Mining, risk and climate resilience in the other Pacific

Mining, risk and climate resilience in the ‘other’Pacific: Latin American lessons for the South Pacific☆

Anthony J. Bebbington,* Jeffrey Bury,† Nicholas Cuba* and John Rogan**Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, USA.

Email: [email protected]†Department of Environmental Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, USA

Abstract: We suggest the value of considering Pacific Latin America and the South Pacific inrelationship to each other in contexts of climate change and investment in extractive industry. Thepaper explores the interactions between extractive industry, climate change and environmentalgovernance through the lenses of double exposure, double movements, resilience and risk. The firstpart of the paper addresses the nature and scope of investments in extractive industries in this ‘otherPacific’. The geography of these investments is changing the actual and perceived distribution ofexposure and risk in the region. The nature of this risk is also being affected by climate change andits implications for the geographies of water and land-use. Much of the contention surroundingextractive industries can be understood as conflicts over the unequal distribution of this risk, how tointerpret its significance and the ways in which resilience might be enhanced to respond to it. Thefinal section of the paper discusses the ways in which mining governance and governance forresilience converge and, on the basis of recent experiences in El Salvador, analyses the difficulties ingoverning extractive industry in a way that manages risk and builds resilience.

Keywords: climate risk, El Salvador, mining, Peru, Pacific Islands, resilience

Double exposures and double movements

This paper addresses the relationships betweentwo accelerating global phenomena: invest-ment in the extraction of underground naturalresources, specifically minerals and hydro-carbons; and climate change. While the paper

focuses on South and Central America, theargument is also presaged on the idea thatthese phenomena connect the South Pacificand Pacific Latin America in significant ways.Each region is particularly vulnerable to climatechange and has significant investment inmining. Indeed, companies based in bothregions invest in extracting each other’s mineralresources.1 There is a case to be made that thismining investment has implications for buildingresilience in the face of a changing climate.

In these contexts, governing resource extrac-tion can be viewed as a form of governing forresilience under conditions of double exposureand double movement. The notion of ‘doubleexposure’ (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008) refersto the idea that places and peoples are simulta-neously exposed to economic globalisationand climate change, and that these processesproduce vulnerabilities and influence theoptions that actors might pursue in the face ofthese vulnerabilities. Importantly, the vulner-abilities produced tend to compound and

☆This paper was first given by Bebbington as the Asia-PacificViewpoint Annual Lecture at the DevNet meetings held inDunedin, New Zealand, November 27–29th, 2014. He isvery grateful to Glenn Banks, Regina Scheyvens, AndrewMcGregor and Doug Hill for the invitation, for making thetalk possible and to Glenn and Regina for their remarkablecollegiality and hospitality. The talk drew on work con-ducted in collaboration with, or with the support of col-leagues in the Graduate School of Geography at ClarkUniversity and at the University of California, and so thepaper is presented as a team-authored, group effort. Thematerial reported draws on projects supported by Oxfam-America, the Ford Foundation, the Effective States and Inclu-sive Development Research Centre and the Government ofEl Salvador. We are grateful to these different institutions fortheir trust in our work, and to Herman Rosa for comments.Thanks also to Scott Odell for help with the literature searchand for careful editing.

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Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 56, No. 2, August 2015ISSN 1360-7456, pp189–207

© 2015 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd doi: 10.1111/apv.12098

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aggravate each other, either because theyoverlap in space or interact across space. In thecase of extractive industry expansion underconditions of climate change, these com-pounded vulnerabilities are especially related toland and water. Polanyi (1944) introduced theidea of ‘double movement’ to conceptualise therelationship between the processes of deepen-ing commoditisation that characterise capitalistexpansion and societal efforts to rein in thatcommoditisation. That is, the former movementextends the frontier of the market while thelatter seeks to moderate this extension andgovern its adverse consequences. Asymme-tries of power that characterise relationshipsbetween national and international institutionsas well as between individual actors withincountries present a key challenge to effectivelygoverning for resilience under these conditions.

Figure 1 captures these relationships insimple graphical form. New forms of exposureare being driven by global climate change onthe one hand, and by increased investment inmining (economic globalisation) on the otherhand. This increased exposure demands effortsto govern for increased resilience at a rangeof levels: from the individual and householdthrough to the national government. The possi-bility of governing for increased resilience is,however, causally related to the very sameinvestment in the mineral economy drivingincreased exposure. There are several factors atplay here, some of which enhance the govern-ance possibilities whereas others underminethem. Figure 1 notes four such factors: thepolitical settlements (Khan, 2010; Bebbington,2015; Hickey et al., 2015) within which mineralexpansion is occurring; the level of social con-flict surrounding this expansion; the fiscal and

other resources generated by the miningeconomy, as well as the rules governing whocontrols access to these resources; and the ideasand imaginations of ‘development’ that under-gird and are accentuated by mineral expansion.

The remainder of this paper is organisedaround the framework presented in Figure 1. Inthe following two sections, we discuss thetwo drivers of exposure, climate change andexpanded investment in mining, and outlinesome of the risks that these are producing. Thebulk of the discussion deals with Peru and ElSalvador, though we also make some cross-references to the South Pacific. In the fourthsection, we discuss in more detail how thepolitical and economic relationships surround-ing expanded investment in mining can them-selves complicate efforts to govern for the risksgenerated by this same process of intensifiedresource extraction. We go on to discuss El Sal-vador’s efforts to govern for resilience in theface of such pressures, focusing particularly onhow the national government has approachedmining regulation within a more general strat-egy of environmental governance that seeksto enhance resilience in the face of climatechange. The discussion also explores several ofthe political economy and institutional con-straints acting on these efforts. The focus on ElSalvador is especially appropriate, given thebackground interest of the paper in the rel-evance of Latin American experience to theSouth Pacific, and vice versa. El Salvador sharesparticularly severe climate change vulnerabilitywith many parts of the South Pacific, and withrespect to many of the same specific areas ofexposure (Alliance Development Works, 2012).

We delay further theoretical discussionuntil the conclusion, where we suggest that inaddition to constituting insight into an urgentpolicy challenge, these efforts to governmining in ways that respond to climate changesuggest the manner in which micro- (Horowitz,2008, 2010) and macro-political ecologies ofresource extraction interact to produce particu-lar regimes of resource governance.

Climate risk in Pacific Latin America

The World Risk Index (WRI), a collaborationbetween the United Nations University, Alli-ance Development Works and The Nature

Figure 1. Governing double exposure: A conceptualframework

A.J. Bebbington et al.

