Mathilde Denoël

Thesis in geography

Defended on July 12, 2019
 
Power relations in mining activity, between neo-extractivist model and territorial variations : the case of the provinces of Jujuy, San Juan and Mendoza in Argentina under the supervision of François Taulelle and Martine Guibert

Abstract

In Argentina, large-scale metal mining activity began in the 1990s, following the recommendations of international institutions and under the aegis of Carlos Menem’s neoliberal government. It is the beginning of extractivism that encouraged the expansion of capitalist logic of accumulation by dispossession into new provinces, wich are now managing their resources. With the arrival of a progressive government in the early 2000s, the deployment of the sector did not slow down and became a state policy. It is the transition to neo-extractivism, which is accompanied by a significant increase in the number of organizations and the establishment of a consensus apparatus aimed at legitimizing, naturalizing and institutionalizing the increasingly criticized activity in the territories.

In this context, this research questions the conditions for the local adaptation of a globalized model.
  • What interdependencies, what power relations exist between the partisan actors of the sector and local territories?
  • What role do local elites play in the hybridization of public-private logic underpinned by neo-extractivism?
  • How do the representations that make territories evolve in the face of this activity, which has a hegemonic definition of “resource”?

To answer these questions, qualitative and multidisciplinary approach as well as multi-site, polymorphic and multimodal methods have been adopted. This methodological triangulation was designed to compare the discourses and practices of the sector’s actors at the subnational level and to identify the territorial variations of a globalized model. Faced with the establishment of an activity that is greedy for “natural products”, we invite the reader to consider the weight of the local in the multiscalar and hybrid power relations deployed by the actors of large-scale metal mining activity.

Publication