Mediated risks: the Roşia Montană displacement and a new perspective on the IRR model

Abstract

Abstract The impoverishment risks and reconstruction (IRR) model is widely used in research on involuntary population displacements. This article endorses an expansion of the model to better account for how impoverishment risks are mediated through economic circumstances and through actors outside and within the displacement process. The case of the proposed Roşia Montană mining project in Romania reveals that some impoverishment risks originate beyond displacement itself, and are harder to counter, while others are mitigated through local resistance and the strategic deployment of material and cultural assets. The Roşia Montană displacement also shows that mediation reduces the predictability of IRR risks.

Résumé Le modèle IRR (Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction) est largement utilisé dans la recherche sur les déplacements involontaires de populations. Cet article propose une extension de ce modèle pour mieux tenir compte du rôle que joue la situation économique locale et celui des acteurs qui participent, de l'intérieur comme de l'extérieur, au processus de déplacement. Le projet minier Roşia Montană en Roumanie montre que certains risques d'appauvrissement, plus difficiles à contrer, ne proviennent pas du déplacement lui-même. D'autres risques sont atténués grâce à la résistance locale et au déploiement stratégique, par les collectivités touchées, de leurs ressources matérielles et culturelles. Dans le cas étudié, ces facteurs de médiation limitent la puissance prédictive du modèle IRR.

Keywords:

• impoverishment risks and reconstruction (IRR)
• mediated risks
• displacement
• mining
• Romania

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was supported by a grant from the University of Toronto and a research scholarship from the German Federal Foundation for the Environment (DBU). Professors Michael Cernea, Bernd Baldus and Ken MacDonald have provided the theoretical impetus for my approach to the Roşia Montană case. I am also grateful to three research assistants (Monica Costache, Miriam Cihodariu and Cosmin Stancu) who have helped with data collection. This article would not have been possible without the support of the residents of the Roşia Montană area, who have generously shared their views with the author. The comments of two anonymous reviewers and of the editor of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies are also kindly acknowledged.

Biographical note

Filip Alexandrescu is a postdoctoral researcher with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. He also works with the Research Institute for the Quality of Life in Bucharest, Romania. His interests focus on human agency in complex environmental conflicts and on the history of environmental ideas in the social sciences. He has published in History of the Human Sciences and the Romanian Journal of Sociology. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Toronto.

Notes

1. Mediated is used in this context in the sense of “acting through, involving, or dependent on an intervening agency” (American Heritage Dictionary 2012).

2. Those engaged in agriculture have so far refused to be displaced.

3. All dollar amounts given refer to USD.

4. This occasional paper was made available to the author by the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC), for which thanks are due.

5. For example, one resident from Roşia Montană, a former miner working as a carpenter at time of the interview, complained that the arrival of the Canadian company had ruined the family business.

6. Of the 90 interviewees, five had relocated to Abrud and three to Câmpeni.

7. This is also the site where the Canadian mining company had built a relocation site including 125 individual homes.

8. Of the 90 interviewees, one was approached in Cluj Napoca.

9. Of the 90 interviewees, four were approached in Miceşti.

10. Name of a socialist-era Romanian automobile.

11. Invoking local history in the struggle against the gold mining project can work as a double-edged sword. Alburnus Maior – the first NGO to oppose the gold mine – took its name from the ancient designation of the Roman mining site in Roşia Montană and vindicated itself as an association of gold miners (Turcanu 2002). On the other hand, the mining company routinely claims that its new mine will continue the local mining tradition.

12. This is the value of the gold deposit calculated at a gold price of $1500/troy ounce.

13. There is an emerging literature on what might be called “planned-only projects”, which create uncertainties, trauma and stress before they actually take place (Kobus 2008, Perera 2010). As the number of such projects is bound to grow due to increasingly effective opposition worldwide, this dimension of uncertainty should be explicitly theorised in the expanded view of the IRR model.

14. This second NGO opposing the mine emerged a few years later after Alburnus Maior.

15. The turnout across all the 35 communities was below 50% + 1, which means that the quorum was not met at the regional level (Gotiu 2012).