© 2015 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd190

Conservancy, seeks to rank the world’s coun-tries according to levels of risk. Risk is under-stood as a function of: exposure to naturalhazards such as earthquakes, cyclones, flood-ing, drought and sea level rise; susceptibility(which depends on infrastructure, nutrition,shelter and economic context); coping capaci-ties (governance, disaster preparedness, earlywarning and medical services etc.); and adap-tive capacities to deal with climate change andother events (Alliance Development Works,2012). In 2012, the WRI concluded that of the15 countries deemed most at risk in the world,four were in Latin America, five were islandstates in the Pacific and four were in SoutheastAsia.2 The pattern in its 2014 report (AllianceDevelopment Works, 2014: 9) was much thesame, with Central America deemed slightlyriskier than in 2012, while Fiji no longer figuredin the top 15. The 2014 report also identifiedPeru and Colombia as high-risk countries, partlybecause of the greater emphasis that that year’sreport placed on urban risk.

While rankings ultimately depend on howrisk is defined and the differential quality of dataacross countries, the vulnerability of the PacificIslands, Central America and El Salvador isnoted by a variety of other assessments as well.3

The World Bank’s Global Facility for DisasterReduction and Recovery (2010), for instance,concludes that fully 88.7% of El Salvador’s ter-ritory, 95.4% of its population and 96.4% of itsgross domestic product are at risk due, largely,to climate change and reduced resilience.Indeed, in 2010, then El Salvadoran PresidentFunes stated: ‘We are vulnerable in the firstplace, to the changing extreme and more fre-quent natural phenomena that threaten the lifeof our communities and jeopardize govern-ments’ capacity to respond’ (Funes, 2010).

As one dimension of the sorts of risks towhich Funes was referring, the frequency ofextreme rainfall events4 in El Salvador hasincreased exponentially since the 1960s(Fig. 2).5 This increase reflects, in particular, amarked jump in tropical cyclones from thePacific Ocean. These extreme events haveled to catastrophic flooding, landslips and lossof life, and constitute an increasingly frequentdestabilising factor in an already vulnerablelandscape. For instance, between the 10th and19th of October, 2011, Tropical Depression 12Edropped 762 mm of rain (averaged across thecountry): put another way, 42% of the annualaverage precipitation for the period between1971 and 2000 fell in one single event. In just

Figure 2. High rainfall event storms in El Salvador, 1960–2014Source: Based on Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, El Salvador.

Note: Hatched circles are storms from the Atlantic; blank circles are storms from the Pacific; area of circle is proportionalto amount of rainfall which is noted in parentheses in mm, after the name of the storm (the figure refers to average rainfall

for that tropical storm across the whole of El Salvador: some local stations registered much higher amounts, and othersless).

Mining, risk and climate resilience

© 2015 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd 191

three events between 2009 and 2011 (Low E96/Ida, Tropical Storm Agatha and Tropical Depres-sion 12E), loss and damage were calculated at$1267 million (5.9% of 2010 GDP), accordingto a formal evaluation conducted jointly by theUN Economic Commission on Latin America(ECLAC) and the Government of El Salvador.6

More than 250 people died in El Salvadorduring those three events. This trend towardsmore frequent and more costly, higher magni-tude, disaster-related weather events is apparentacross Central America. A recent study byGarlati (2013) notes that flooding events in theregion increased from around 200 p.a. duringthe 1970s to over 1100 p.a. in the 2000s: stormand landslide events also showed significantincrease over the same period.

If one source of climate-change-driven risk isepisodes of too much water, another is too littlewater. In a paper dealing with drought in the USSouth West, Ault et al. (2014) estimate the riskof decadal drought as being at least 70% andtheir data imply that the risks in much of Centraland South America are at least as high. Water-related risk is also serious in the Central andNorthern Andes, where deglaciation has accel-erated over recent decades. Indeed, Peru’s Cor-dillera Blanca has lost 30% of its glaciated areasince 1930 and Colombian glaciers have lost20–50% of their areas (Schauwecker et al.,2014). These are significant losses in a contextin which coastal areas – where the bulk of thenational population as well as the country’sdynamic export agricultural sector are concen-trated – depend considerably on glacial melt forwater supply (Bury et al., 2013). Meanwhile, theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) identifies water availability, drought andflooding as particularly likely risks for South andCentral America, together with food insecuritydue to drought and increased temperature(IPCC, 2014).

Like the Pacific Islands, then, Pacific LatinAmerica is a region of particular vulnerabilityto climate change. If in the South Pacific, theprimary manifestations of this vulnerabilityhinge upon sea level rise, coastal flooding andgroundwater salinisation, in Central Americaand the Andes the primary manifestations are asteady trend towards warmer, drier, water scarceconditions and increasingly frequent high mag-nitude events characterised by heavy rainfall,

flooding and slope slippage. In the followingsection, we consider how this form of exposuremight interact with changing dynamics in themining economy. The precise nature of thisinteraction will depend on the ways in whichoverall tendencies in climate manifest them-selves at more local levels (something that isdifficult to model with accuracy at finer spatialresolutions) and how the locally specific geog-raphies of exposure to climate change interactwith the locally specific geographies of extrac-tive industry.

Extractive industry expansion and risk: Peruand El Salvador

The last two decades have seen a dramaticintensification of investment in extractive indus-try in Latin America (Bury and Bebbington,2013). This has been the case for hard rockmining and hydrocarbons alike, though here wefocus only on mining. The region now receivesaround one quarter of global investment inmining exploration, and the value of mineralexports has increased exponentially (Fig. 3;from Bury and Bebbington, 2013). Indeed, mostcurves associated with the mining sector sincethe early 1990s have been exponential innature, whether one is graphing trends in exportvalue, area affected by mining licences, numberof mining licences given or number of socio-environmental conflicts related to mining (Buryand Bebbington, 2013). These patterns arerepeated at both national and sub-nationalscales. Rudas Lleras (2012), for instance, hasshown that approved and requested mininglicences in Colombia grew from essentially nopresence in 1990 to covering the larger part ofthe country’s Andean region by 2009 – evenbefore Colombia declared in its 2010–2014National Development Plan that mining wouldbe the primary ‘locomotive’ of national devel-opment (Göbel and Ulloa, 2014).7 At a com-pletely different scale, in their analysis of onewatershed in Ancash, Peru, Bury et al. (2013)report that ‘[s]ince 1990, more than 90 percentof all recorded mining claims were placed inthe watershed. In 2010, there were three largemining operations in the watershed, six newplanned projects, twelve mineral processingfacilities, and 1848 active mining claims



covering approximately 52 percent (6111 km2)of the drainage area’.

In this section, we discuss how these trendsmanifest themselves spatially, and in theprocess, produce forms of risk that interact withclimate-change generated risks surroundingagriculture and water. Indeed, the IPCC (2014)identified these as two of the three main climatechange risks for Central and South America (theother being an expansion of vector-borne dis-eases). For reasons of space, we limit ourselvesto a discussion of Peru and El Salvador. Theformer has a long history of mining, while thelatter is currently grappling with a possiblesurge of mining investment, but has little expe-rience governing the sector.

