Prospective environmental injustice: insights from anti-mining struggles in Romania and Bulgaria

ABSTRACT

The concept of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ) is proposed to make sense of situations in which development proposals and the actions of state and market actors create injustices even before the development projects become a material reality. Through this concept and its application to two cases of opencast gold-mining, a broader conceptualization of socio-environmental (in)justice is invited that considers multiple forms of injustice of rural communities in Romania and Bulgaria during more than a decade of waiting for the ‘actual harm’ of mining to happen. The mere prospects of opencast gold-mining have, in fact, shed light on deep-seated and ongoing dimensions of socio-environmental injustice such as, land-grabbing, slow community disappearance and marginalization, daily psychological damage, disavowal of alternatives and disqualification as political subjects. These injustices experienced collectively could be seen as constitutive moments of systemic violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-environmental justice
• mining
• eastern Europe
• political ecology
• critical political theory

Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Gustavo Garcia-Lopez, the two reviewers and the editors of the journal for encouraging and supporting this work in many ways. I acknowledge the support of Foundation for Science and Technology-Portugal for the postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/94680/2013.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the cES, Programa de Estímulo ao Emprego Científico, FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal [DL 572016/CP1341/CT0022].