘brain-
washed’ by a trip to a copper mine and smelter in Peru . Another
informant gave an example of information being given to the
rural communities by a local environmental organisation,
implying that it had gained almost ‘mythological’ status.
5 Environmental Impact Statement.
He described this as purely anecdotally based information,
without verifiable scientific bases in epistemic or technical
knowledge. He portrayed the convictions of the people as
ridiculous and ill-founded: ‘‘. . .people are telling all their people that
the desert in Peru is caused by mining, and people believe them. There’s
even one story that came out, this came to me fourth-hand, that
underneath the copper deposit there is a big nuclear uranium deposit,
and when you dig too deep into the copper, this uranium bursts out and
causes a desert like the one that was created by the mining companies in
Peru .’’ A further informant simply called the people of the area
‘mis-informed’ and in this way the power of the anti-mining
claim is undermined by the questioning and ridicule of the
accuracy of the technical information on which their thinking
about the effects of mining is based. This same tactic,
dismissing conviction and claims as based on mere anecdote
is used by the anti-mining environmental alliance to under-
mine the pro-mining alliance’s equally strong belief in the
benefits of mining by claiming their lack of epistemic and
technical information on the socio-environmental risks of
mining to the health and well-being of proximate rural
communities.
However anecdotal knowledge is very important in the
promotion of action. One Intag resident told me that her
determination to work against the mine comes from the deep
feeling she has for nature conservation and a heart-felt
conviction that the mine would be bad for her family and the
future of the village ‘‘We’re fighting for future generations to come.
We are already middle-aged but the children need clean rivers
without contamination, and peaceful hills’’.6 She is one of the
group of women who visited Peru as part of building
awareness of the impacts of open-cast mining and saw an
operational copper mine, the extent of the excavation works,
the rock spoil, and the tailings dam, and so is concerned about
how mining will destroy the Intag landscape and existing
economic activities. This type of anecdotal information is the
basis for the stories often re-told and relayed between claim-
makers based on their experiences and observations and their
own interpretation of reality.
Extensive capacity-building in all rural communities in the
Intag valley has ensured that information on causal links
between mining and environmental, health and social
impacts is clearly understood by the anti-mining alliance
who use this epistemic information in their discourses against
the mine. In the Intag conflict claim-makers use both
generalised and specific environmental discourses, with
information and knowledge from multiple sources as evi-
dence to substantiate the argument behind each claim, and
each claim-maker assembles and deploys their own battery of
resources to lever influence and power over the policy process
and its eventual outcome, as well as its impacts. The epistemic
knowledge in this case is derived from a range of sources: from
the EIS produced for the Japanese International Cooperation
Agency (JICA); from scientific reports produced by national and
international environmental NGOs; from the World Bank;
from various national Ministries; from the mining company
venir, se necessitan los rıos limpios sin contaminacion, las mon-tanas libre de ruido.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 5 23
engineers and corporate social responsibility managers; also
from site visits to mining areas in Chile and Peru . This type of
knowledge is used to inform the policy positions of the anti-
mining claim-makers and articulated using environmental
discourses.
The epistemic knowledge contained in JICA’s EIS became
available to the national environmental campaigning organi-
sation Accıon Ecologica. This Ecuadorian NGO first alerted the
Intag communities to the threat of mining. It did this through
an initial environmental awareness campaign run in con-
junction with the newly formed local environmental organi-
sation DECOIN that was formed to represent the interests of
the residents of Intag and promote sustainable alternative
economic forms of development to copper mining. Specifical-
ly, they introduced the particular hegemonic neoliberal
discourses of biodiversity conservation and sustainable
development (Fletcher, 2011; Igoe et al., 2010), which advocate
solutions for conservation that simultaneously stimulate
economic development. There are some dissenting views on
how this information should have been used7 as not all anti-
mining environmentalists agree how the knowledge should be
used as a strategic tool for organising local communities.