Agriculture

Peru has experienced a significant boom inmining investment since the early 1990s. By2013, the country was the world’s third largestproducer of copper, silver, tin and zinc, and fifthof gold. Exports of copper, iron, gold and otherminerals have accounted for around 60% of thecountry’s total export earnings, 13% of totalforeign investment, 30% of income taxes and15% of total tax revenues (Sanborn, 2015).Another measure of this growth has been theincreased acquisition of mining licences, whichgrant the holder the subsoil rights required tocarry out exploration work. Figure 4 shows theextent of these licences (or concessions) for thewhole of Peru.

Reflecting this steady expansion of mininglicences, the proportion of agricultural landaffected by concessions has also increased sig-nificantly, as shown in Figure 5. This graph isbased on the national government’s classifica-tion of land according to its agricultural poten-tial in the country’s three broad eco-regions: thecoast, highlands and eastern rainforest. The pro-portion of land affected by concessions beganto increase significantly in 2002, with anothernotable rise after 2007. Given that assessmentsof ‘potential’ agricultural land might overstatethe areas affected (given that not all potentialland is actually turned to agricultural use), wealso assessed the percentage of ‘actual’ agricul-tural land affected by concessions. This is amore challenging task as actual agriculturalland was determined on the basis of commer-cially available remotely sensed data. Thesedata understate the extent of actively managedagricultural land because it does not pick upgrazing land nor that lying in fallow as part ofrotational cycles. Nonetheless, the overlapssuggest similar percentages of agricultural landaffected by concessions, again with markedincreases beginning around 2002 and thenagain in 2007 (Bebbington et al., 2014).

The extent of these overlaps is significant andspeaks to a double exposure that is importantboth at the national and sub-national level.Such overlaps also speak directly to debates inAsia Pacific Viewpoint on ‘contested geogra-phies of coexistence in natural resource man-agement’ (Howitt et al., 2013) contestations that

Figure 3. Mining exploration and mineral exports for Latin America 1990–2008 (left: mining investment; middle: averageshare of global mining investment by region; right: mineral exports)

Sources: Bury and Bebbington, 2013, based on: Barclays, 2009; MEG, 2011; USGS, 2012.



involved not merely the overlapping of land useclaims, but also of ontologies of the environ-ment and landscape (see also Marsh, 2013 andDoohan, 2013). It should be noted, however,that the extent to which the exposure and con-testation produced by these overlaps is realversus potential is a point of debate. It could beargued that the mere existence of a mininglicence in a given area means very little, giventhat other forms of land-use and livelihood areonly affected in the cases where explorationactually begins, and only significantly affectedin the relatively small number of cases in which

exploration culminates in an active mine pro-posal. This line of reasoning would thus con-clude that the geographical reach of the doubleexposure is limited.

Conversely, if mere knowledge of the exist-ence of a concession changes farmer incentivesand practices, then there may be an effect evenwithout exploratory activities being present.Perhaps more significantly, the concession con-stitutes a legal right to subsurface resources,thus affecting the security of tenure andlivelihood of the owners of surface rights. Theexistence of such concessions indicates the

Figure 4. Distribution of mining concessions across PeruSource: Cuba et al., 2014.



willingness of some parts of government tofacilitate the expansion of mining activities intothe areas so licensed. Thus, even if there isdebate about the possible physical effects of amining licence, the actual geography of conces-sions tells us much about the functioning andpriorities of a planning system.

Water

Similar overlay exercises can be conducted forwater resources, distinguishing between areasat risk of increased competition over resourcesand areas at risk of contamination of water.8,9

To assess potential pressure on the waterresource base, mining concessions can beoverlain onto drainage basin maps to revealthe percentage of basins that have been

licensed for possible mining activity. Figure 6highlights this issue for the whole of Peru from1992 to 2011 and reveals that more than 36%of most coastal and highland drainage basinsare occupied by concessions, with still higherpercentages in other regions of the country.This concession-watershed overlap can, inturn, be overlain with maps of potential agri-cultural land-use to identify those areas ofagricultural production where water resourcesmay become subject to particularly intensecompetition between agriculture, mining andurban settlements. This implies that in loca-tions with especially significant competition,there might be greater risk of adverse implica-tions for agricultural production and levels ofsocial conflict over water (Boelens et al., 2011;Bury et al., 2013).

Figure 5. Trends in mining concession overlap with areas of agricultural potential in Peru, by region and by level ofpotential (high, medium, low)Source: Cuba et al., 2014.



Similar patterns emerge from an assessmentof the percentage of high Andean wetlands andgrasslands (ecosystems that are deemed to beimportant sources of water for downstreamareas) affected by concessions (Bebbingtonet al., 2014). These patterns are all the moreconcerning when we take into account that thePeruvian coast is divided between desert, highpopulation areas and the heart of the country’sexport-oriented agricultural sector. These actualand perceived risks for water resources havebeen a recurring theme in the growing level ofconflict surrounding expansion of the miningsector in Latin America (Bebbington andWilliams, 2008; De Echave et al., 2008;Bebbington, 2012; Perreault, 2014).

This potential pressure on water resources isparticularly significant in contexts where theyare already under pressure from the accumu-lated impacts of prior human use. According to2007 data from the government system formonitoring water quality, only 20% of surfacewater in El Salvador can be potabilised by con-ventional methods, and fully 76% is not fit foruse in irrigation (TAU, 2011). Meanwhile, overthe last three decades, river discharge declinedby 80% in the north of the country, and by 30 to50% in the rest of the country (TAU, 2011).10

These statistics reflect the combined effectof widespread deforestation and land coverchange in the country (notwithstanding earlyindications of some forest rebound: Hecht et al.,2006), as well as of completely underdevelopedsystems of municipal and industrial waste andwastewater management. Under such condi-tions, while the extent of mining concessions ismuch less expansive in El Salvador (see below)

than in Peru, the risks implied may still be quitesignificant.

Mining expansion and governing forresilience under conditions of climate change

Climate change and expanded investment inthe mining industry have, then, generated bothlong-standing and new forms of actual or poten-tial risk for different countries in Latin America(and, though we have not discussed it here, thePacific also: Banks, 2002; Evans, 2010; Adgeret al., 2011; Barnett, 2011; Lata and Nunn,2012; Hoeke et al., 2013; Le Meur et al.,2013a,b). The geographies of these risks overlapand interact such that one can reasonably speakof two levels of double exposure: first, at acountry level, as national institutions have torespond to the aggregate and interacting effectsof these risks; and second, at the level of spe-cific territories where pressures induced byclimate change and mining coincide in space.In some sense, localised conflict and manoeu-vres by sub-national authorities reflect efforts togovern these decentralised double exposures,while machinations within ministries, executiveoffices and other national institutions constituteattempts to govern exposures at a macro-scale.These two governance responses – each ele-ments of a sort of Polanyian counter-movement– interact with each other.

