Analyze

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

Piecemeal approach to self-regulation forecloses more sweeping structural change as well as an actual check on power thru independent control over corporations

No real audit and no punishment for violating something like the UN Global Compact.

Since the CSR initiatives align with some of the infrastructure/development and personal goals of the village elites, it forecloses resistance to the mine and in fact has spawned violent defense of the mine by local people. 

Mistrust of the NGOs, who come in and out, and who the corporations have carefully targeted with smear campaigns, forecloses certain kinds of alliances that could have put a check on corporate power, but perhaps not improved the lives of the villagers in the way they wanted.

They see their environmental training as enlightening the backward locals who eat turtle eggs or fish in the reefs - so here they are helping the charismatic environment and helping the unknowing locals to preserve natural beauty. They wanted to provide waste management - they believe it’s helpful to the locals and it also would help with their distaste for trash at the beaches. The other CSR initiatives are portrayed as being forcefully demanded by the village elites and given as concessions to improve security, so the narrative of “help” to the locals is less prominent.

Their scientists have neutralized the environmental damage their practices do - defining tailings as nontoxic 

Enviro-rituals - (Gusterson) - -Flamboyantly lick, eat, bathe in the tailings - for media, on road shows… Rituals demonstrate but also produce their belief in the harmlessness - cites Geertz 1973 and Althusser 1971. This is also a kind of diversion - because maybe the tailings are not toxic to a human’s licking them, but they destroy the marine life the way they are dumped into the ocean, and they may react with other things in such a way that the end result is extremely toxic to humans, not to mention that it is certainly extinguishing a staggering amount of marine life by nature of crushing, before anything else 

Charismatic species - they hand-release sea turtles near a resort, very publically, a very feel-good moment that “Feels like social action”, and produce narratives of unenlightened locals being the ones bad for the environment because they eat turtles and turtle eggs - criminalize subsistence - attribute to poverty and ignorance, so they spend corporate $ on environmental education, and tell the kids that what their families do is bad. (The subsistence activities are often social - so people do them even if they can afford to buy food differently)

In-house corporate anthropologist - debunking the idea of the “ecological noble savage” as something first world activists made up - of course there are different ways to be ecologically-minded… 

Things that compete with mining corporations for resources or charismatic cases that are easily blamed on the mine are the environmental issues they talk about and they work to address - missing is greenhouse gas, for example. 

Claim they focus on Western corporations to get Western funding - claim they’re not transparent whereas corps have annual reports to shareholders. Various defaming of the NGOs - saying they are in the hands of “international anti-development” NGOs, that they infiltrate and only create illusion of local resistance, say their clear goal is “to bring international mining companies to their knees” - [which is almost funny]

Clandestine strategies: instead of suing, put the NGO on a watch list of bad/ non transparent NGOs, use the NGO as a workshop case study of bad NGO, held by a different cooperative and influential NGO that allies with the corporation secretly; op-eds “placed” into newspapers calling for regulation of NGOs

Basically turning transparency and accountability against the NGOs

Control of information flow - circulating the inaccurate NGO bulletin to rile up anger at the NGO - 

They define themselves as “environmentally friendly,” “good”, “moral”, “responsible” mining corporation, and their moral narrative is defined against these other groups in different ways: they have healthy competition with the backward mines (also “dinosaur”, will go extinct, they do blatant pollution and human rights violation), patronizing superiority for the poor Indonesians, and they straight up vilify the activist NGOs

Mine managers are proud of the mine and the environmental/ social/development projects, which they raise as evidence 

A lot of local groups want to take credit for attacking the activists - attacking the activists and defending the mine becomes morally sensible to many of these actors

Interestingly the narrative here is that village elites have used tactics, including violence, blocking roads, etc., to force the mining corporation to act as the state and provide patronage, goods, development in the material/infrastructural sense. The corporations use the CSR to quell their protesting. 

State gets demoted to one player of “multi-stakeholder” process in these voluntary self-monitoring/ self-regulating situations. Corps are rhetorically also just one player, but come to these events in force and drive the rhetoric, and in fact it’s all up to them what they actually do

In remote areas, the state doesn’t provide infrastructure and services so the mining companies become de-facto state in the provision of these things.

Three features described for CSR - 1) voluntary self-regulation, 2) articulating the value to the profit of doing CSR, and 3) strong ties to development industry 

Differing beliefs about what is development - the Infrastructure -centered development is out of style - now it’s about self-help, participatory, bottom-up - the former is associated with slow state and new is associated with certain types of CSR - tho not the wins that the village elites got in this case 

US foreign policy logic - applied to corporations - get security by giving aid/CSR boons to people - Security guards perform human rights training intensely - laminated cards around necks. → new and different forms of violence

Taking the offensive with PR firms that are doing CSR consulting plus clandestine research and “strategies for destroying NGOs” - with naked instrumentalism in their reports, not using words like “vulnerable, marginalized, underrepresented” - get personal dirt on people in NGOs - use words like “vocal, emotional, aggressive, passive, proactive, and cooperative but unclean” - p158 - also offers contract of clost to $1M for a big secret smear/boost campaign. Advise against suing because of “david and golaith” image. 

“The Project Green Shield report recommended turning public opinion against LOH (NGO that accused Newmont) by using Indonesian movements for NGO transparency and an NGO Code of Ethics.” 

Giving loans to their critics - it may not silence them fully but it discredits and makes them seem complicit/ hypocritical