However the use of the environmental discourse of biodiver-
sity conservation has been chosen by the local environmental
NGO to frame the aims of the future development of Intag by
the anti-mining alliance. The technical knowledge that is
deployed in these discourses was shared through these
workshops and meetings and they had a strong influence
on the development of a shared worldview within local
environmental groups. They have shaped local thinking and
are reflected in policy options and preferences. Biodiversity
conservation has become their point of departure in the
development of environmentally sensitive enterprises such as
shade-grown organic coffee for export to Japan and Germany,
loofah-based products, organic soaps, and flour. Most initia-
tives are run by local women who for the first time have their
own income.
7 I was present when the original EIS came out from the Ministryof Energy and Mines, when we were given that document; I waspresent at the DECOIN meeting where we went over that study; Isays, these guys are beautiful, they’ve just given us the best toolwe have for building awareness, these folks just don’t want toleave their land, there’s nowhere else to go; these guys are allcolonists, they will not want to be just tossed off their land, just fora mine; and they were offering to relocate all 200 families orsomething like that that would have to be relocated, they weregoing to give them public housing, a small house on a 20 by 20 lotin the new mining town that was going to be developed in order toprocess the slurry and send it down the tube to the coast; that wasthe trade-off they were offering, I just thought that, it was a greatorganising tool you know, ‘they’re not going to get our land’, that’ssomething people can understand. There are people who don’tagree with me on that; they say ‘we’ve got to build an anti-miningconsciousness!’ and all that, it was just artificially imposed, I wasalways saying we’ve got to legalise these people’s land; that’swhere we’ve got to put the money, raise money and we’ll legalisetheir land with INDA before the big company gets in here and buysit all up; just never went ahead, that’s one of the things whichwould have been, I think, a much more positive direction, wouldhave helped.
4. Environmental discourse and policydevelopment
As Hajer and Versteeg (2005) write: ‘‘environmental discussion
can lead to the revision of rules, the enactment of laws, or the creation
of institutions – but underlying these visible changes, there is the
creation, thickening or discarding of meanings. Environmental
arguments might seem factual and scientific, but they are also
meaningful, suggestive and atmospheric.’’ Indeed, the study of
nature and society relations has several approaches which
reflect how claim-makers advocate particular environmental
policy alternatives based on the different forms of environ-
mental knowledge they have acquired through environmental
education, capacity-building, and multi-level international
alliances. Castree and Braun (2001) write that: ‘. . .knowledge of
nature is invariably inflected with the biases of the knower. . . [i.e.]
. . .only particular, socially constituted knowledges. . .are. . .seen as
implicitly and explicitly reflecting the wider. . .interests of the most
powerful groups in Western and non-Western societies.’ Intag’s
anti-mining environmental discourse uses epistemic knowl-
edge of nature derived from empirical scientific studies carried
out by national and international experts citing the incredible
biodiversity of the area. In contrast to what Castree and Braun
appear to suggest, the Intag case demonstrates that also
traditionally less powerful groups were able to benefit from
the mobilisation of this knowledge. They were also able to
mobilise the technical knowledge about presumably sustain-
able alternatives for economic development that was associ-
ated with the neoliberal discourses of conservation and
sustainable development. However it is not only epistemic
and technical but also local forms of knowledge that are used
in supporting claims within the struggle at the local level.