As noted earlier, the nature of theseresponses, and the extent to which they succeedin inducing new modes of governing for resil-ience, are in turn causally related in four keyways to the very process of mining expansionthat they seek to govern. First, they are related

Figure 6. Percentage of river basins overlapping with mining concessions in PeruSource: Cuba et al., 2014.



financially. The extent to which government caninvest in building capacities to respond toclimate change depends entirely on the revenueavailable to government (for the case ofinvestment in human development, see UNDP,2014). Thus, extractive activities can only con-tribute to a fiscal capacity to respond if they firstgrow to the point where they generate this taxand royalty revenue for the state. This argumentoften weighs heavily in political discussions ofresource extraction as actors such as Ministriesof Finance insist on first promoting investmentin order to generate revenue. Governance forresilience thus comes after governance forinvestment.11

Second, any efforts to build capacities togovern for resilience are caught up within thesame asymmetrical relations of power withinwhich the extractive economy has expanded.These relations of power – insofar as they havesupported and been supported by the growth ofresource extraction – are likely to resist govern-ance responses that might constrain this growth.One particularly brazen demonstration of thisoccurred in 2014, when the Peruvian Ministryof Economy and Finance encroached upon theauthority of the Ministry of Environment inorder to simplify environmental permissions formining in the name of economic growth (DeEchave, 2014; MEF, 2014). Not all responseswill necessarily be so blunt – more often theyinvolve public criticism of, or budget constraintsto, environmental regulations or free prior andinformed consent (FPIC) requirements.12 Themore general point, though, is that the widerpolitical settlement that made mining growthpossible constitutes the same set of politicalrelationships with which any countermovementhas to contend.

Third, governance responses are affected bythe conflict that often surrounds mineral expan-sion, as well as, in some instances, longer his-tories of violence that have imparted certainmeanings to more recent conflict around extrac-tion. The relationships between this conflict andgovernance possibilities are complex. In somecases, the conflict becomes so severe that itchallenges the profitability of resource extrac-tion and so elicits institutional change(Bebbington, 2012; Franks et al., 2014). In othercases, conflict may be interpreted through his-torical lenses (e.g. of terrorism or civil war) that

also affect responses. In El Salvador (see below),the recent history of civil war was interpreted ashaving left a legacy that further reduced countryresilience (GoES, 2010). This interpretation sup-ported arguments favouring more strict regula-tion of mining. The history of Bougainville inPapua Guinea is another instance where con-flict has shaped thinking about mining andany effort to govern it. Similarly, in the SolomonIslands, broad conflict between Guadalcanaland Malaitan militants – including over mining– led to a raid of the Gold Ridge mine in searchof weapons and vehicles to use in the fighting(Evans, 2010).

Fourth, efforts to govern for resilience are alsoaffected by the transnational apparatus withinwhich mineral expansion occurs. There aremany components to this apparatus, and theirweight varies from country to country. Theyinclude: the influence and thinking of interna-tional financial institutions; the weight of keybilateral relationships and their influence onhow companies from that country are governed;the influence and ideas of transnational corpo-rations and civil society; and, not least, thetransnational legal architecture designed tofacilitate foreign direct investment and trade.This last apparatus in particular tends to con-strain national sovereignty to strengthen institu-tions of environmental governance and law.

In the following section, we will expoundupon these four causal interactions by analysingrecent efforts to regulate mining expansionin El Salvador. Within the larger framework ofthe paper, these efforts constitute an attemptto address the types of pressure on waterresources, agriculture and society that arereflected in the maps that we have discussedabove. While those maps helped visualise pro-cesses in the Andes, not dissimilar patterns arealso apparent in El Salvador. We have chosen tofocus the remainder of the paper on governanceresponses in El Salvador because the case isparticularly revealing and one on which wehave been able to garner relatively detailedinsights.13

El Salvador: Seeking resilience againstthe odds

We have already noted some of the dimensionsof double exposure in El Salvador. While not all



aspects of economic globalisation necessarilyaggravate country risk, a mining economy mightcontribute to ungovernable risk based on theoverall level of vulnerability in the country. Thishas been the case in El Salvador where diversevulnerabilities have been produced by longhistories of inequality and violence, profoundtransformation of land cover (Browning, 1971;Hecht et al., 2006) and reduction of areascovered by natural ecosystems.14 These historiesculminated in the 1980–1992 civil war that lefta heritage of some 75 000 killed, a million or sodisplaced, and notorious human rights viola-tions (Skidmore et al., 2010). The Peace Accordsthat brought an end to the war in 1992addressed a series of political and socialconcerns, in particular allowing the umbrellaorganisation of the guerrilla groups, the FMLN,to become a legitimate political party. Theaccords left untouched the basic neoliberalorganisation of the economy and the socialcontrol of the state, which remained in thehands of the economically conservative ARENAparty from 1989 to 2009.

A series of policy reforms passed after thePeace Accords facilitated mining investment(Spalding, 2013). In particular, a new miningcode passed in 1995/1996 and revised in 2001reduced royalties from 4% to 2%. In 1999, thegovernment passed a new investment law‘which allowed foreign investors to bring dis-putes to the World Bank’s International Centerfor the Settlement of Investment Disputes[ICSID] . . . rather than depend on local courts’(Spalding, 2013: 27). By 2006, eight interna-tional mining companies held investments inthe country (Spalding, 2013) and by 2007, thestate had granted 29 exploration licences(Cartagena, 2009). One such licence paved theway for the El Dorado mining project in theDepartment of Cabañas, on the site of a formermine from the 1940s. Exploration began therein 1993, and in 2003 the project was subse-quently acquired by the Canadian companyPacific Rim (Cartagena, 2009).

Initial mining activity scarcely appeared onthe radar of civil society organisations, but thisbegan to change by the early 2000s, when theRoman Catholic Church and several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) createdthe National Forum Against Metal Mining(Cartagena, 2009; Steiner, 2010; Spalding,

2013). This platform articulated emerging localconflicts, including in Cabañas, and receivedimportant international support from, amongothers, Oxfam America – an organisation thathad for some time been working on mining inLatin America as an issue of rights and liveli-hoods. Over the next few years, conflicts overmining projects became more intense, andinvolved both deaths15 and mobilisations. Thisled the Minister of Environment of the pro-business ARENA government, Hugo Barrera, todecide in 2007 to stop processing any Environ-mental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for miningprojects on the grounds that the sector hadbecome too conflictive and the impacts werepotentially serious. This was not a formal mora-torium on mining so much as a decision tocease reviewing project requests. One suchunprocessed EIA was that of Pacific Rim’s ElDorado Project. Pacific Rim took this to be apolitically motivated and unjustified infringe-ment of its investment rights under both domes-tic legislation and the Central American FreeTrade Area (CAFTA) treaty and on 9 December2008, filed notice of its intent to sue fordamages at ICSID (ITA, 2014). Another com-pany operating in the east of the country, theUS-based Commerce Group, did likewise.

