Cleaning mineral supply chains? Political economies of exploitation and hidden costs of technical fixes

Abstract

This article examines hidden costs of three prominent mineral supply chain ‘solutions’ that respectively aim to create ‘conflict-free’ minerals, curtail corruption, and reduce mercury pollution. Our analysis underscores the heterogeneous ways in which global capitalism shapes regulatory injustices spanning multiple scales, illustrating how ‘clean’ mineral supply chain schemes can hide inequitable territorial and economic regimes of accumulation and labour exploitation resulting in social harms for artisanal and small-scale mining communities, negative environmental impacts, and the reproduction of extractive political economies dominated by large corporations. We argue for increased critical attention to how mineral supply chain schemes narrowly circumscribe spaces for pursuing counter-hegemonic ‘transformation’.

Keywords:

• Supply chains
• global production networks
• extractive industries
• transparency
• traceability
• formalization
• conflict minerals
• Kimberley Process Certification Scheme
• Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
• Minamata Convention on Mercury

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct application of this research.

Funding details

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant Number 895-2018-1002.

Notes

1 We use scare quotes for ‘solutions’ to reflect the truth-effects of this term and naturalization of these initiatives as serving broad interests rather than revealing some of their intentions and limits.

2 Our conception of ‘exploitation’ refers to multiple forms of marginalization within the global economy. This encompasses but also goes beyond mistreatment of individuals employed by companies in global commodity chains to include diverse forms of forced transfer of productive powers from more socially marginalized groups to the advantage of already more powerful groups (McKeown, 2017; Suwandi et al., 2019).

3 As noted by a reviewer, ‘costs’ could be unintended, perverse and unacknowledged (by at least some actors) without being obviously ‘hidden’.

4 Angola, Belgium, Cambodia, Colombia, DR Congo, France, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, United Kingdom, United States, and Zimbabwe.

5 By structural violence, we seek to emphasize the harm caused by the inequities of political economies and institutional structures, while also acknowledging their more direct, symbolic and political forms (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004). We see violence as an unfolding process, rather than an ‘act’ or ‘outcome’ (Springer & Le Billon, 2016), and thus include the ‘slow’, or temporally dispersed, violence of health risks resulting from mineral sector related pollution (Nixon, 2011).

6 The oil sector accounted for about 65% of this overall figure, with coal and natural gas representing around 11% each, and non-fuel minerals 13%. See World Bank Wealth of Nations database (http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/wealth-of-nations).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philippe Le Billon

Philippe Le Billon is Professor at the University of British Columbia with the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He holds an MBA (Paris 1) and PhD (Oxford). Working on linkages between environment, development and security, he has published widely on natural resource governance and investigates socio-environmental relations and commodity networks linking spaces of exploitation, consumption and regulation.

Samuel Spiegel

Sam Spiegel is Senior Lecturer and ESRC Future Research Leader Fellow at the University of Edinburgh with the School of Social and Political Science. He holds an MSc (UBC) and PhD (Cambridge). Working on conceptual and methodological debates in development studies, he has published widely on social marginalization and collective mobilization in mining regions and the framing of social justice debates.