Rural communities in Intag understand and relate to their
environment as something they are part of. They express this
relationship through their claims and self-identification as
environmentalists living in mutual respect with nature. The
Parish magazine ‘El Inteno’ explains that the majority of local
farming people are accustomed to the rural way of life which
they would like to continue to enjoy in peace: ‘‘. . .the majority of
Intag’s residents are farmers. This has been our life and we would like
to continue living in peace. We Intenos are environmentalists by
nature due to being born in the countryside.’’8 This position is
clearly based on their understanding of the values of the Intag
people and their local knowledge.This ‘social nature’ approach
sees nature as essentially social and ‘. . .defined, delimited, and
even physically reconstituted by different societies, often in order to
serve specific. . .interests. . .’ (Castree and Braun, 2001). This
assertion fits well with this study presented here and gives
recognition to unequal positions of power and resources
among those either advocating or contesting environmental
claims and seeking opposing policy outcomes. In Intag the
environmental policy-making process uses the word ‘la
naturaleza’ to describe their natural environment. This term,
despite its multiple and overlapping meanings, is used
8 ‘‘La mayorıa de los/las Intenos somos campesinos, agricultoresy ganadores. Es ha sido nuestra vida y queremos seguirla viviendoen paz. Los Intenos somos ecologistas por naturaleza, porquenacimos en el monte.’’ ‘El Inteno’, 2006.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 524
deliberately and consistently to achieve a common purpose of
defeating the mining policy advocates. The intention of the
claim-makers in this particular conflict demonstrates this
selectivity in practice as their environmental claims are
discursively constructed using different forms of knowledge
in order to achieve their policy and political objectives.
In Intag the claims and counter-claims are formed from
different forms of environmental information communicated
by organisations at all levels from local to international. The
claims are used to create a dynamic knowledge base which
informs the evolution of discourses used by claim-makers.
New institutions have emerged in Intag to represent the
coalitions and articulate the associated discourses. The
analysis presented here shows that DECOIN was instrumental
in the introduction of new epistemic and technical knowledge.
This knowledge was used in its environmental-awareness
campaign to educate the local farming communities, some of
which took on these new discourses and used them to express
feeling and beliefs which had not been vocalised previously.
The Canton’s Environmental Committee has since supple-
mented this initial campaign with a universal environmental
education programme targeted primarily at those in the first 5
years of education (children and adults alike in the parallel
local campaign for universal literacy). There is now a growing
body of rural people who have adopted this way of thinking
and have started to employ environmental discourses from
the North of sustainable development, biodiversity conserva-
tion, ecology, water protection and so on, through their own
narratives and accounts of the conflict in order to influence
policy outcomes. Their discourses, and the strong interna-
tional political links made from using these imported concepts
and terminology, have empowered the rural communities to
make changes to their own social and material practices, and
to take direct action to achieve a mining-free future in Intag.
Multi-dimensional and multi-sector resistance move-
ments, such as the ecologistas discourse coalition, have
emerged in response to ecological distribution conflicts where
there is a perception that environmental risks and hazards are
unequally distributed across human populations. As this
paper has shown in the analysis, the coalition was able to
integrate epistemic, technical and anecdotal knowledge, and
connect it to specific discourses of biodiversity, sustainable
development, and neoliberal conservation. In so doing, they
have been able to make a number of claims: about the high
biodiversity values of the area; about the extent of environ-
mental degradation caused by the large-scale copper mine
planned for the area, including the degradation from the waste
produced from the extraction process; about how the copper
mine would affect their relation with nature and threaten
their way of life; about the problematic assumptions under-
pinning the mining project and about sustainable alternatives
for local economic development in Intag and the wider region.
While on initial inspection it may appear that there is little
connection between local and global ecological distribution
conflicts, in terms of the local movements and global issues,
global ideas are being used in Intag’s local and Ecuador’s
national environmental debates and struggles. In the Intag
case global to local links are driven by the global market for the
products of the copper mining industry; local to global links
are promoted by the local communities who resist the
pressures of global forces to exploit mineral resources
underneath their farmland and cloud-forests.
Despite inequalities based on gender, socio-economic
class, and level of education, the powerful unifying identity
of the conflict’s main groups is around their unique dis-
courses. This strong self-identity of an otherwise heteroge-
neous alliance determines their degree of bargaining power
and the extent of control over resources such as land and its
environmental degradation on which their livelihoods de-
pend. In terms of multi-scalar connections, Intag’s claim-
makers situate the process in the context of global economic
demands for copper, and also the associated political
pressures for mineral development tied in with national
economic development, local social forces of resistance to
change and environmental degradation, and hegemonic
environmental discourses. These contested policy discourses
are the very substance of political developments, negotiations
and power relations.