By this time, national and local debates overmining had become of such significance thatthey influenced the language of the nationalbusiness community and the 2009 presidentialelection campaigns. For example, a representa-tive of the National Association of Private Enter-prise commented, ‘We are not going to go outand support Pacific Rim’.16 For his part,Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate forthe FMLN, declared that if elected, he wouldban metallic mining in El Salvador. On 15March 2009, Funes was elected in what was ahistoric first victory for the FMLN; six weekslater, on 30 April 2009, Pacific Rim served thegovernment of El Salvador with notice that itwas taking its complaint to arbitration (Crowelland Moring, 2009).

Funes was hardly the only successful presi-dential candidate in Latin America to havemade campaign commitments to act assertivelyagainst mining and mining companies. AlanGarcia and Ollanta Humala in Peru, and RafaelCorrea in Ecuador, have each made similarlystern commitments only to shift their stance



once in office and become staunch supportersof mining (Bebbington, 2009). Such a shift was,however, not so easy for Funes because, regard-less of what his personal commitments mayhave been (and they may well have been scep-tical of mining), he did not share the same roomfor political manoeuvring that his peers hadenjoyed. A TV host, he had not made his way upthrough the ranks of the FMLN, but had insteadbeen chosen as the party’s candidate becauseof his electability. Once in office, he thereforeneeded to continue building legitimacy withmembers of the party who were sceptical ofhaving a journalist rather than a former guerrillaas their candidate. The need to build thislegitimacy was particularly pressing becauseFunes began government with a cabinet thatincluded many similar non-militant techno-cratic members. This was, then, a governingapparatus of which the party bases were scep-tical but which at the same time needed theparty in order to act legislatively. These partybases were, moreover, largely opposed tomining. Funes had to listen.

At the same time as working through aresponse to this national mining conflict, Funes’cabinet had to worry about a stalling post-crisiseconomy suffering from sharp declines in thevolume of remittances sent home by Salvador-ans living in the United States (the country’smain source of foreign currency), growingunemployment coupled with serious gang vio-lence,17 a domestic entrepreneurial elite thatdistrusted Funes and on whom he depended forinvestment, and not least, the brewing case inICSID. It fell largely to the Ministers of Environ-ment and of Economy to work out how tohandle the mining question in this context,though they had to do so in a way that would beendorsed by Funes and his two Prime Minis-ters.18 Both ministers19 were former researchers/academics and neither belonged to the FMLN.At a personal level, they doubted that openingup a mining economy would be sensible for thecountry; they had the sense – one more intui-tively, the other more analytically – that theenvironmental risks would be too great. How-ever, the broader political economy context –and especially the arbitration at ICSID of PacificRim’s complaint that the Government of El Sal-vador had violated their investment rights underCAFTA and Salvadoran law20 – did not allow for

legislation that would immediately appease thedemands of the FMLN bases and anti-miningmovements. Legal and political calculationsindicated that a quickly passed law banningmining would weaken El Salvador’s position inthe arbitration because it would lend credenceto Pacific Rim’s assertion that the government’srefusal to process the company’s EIA had beenarbitrary and politicised rather than technicallygrounded. At the same time, such a law wouldconvey to the national capitalist class thatthe FMLN government was disposed to over-ride contractual commitments when politicallyexpedient. Such a message would only increasethe likelihood of the class boycotting invest-ment, which the government could ill afford. Inthe light of such calculations, the ministerialteam opted to commission a Strategic Environ-mental Assessment (SEA) of the whole miningsector (a process that had been initiated underthe ARENA government) on the grounds thatthis would provide an independent, technicalview of the risks and benefits associated withmining and that this technical view could serveas the basis of any subsequent legislation(Achtenberg, 2011).

If the SEA was affected partly by these calcu-lations, it also went ahead in a context in whichthe new Ministry of Environment (MARN)21 wasactively fostering national and cabinet debateon the climate change risks facing El Salvador.The Ministry was aided in this effort by natureitself – in particular the flurry of high magnituderainfall events and associated human tragediesand economic losses that occurred in the firsttwo years of the new government. These stormsmade clear that El Salvador’s landscape wasvulnerable to landslides and severe flooding inthe face of high magnitude events. The experi-ence further endorsed the minister’s view thatrisk management (‘gestión de riesgos’) shouldbe the key theme underlying the ministry’swork. More broadly, the minister adopted anexplicit strategy to insert risk management intothe language used by the president’s economicteam,22 on the grounds that it should be at thecore of any development policy for the country.Indeed, the country’s five-year plan noted theneed to ‘rebuild the social and productive fabricthat has been damaged by natural phenomena,and to build an effective system for civil protec-tion, early warning systems and capabilities to



prevent and manage risks across the country’(Gobierno de El Salvador, 2010: 54).23 Risk andits reduction continue to be visible themes inthe most recent five-year plan (Gobierno de ElSalvador, 2015).

The SEA was put out to tender and won bya Spanish consulting company that then com-piled a team including mining economists,biologists, social scientists, lawyers and organi-sational analysts. Many members were basedoutside the country, so travel complicatedcoordination both within the team and withthe Ministry. In addition, team members werenot of the same mind on mining and rangedfrom true believers to radical skeptics. At thesame time, the team had to negotiate itsreports with an oversight committee that hadto endorse their quality, if not agree with all oftheir contents.24

These negotiations were not always straight-forward, as opinions differed on costs, thenature of evidence required to substantiatearguments and the role of public consultationwithin the overall SEA. The consultant was,understandably, conscious of controlling costs,while the committee (who did not have to worryabout cost) sought a more consultative process.For these and other reasons, the SEA processtook well over a year, between contracting theconsultants and production of the final report.This relative slowness itself fed doubts in theanti-mining movement that the government wascommitted to any serious regulation of mining(the demand of the movement) and was insteadusing the SEA as a tactic to delay action. Asleaders of the Working Group Against MetallicMining in El Salvador stated, ‘If the governmenthas already said there would be no mining, thenwhy are they doing an SEA? . . . the SEA couldopen a space for the justification of mining’.Indeed, their reading of the terms of referencefor the SEA was that they revealed ‘a tendencypointing towards justifying’ mining. A pro-gramme officer of an international organisationclose to the Working Group similarly com-mented that the SEA was either a trick (‘engaño’)or at best an attempt to avoid lawsuits. Theseconcerns were further aggravated by a relativelack of fluid communication between the min-ister and movement organisations.25 Conversely,the Minister kept the Prime Ministers informedof progress and of emerging arguments.

