Excavating the post-political: Mining, water and public participation in Arizona, USA

King, Owen

Abstract

Contributing to recent debates in democratic theory and human geography around the ‘post-political’ nature of contemporary modes of governance, this thesis challenges the extent to which deliberative, participatory spaces of decision-making lend democratic agency to those impacted by resource development projects. It examines the contention that these spaces are overdetermined within a discursive field biased toward the interests of corporate power and capital accumulation. The research connects three ‘registers’ of theoretically-informed enquiry: the aforementioned macro-level theorisations of what constitutes democracy and ‘the political’; the meso-level questions around the implementation of participatory practice within NEPA; and micro-level empirical situations where the above have recently come into play.
Empirically, the research takes one case study of a proposed copper mine in southern Arizona, United States. Specifically, it focuses on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process mandated by the United States’ 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Central to this example are the links between two types of resource, hard rock minerals and water – the large-scale realisation of which has been fundamental to development in this semi-arid region – and the ‘hydrosocial’ ecologies and economies in which they are entwined.
Employing a mixture of extensive and intensive methods within a broad critical realist framework, the research centres on the content of public comments in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed mine and a series of in-depth interviews with key informants. At the meso-level, it analyses the nature of competing discourses articulated in the NEPA EIS public commenting process, and the extent to which the institutional response to participatory process corresponds to normative conceptions of substantive democratic participation. At the micro-level, it aims to understand the role that spatial relations of social, political and economic power play in the trajectory of the process. Finally, the thesis considers how the case in question speaks back to macro-level theoretical debates around post-politics and post-democracy.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 28, 2019
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1491242
• Contract Date: Aug 22, 2019
• Award Date: Aug 28, 2019