5. Conclusions
As this article has demonstrated, multiple forms of environ-
mental knowledge are being used by each claim-maker as they
try to exercise power by using environmental discourses
which can then affect their relative and dynamic positions of
empowerment and disempowerment within the conflict. This
position changes according to the control and use of
environmental ‘knowledges’ and discourses; and ultimately,
also the degree to which each claim-maker is able to advance
their own policy and political interests. The discourses used,
particularly the hegemonic neoliberal discourse of biodiversi-
ty conservation, are actively shaping and defining the
boundaries of expression and language used by the local
claim-makers, and in turn delimiting their claims for the
protection and preservation of the cloud-forest. Supporting
Hajer and Versteeg’s contention (2005), these discourses serve
to ‘shape what can and cannot be thought’ by the environmen-
talists in the Intag conflict; they also ‘delimit the range of policy
options, and thereby serve as precursors to policy outcomes’ that
claimants in this discourse coalition seek which ultimately
defines the range of environmental policy options that they
seek to influence.
Intag’s claim-makers’ deliberate use of combinations of
epistemic, technical, and even anecdotal knowledge through
dynamic environmental discourses demonstrates the dialec-
tical relations between claim-makers in the two coalitions as
claim-makers are dynamically defining and re-defining claims
in connection with the different environmental and develop-
mental discourses mobilised in the conflict. Thus what this
paper has shown in the Intag case is the co-evolution of
discourse and knowledge whereby the knowledge ingrained
within the discourse either promotes or inhibits the power of a
discourse’s use as a claim; in turn strengthening or weakening
specific claim-makers within the conflict. Ultimately the
success of the ecologistas’ coalition in protecting their cloud-
forest from large-scale open-cast copper mining, until today,
derives from their active mobilisation and strategic combina-
tion of different forms of environmental knowledge –
epistemic, technical and anecdotal – in their anti-mining
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 1 9 – 2 5 25
and pro-biodiversity conservation discourses and policy
advocacy.
Finally, the paper can conclude that through including the
hegemonic neoliberal biodiversity discourse in their anti-
mining and pro-conservation environmental discourse and
policy advocacy, environmentalists from the local to the global
level were able to use neoliberal arguments as counter-claims
against the neoliberal pro-extractives rhetoric of economic
development. In practice, this was achieved both by enacting
local environmental policies and practices to protect the Intag
area from large-scale open-cast mining activities, and by
leveraging power through spreading social media based
information to undermine the viability of successive mining
concession-owners at the international level. The gap be-
tween science and policy therefore was, and continues to be,
transcended by the nature of the urgent political expediency of
the conflict. Until today no copper exploration activities have
begun in the Intag valley however the threat is always there. In
July 2012 the Ecuadorian and Chilean governments signed an
agreement to activate the copper mining project by beginning
exploration activities in this richly biodiverse area in 2013,
despite the prolonged resistance from environmentalists
within the local communities, the Cantonal Assembly’s and
the wider international community. Unlike the previous
attempts by 2 non-Ecuadorian companies to start exploration
in Intag, this time the threat comes from the state mining
company. With this new power constellation of national
versus local interests and the rhetoric of economic develop-
ment in the interest of Ecuador’s national economy, the
struggle for Intag’s environmental discourses, policies and
practices to still prevail within the claim-making process will
be tested to a far greater extent than ever before.