In the end, the report concluded thatwhile mining could be viable in El Salvador,the conditions required to make it so werenowhere near in place in the country (TAU,2011). The report emphasised that El Salvador’swater and landscape resources were alreadyextremely degraded and vulnerable. Drawingon the government’s national development plan(Gobierno de El Salvador, 2010), the report alsonoted that El Salvador was socially fragile, inpart because of the still recent civil war. In thiscontext, the report concluded that the govern-ment would need a range of capacities to plan,monitor, supervise, tax, consult and negotiate inorder to make mining viable – hardly any ofwhich were currently in place. Put another way,the report argued that El Salvador would simplybe unable to govern for resilience if it were toallow expanded mining investment. The report’sauthors therefore suggested that the most sensi-ble approach was to put all mining projects onhold until the country had built the capacities itwould need to govern mining for resilience. Thiswould require El Salvador to develop technicalexpertise; implement new legislation and taxand royalty systems; and elaborate land-useplanning procedures that could handle miningand create geological, hydrological and otherinformation systems, among other things (TAU,2011). The SEA’s oversight committee sub-mitted a similar argument to the Minister ofEnvironment, though were yet more concernedabout the government’s regulatory capacity andoverall vulnerability of its human and physicalenvironments (Bebbington et al., 2012).

The minister’s initial response to these reportswas that their findings meant that the countryreally should ban mining. This option was soondismissed by the prime minister responsible foreconomy and finance, and was also stronglydiscouraged by the legal team, given concernsover the implications of such an action forthe ICSID proceedings. Instead, they decided toprepare draft legislation for an indefinite sus-pension of all administrative procedures relatedto mining projects (in practice an indefinitemoratorium) until the capacities to govern forresilience had been developed. The draft lawproposed that a multi-actor committee (govern-ment, civil society, church and business) wouldbe the mechanism for determining when suchcapacities had been achieved.



The drafting and debate of the law withinthe national assembly took another severalmonths, during which time the FMLN lost itsclear majority in the assembly in mid-termelections. Arguably because the governmentdid not sufficiently explain their intent behindthe law to the anti-mining movement,26 theMesa were not supportive on the grounds thatthey had not been adequately consulted, thelaw did not propose a ban and that anythingshort of a ban could easily be manipulatedinto a green light for mining.27 Nor did theynecessarily accept the argument that a banwould compromise the case being arbitrated atICSID, and overall, their deep distrust of bothgovernment and national political elites leftthem unable to support anything other than aban. It was probably also the case that themovement itself found it hard to move beyondits long-standing frame demanding a ban ofmining, and believed that a future, more mili-tant, FMLN government, would pass far morestringent legislation banning mining (whichhas proven not to be the case under thecurrent government, notwithstanding the pres-ence of former guerrillas in the cabinet andexecutive office). In the words of one move-ment leader, the law was ‘weak; any futuregovernment could change the composition ofthe committee [charged with guaranteeing theimplementation of the law]’.28 The movement’saccess to key FMLN members of the Legisla-tive Assembly, and (perhaps) the fact that somemovement leaders and members of the assem-bly shared backgrounds going back to the civilwar, contributed to the law becoming stalledin parliamentary committees. Meanwhile, thePresident’s office did not actively push for thelaw to be passed, further reducing the politicalspace open to the Ministry of Environment tobe especially assertive in pushing the law. Inthe end, the micropolitical foundations of analliance within the state and between state,legislature and social movements were neveradequately constructed such that the lawcould have momentum in the Assembly.

While this slow drama unfolded, the case inICSID continued – a background constraint onpolitical opportunities in El Salvador. Thelawyers representing the Government of El Sal-vador cast an argument that was part detailedlegal reasoning against the legitimacy of

Pacific Rim’s claims, and part sustainabilityscience, with an argument grounded innotions of resilience and vulnerability. Indeed,a significant part of the lawyers’ argumentdrew on testimonies submitted by two mem-bers of the Oversight Committee29 and paral-leled the position elaborated in the SEA that ElSalvador was so vulnerable that the decision tosuspend mining activities was a technicallysubstantiated one and not an arbitrary politicalact. In some sense, this position also consti-tuted an effort to govern for resilience, in thisinstance through the institutions of interna-tional investment arbitration.

As the case has moved slowly forward, thedamages claimed by Pacific Rim have crept upfrom an initial $77 million to just over $300million. At the same time, Pacific Rim itself – arelatively small operation – was running out ofthe money necessary to retain its lawyers. InNovember 2013, the company was acquired byan Australian mining company, Oceanagold, forjust over US$8 million (Oceanagold, 2013). IfICSID finds in favour of Pacific Rim, the returnon Oceanagold’s investment will be very high,and it is conceivable that Oceanagold was moreinterested in acquiring the arbitration case thanthe mining project itself. Indeed, in an interviewat the mine site in Cabañas, the then Pacific Rimgeologist commented that he felt the projecthad become so conflictive that it was going tobe difficult for the company to implement evenif they did win the arbitration. If this is so, thenthe only value that Pacific Rim had at the pointit was acquired resided in its legal case at ICSID.

Seven years after the then-Minister of Envi-ronment Hugo Barrera refused to process EIAsfor mining projects, El Salvador still has no newmining law and is awaiting the outcome of whatwill be a game-changing decision in Washing-ton, DC. Yet in the interim, there has been animmense amount of negotiation, knowledgepolitics, network building and argument con-struction (see Horowitz, 2010) to try and buildforms of mining governance that can enhancethe overall resilience of this at-risk country. Thatthese forms of governance are yet to be realisedinstitutionally reflects the fact that they aresubject to the same types of transnational rela-tionships, political settlements and conflictsthat underlie the growth of the very mineraleconomy that they would govern.



Conclusions and discussion

Significant parts of the island Pacific and ofPacific Latin America share a double exposureto climate change and intensified investmentin mining. Governing the drivers and conse-quences of this exposure presents an immensechallenge and involves, inter alia, buildinginstitutions of participatory land-use planning,mechanisms of FPIC, systems for monitoringand sanctioning the environmental and socialimpacts of resource extraction, water govern-ance institutions that ensure its availability andquality for a range of uses and mechanismsfor increasing transparency in the issuing oflicences, and management of taxes and royal-ties. The draft mining legislation sent by theMinistry of Environment and Natural Resourcesto the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly identi-fied the need to progress in each of thesedomains before El Salvador would be in a posi-tion to govern mining under conditions of post-conflict and acute climate change risk.

While these challenges look like mining gov-ernance pure and simple, they are simultane-ously means of governing for resilience andvulnerability reduction. At the same time, theyare reformist measures. They do not changethe fundaments of the working of a capitalisteconomy and in most instances they would notimply blanket bans or moratoria on resourceextraction. They would, though, seek toenhance capacities of voice and public sectorregulation, and to produce landscapes less vul-nerable to disturbance events of high magnitudeand potentially increasing frequency.

