Socio-Environmental Conflicts

Development of the extractive industries is at the core of a growing number of socio-environmental conflicts. Conflicts not only position "stakeholders" in natural resource extraction projects  against each other - the companies that operate them, the governments that authorize them and the communities that host them - they also involve a range of political allies, economic partners, legal entities, and environmental phenomena. This results in complex disputes and disagreements when a variety of actors, normative regimes and empirical, technical, scientific or "lay" knowledge compete during the profitability assessment of the ecological viability or social desirability of a mine or deforestation (Li 2015). This line of research aims to examine these disputes more closely in order to identify the elements necessary for their resolution. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the voices most often marginalized in these conflicts, those of youth and women (Mills et al., 2013, Altamirano-Jiménez, 2008). GRITE members analyze the necessarily ambiguous and therefore "frictional" nature (Tsing 2005) of relations between the various actors affected by natural resource extraction projects - their interests sometimes converging but remaining fundamentally different in nature (Furton 2001); as well as the "equivalences" (Li 2015) between knowledge systems that are mobilized to promote or oppose these projects. 

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