Acknowledgements
A first version of this paper was given at the Sixth Interpretive
Policy Analysis Conference in Cardiff in June 2011. The author
would like to express her gratitude to Esther Turnhout for her
support in preparation of this article for submission and her
thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
r e f e r e n c e s
Bebbington, A., Bebbington, D.H., Bury, J., Lingan, J., Munoz, J.P.,2008. Mining and social movements: struggles overlivelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes.World Development 36 (12), 2888–2905
Bingham, N., 2003. Introduction. In: Bingham, N., Blowers, A.,Belshaw, C. (Eds.), Contested Environments. Wiley inAssociation with the Open University, Chichester
Blaikie, P., 2001. Social Nature and environmental policy in thesouth: views from veranda and veld. In: Castree, N., Braun, P.(Eds.), Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Blackwell,Oxford
Burgess, J., Harrison, C., 1993. The circulation of claims in thecultural politics of environmental change. In: Hansen, J.(Ed.), The Mass Media and Environmental Issues. LeicesterUniversity Press, Leicester, pp. 198–221
Castree, N., Braun, B., 2001. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, andPolitics. Blackwell, Oxford
Castro, A.P., Nielsen, P., 2001. Indigenous people and co-management: implications for conflict management.Environmental Science and Policy 4, 229–239
Dryzek, J., 2005. The Politics of the Earth: EnvironmentalDiscourses, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Fletcher, R., 2011. Neoliberal environmentality: toward apoststructuralist political ecology of the conservationdebate. Conservation and Society 8 (3), 157–240
Flyvbjerg, B., 2001. Making Social Sciences Matter: Why SocialInquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge
Fortmann, L., 1995. Talking claims: discursive strategiesin contesting property. World Development 23,1053–1063
Hajer, M., Versteeg, W., 2005. A decade of discourse analysis ofenvironmental politics: achievements, challenges,perspectives. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7,175–184
Hajer, M.A., 1995. The Politics of Environmental Discourse:Ecological Modernisation and the Policy Process. OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford
Harvey, D., 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography ofDifference. Blackwell, Oxford
Hildyard, N., 1999. Blood, babies and the social roots of conflict.In: Suliman, M. (Ed.), Ecology, Politics & Violent Conflict. ZedBooks, London, pp. 3–24
Hilson, G., 2002. An overview of land use conflicts in miningcommunities. Land Use Policy 19, 65–73
Igoe, J., Neves, K., Brockington, D., 2010. A spectacular eco-touraround the historic bloc: theorising the current convergenceof biodiversity conservation and capitalist expansionAntipode 42 (3), 486–512.
Lester, L., Hutchins, B., 2012. The power of the unseen:environmental conflict, the media and invisibility. Media,Culture & Society 34, 847–863
Morris, C., Wragg, A., 2003. Talking about the birds and the bees:biodiversity claims making at the local level. EnvironmentalValues 71–90
Neves-Graca, K., 2004. Revisiting the tragedy of the commons:ecological dilemmas of whale watching in the Azores.Human Organization 63 (3), 289–300
Neumann, R.P., 2005. Making Political Ecology. Hodder, LondonOckwell, D., Rydin, Y., 2006. Conflicting discourses of
knowledge: understanding the policy adoption of pro-burning knowledge claims in Cape York Peninsula,Australia. Environmental Politics 15 (3), 379–398
Robbins, P., 2012. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 2nded. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford
Tenbensel, T., 2008. The Role of Evidence in Policy: How the MixMatters. IRSPM, Australia
Turnhout, E., Hisschemoller, M., Eijsackers, H., 2008. Science inWadden Sea policy: from accommodation to advocacy.Environmental Science and Policy 11, 227–239
Urkidi, L., Walter, M., 2011. Dimensions of environmentaljustice in anti-gold mining movements in Latin America.Geoforum 42, 683–695
United Nations, 1992. Convention on Biodiversity Conservation.Watts, M.J., 2000. Political ecology. In: Sheppard, E., Barnes, T.
(Eds.), A Companion to Economic Geography. Blackwell,Oxford, pp. 257–274
Wesselink, A., et al., 2013. Technical knowledge, discursivespaces and politics at the science-policy interface.Environmental Science and Policy 30, 1–9
Wildavsky, A., 1979. Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craftof Policy Analysis. Little Brown, Boston