The Salvadoran experience illustrates theextent to which the space for such reforms isconstrained by a combination of the operationsof a formal capitalist economy that generatesfew jobs, the related calculations of nationalelectoral politics, and a national and interna-tional legal regime that has been designed toreduce the scope of action for national regula-tory authorities. At the same time, it also showshow a particular convergence of social mobili-sation, cabinet composition and technical argu-mentation can push back against some ofthese constraints. In this sense, the Salvadoranexperience has been a case study of thedouble movement in real time, in which thedeepening commoditisation of the country’s

subsoil resources has been accompanied by acombination of protest, electoral change andstatecraft that, in different ways, has soughtto limit some of the consequences of thatcommoditisation. In no way revolutionary30

(and this has been the great complaint of socialmovements – a complaint that may turn outto have unravelled regulatory reforms), thiscounter-movement was nonetheless real in bothits intent and its potential impact on marketdeepening.

The material discussed here has conceptualand methodological implications for ways ofthinking about governing for resilience in theface of double exposure. First, and perhapsmost simply, is that discussions of exposure,vulnerability and resilience must not only besocially disaggregated (something we have notdone in this paper) but also spatially explicit. Inthis instance, spatially explicit visualisation ofthe relationships between mining expansion,agriculture and water resources helps identifyareas of particular vulnerability at the same timeas making palpable the importance of more par-ticipatory land-use planning as a component ofbuilding resilience. (Such visualisation can alsobe especially powerful as a means of commu-nicating risk and its geography.)

Second, the Salvadoran case shows the value(though of course, also the difficulty) of under-standing manoeuvres within government, politi-cal parties, social movements and companies.This reinforces arguments that have been madeelsewhere by political ecologists and studentsof development studies (Ferguson and Gupta,2002; Bebbington et al., 2004; Wolford, 2010)– even if such research has focused primarily ondevelopment agencies and government andsaid much less about political parties or com-panies (see Kemp, 2014). Still, the point remainsthat it can be analytically risky to treat organi-sations as relative black boxes while at the sametime affording interpretations of actions thatemanate from those organisations. In this case,the failure (if that is what it ends up being) of thelegislative proposal for an indefinite suspensionof mining in El Salvador could easily be labelleda bill that was designed to fail, thus reflectingthe proclivities of a government that was tootimid and neoliberalised to challenge any sort ofprivate investment. Reading it this way wouldnot only be inaccurate, but more significantly



would have missed potential causal pathsbetween protest, long-term learning within asocial democratic party and regulatory change,as well as the extent to which problems ofcommunication between Ministries and socialmovement organisations may ultimately haveundermined the potential for governing forresilience.

Another insight gained from having beenable to look within government is that pro-cesses of negotiation matter greatly and thatthere are arguments to be won, lost andbrokered. Outcomes of these arguments arenot necessarily determined by structural neces-sity or power relations. In this instance, it mat-tered more how the Ministries of Environmentand Economy constructed an argument.However, building an argument that convincedother parties in government took time, andwhen it finally became convincing, the FMLNhad lost its majority in the Assembly. This, inturn, further complicated the possibility ofpassing legislation to indefinitely suspend allmining activity in the country. Negotiation thusmatters analytically as a manifestation of thescience-policy interface, as a communicativeexercise conducted under conditions of asym-metry and, importantly, as a process thatunfolds over time. As such, the timing of nego-tiation interacts with other temporalities inways that are causally important.

Third, the argument here has implications forthe different scales at which political ecology isconducted, and the different methods opento political ecologists. In a series of articlesdealing with the politics surrounding mining,environmental risk and conservation in NewCaledonia, Leah Horowitz has developed anargument for what she refers to as ‘an up-close, micropolitical angle within a politicalecology framework, in what might be termed“micropolitical ecology” ’ (Horowitz, 2008:260; also Horowitz, 2010, 2011). In this spirit,she has sought to understand the indigenousKanan society and environmental movementorganisations from within in order to analysebroader dynamics surrounding mining andnatural resource governance (see also Le Meuret al., 2013a,b). Being attuned to these micro-politics, she shows, helps understand whycertain knowledge claims surrounding miningand its impacts become more or less credible

among different parts of Kanak society, whysub-groups position themselves differently vis-à-vis mining, and how they come to trust ordistrust other actors involved in mining govern-ance. She shows convincingly that this attribu-tion of trust and credibility can then havematerial implications for the broader develop-ment of large-scale mineral projects.

For Horowitz, this project involves analysingthese micro-political tensions ‘within theirbroader historical, social and politico-econo-mic context’ (Horowitz, 2008: 261): what wemight call a combination of micro and macro-political ecology. This combination can alsohelp understand the experience of the draft lawin El Salvador. On the one hand, the processleading to it involved all manner of micro-political negotiations over knowledge claims, aswell as processes of persuasion in which someactors within government tried to convinceothers in different ministries of the extent towhich mining might represent unmanageablelevels of risk in contexts of climate change andpost-conflict society. On the other hand, theseactors did less to persuade social movementorganisations – allied to the same political party– that to propose legislation that would banmining outright would run the risk of losing theclaim that Pacific Rim had made against thegovernment. Indeed, this broader global gov-ernance of investment haunted micro-politicaltensions surrounding mining within El Salvador.That said, this very macro-political ecology wasnot just a structure determining the contours ofmicro-political debate. Instead, the arbitrationat ICSID was only happening because of theconflicts that surrounded Pacific Rim’s andother mining projects in the country. Had theseconflicts not arisen in the first place, PacificRim’s project would have gone ahead and therewould have been no arbitration proceedings. Inthis sense, the micro- and macro-politicalecologies of the mining question in El Salvadorconstituted each other.

While some of the most intense mining con-flict in El Salvador had existed around thePacific Rim project, those conflicts were part ofbroader politics of resource governance inthe country in which this project was one ofmany, and in which the politics of miningexisted in relation to politics of large-scaleland cover transformation and an increasingly



well-articulated politics of knowledge sur-rounding climate change risk. There were there-fore many dimensions of the ‘macro’ thatimpinged on discussions of the proposedmining law, the implication being that an ana-lytical framework pursuing the co-constitutionof the macro- and micro-political ecologicalrequires methodologies to grasp these broaderprocesses. In this paper, we have referred tojust one such approach – namely, large-scalemapping of shifting and overlapping geogra-phies of resource access and rights. Combiningsuch approaches with micro-political explora-tions of resource governance (in this case, ofpolicy and legislative conflicts; in Horowitz’scase, of conflicts within movements) follows theGIS and political ecology agenda laid out byMcCusker and Weiner (2003; see also Weinerand Harris, 2003) and further endorses theclaim that political ecologies of the subsoil willoften have to be interdisciplinary and team-based exercises (Bebbington and Bury, 2013;Postigo et al., 2013).

Notes

1 The Salvadoran example at the end of the paper is oneinstance of this. There is a particularly high level ofAustralian investment in Latin American mining. LatinAmerican investment in the Pacific is on a far smallerscale, though the Brazilian company Vale, for one, hassignificant investments in New Caledonia (Le Meuret al., 2013a,b).

2 The countries were (with rankings in parentheses): inLatin America, Guatemala (ranked 4th), Costa Rica (7),El Salvador (10), Nicaragua (14); Pacific Island states,Vanuatu (1), Tonga (2), the Solomon Islands (6), Fiji (15)and Papua New Guinea (12); and in Southeast Asia,Philippines (3), Cambodia (8), Timor-Leste (9) andBrunei Darussalam (11).

3 For instance: Human Development Index (HDI) devel-oped by UNDP, the Climate and Regional Economicsof Development Vulnerability Index (VI-CRED) bythe Stockholm Environmental Institute, the ClimateChange Vulnerability Index (CCVI) by Maplecroft,Global Adaptation Index (GAIN) by the Global Adap-tation Initiative, and the Climate Vulnerability Monitor(CVM) by DARA.

4 Defined as events depositing a country average of atleast 10 cm of rain in 24-h periods and more than35 cm in 72-hour periods.

5 Figure 2 is based on a graphic produced by the Minis-ter of Environment and Natural Resources of the Gov-ernment of El Salvador.

6 Noted by the Minister for Environment, Herman Rosa.7 Though in the end, the period 2010–2014 saw little

investment in mining projects.

8 Assessing water resources at risk of contamination canbe done by mapping streamflow downstream of minesites and the areas that it serves for human and eco-system use (Bebbington et al., 2014). This, in turn, canbe overlain with areas of potential or agricultural land-use to identify agricultural sites whose water resourcesare at risk of contamination.

9 It is important to note that agriculture, overall, usesmuch more water than does mining and that agricul-ture can also be a serious source of water contamina-tion. The point here is not to overlook this fact, but tofocus attention on the additional exposure that couldresult from the introduction of mining into areas wherewater resources are already used by other economicand social activities.

10 The one exception was the river feeding San Salvadorwhere discharge has increased – but this is because theriver has been increasing, fed by water drawn fromother basins.

11 Revenues have also been shown to affect capacitiesto govern for resilience in other ways. For instance,Arellano-Yanguas (2011, 2012) has shown that in Peru,the transfer of extraction-generated revenues back tothe regions in which extraction occurs has often givenrise to conflict, as different groups seek access to theresources or suspect local authorities of not managingthem honestly. This general proclivity to conflict, ori-ented as it is to accessing rents, complicates efforts tobuild other governing capacities.

12 Though this may not always be the case. For example,the pro-extraction government of Ecuador has alsoincreased the Ministry of Environment’s budget.

13 This section draws heavily on Bebbington’s own directinvolvement in some of the processes discussed here,in particular: discussions within El Salvador’s Ministryof Environment regarding strategies for environmentalgovernance under conditions of climate change; theimplementation of a Strategic Environmental Assess-ment of the mining sector; and the background workfor the preparation of draft legislation regarding theregulation of mining. In this work, he collaborateddirectly with the 2009–2014 FMLN government, aboveall with the Ministry of Environment – this collabora-tion has continued with the new FMLN governmentelected in 2014.

14 No protected area in the country is larger than 10 000hectares, and 81% of these are smaller than 500hectares.

15 It is not at all clear that the deaths of mining activistswere because of the mining projects, though they wereoften interpreted as such.

16 In Spanish: ‘No vamos a salir a apoyar a PacificRim’. Interview with Bebbington in San Salvador, July2010.

17 Job creation was still an urgent concern at the end ofthe government. A senior member of the team prepar-ing the FMLN’s agenda for the 2014 elections com-mented that: ‘Employment is the principal demand, inall the surveys’. He noted, furthermore, that the busi-ness sector had taken advantage of this, linking jobcreation to investment and environmental regulation asan obstacle to investment and their job creation.



18 Technically these positions are referred to as ‘Secretar-ies’: the technical secretary, responsible for overseeingfinance and economic strategy; and the political affairssecretary, responsible for state–society relations andsecuring the political viability of the government.

19 Herman Rosa Chávez, Minister of Environment; HectorDada Hirezi, Minister of Economy.

20 One of the Ministers referred to the Central AmericaFree Trade Agreement with the United States as an‘absolute defense of all companies registered in theUS’. ICSID is the venue at which CAFTA disputes arearbitrated.

21 The Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales.22 Interview in 2010. Four years later, a senior member of

the team preparing the FMLN’s electoral platform for2014 said that ‘gestión de riesgos’ and disaster respon-siveness had indeed been one of the Ministry’s greatachievements.

23 The Spanish is: ‘Reconstruir el tejido social yproductivo dañado por fenómenos naturales ydesplegar en todo el territorio nacional el sistema deprotección civil y un efectivo sistema de alertatemprana y de prevención y de manejo de riesgos’.

24 Bebbington chaired this committee: other memberswere the late, great ecologist Robert Goodland, geo-chemist Ann Maest and geologist Allan Astorga.

25 It is worth noting that the Minister and representativesof the Mesa did not see this the same way. In somesense, though, these different interpretations are them-selves indicative of the difficulty which these actorshad in communicating with each other in ways thatwere fluid and frank. The Vice-Minister did maintainmore fluid lines of communication, reflecting in parther own political background and earlier work in theFundación Heinrich Boll, the foundation of theGerman Green Party that is closely linked to the moreradical environmental movement in El Salvador. ThisVice-Minister is now Minister of Environment underthe second FMLN government.

26 For some, this was a more general limitation. A seniormember of the team preparing the 2014 electoral plat-form of the FMLN felt that the Ministry had been tootechnocratically concerned with policy design, and notpolitically astute enough. Speaking of the Ministry’sagenda in 2014, he commented: ‘now is the time forthe ministry to think politically. . . . MARN’s battle isnot the law but rather the social legitimacy of what it’sdoing’ (‘es el momento que el ministerio piense en lopolitico. . . . ‘la batalla del MARN no es la ley es lalegitimidad social de lo que haces’, interview in SanSalvador, July 2013).

27 Indeed, the movement then presented its own proposalfor a law that would ban mining outright.

28 Interview with Bebbington, San Salvador, July 2013.29 These were from Robert Goodland and Anthony

Bebbington.30 Indeed, in one interview a very senior member of

the Ministry of Environment said that their goal was‘not to change the model, just to reduce irrationa-lity’ within it (‘no cambiar el modelo, es soloreducir la irracionalidad’: interview, July 2010, SanSalvador).

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