Breaking Ground: From Extraction Booms to Mining Bans in Latin America analyzes mining policies in Central America during the 2000s and 2010s mining boom, with a focus on the gold sector. The book forges new paths for scholarship on extractive conflict by shifting our attention from explaining conflict toward tracing its policy impacts. As a comparative study of national mining policy, Breaking Ground pushes us beyond project-level dynamics on which the literature has centered. Rose Spalding’s rigorous qualitative empirical analysis draws on data she collected through her extensive fieldwork that included more than 250 interviews.
The book leverages most-similar and most-different systems designs to explain mining-friendly policies in Nicaragua, intermittent mining restrictions in Guatemala, and Costa Rican and Salvadoran mining bans. Cross-national variation in policy emerged even though all four countries had histories of mining and of government encouragement of large-scale mining in the 1980s–90s, as part of the region’s turn toward economic liberalization. Mining was banned both in Costa Rica and El Salvador, though these two countries vary in state capacity, internal security, and economic growth. During the period of interest, both El Salvador and Nicaragua were governed by political parties that had emerged from a revolutionary leftist movement, and yet the cases differ starkly with respect to mining policy.
Spalding’s causal framework, which borrows insights from political economy, comparative politics, and social movement theories, emphasizes the power balance between anti-mining and pro-mining actors. One variable is the degree of elite unity, expressed in terms of political and business elite views on mining and, organizationally, whether national business associations incorporate foreign mining.
Countering elite unity is the strength of the anti-mining movement. Spalding considers whether that movement displays a coherent set of goals, extends to the national level, and incorporates multiple sectors, such as Indigenous rights activists, Catholic Church leaders, and environmental organizations. Successful movements built on preexisting civil-society organizations and networks—be they environmentally oriented as in Costa Rica or structures developed by resilient communities during and following civil war in El Salvador. By attending to movements’ goal coherence, Breaking Ground underscores variation and tensions among three kinds of mining conflict that traditionally have not been examined in single studies: environmental conflict, conflict over compensation or other material benefits brought by mining, and conflict in which artisanal miners resist relocation caused by large-scale mining development.
The book’s third and final variable is the presence of “institutional locations within the state where engaged citizens can introduce initiatives and maneuver public officials to advance toward their preferred policy response” (38). Although the research is concerned mainly with social movement actors’ use of these “docking points,” it also reveals how elites depend on them. For instance, both activists and elites in Costa Rica turned to the judiciary in their struggles.
Docking points operate independently in Guatemala where, despite a unified, pro-mining elite and the lack of a national mining movement, groups that organized against individual mining projects gained traction using the courts. Yet in other cases, docking points result partly from the actions of powerful anti-mining movements, unified elites, or both, demonstrating how Spalding’s independent variables interact. In Costa Rica, organizers opposed to the major Crucitas mine project gained success through the court that oversaw administrative law. Previously, social movements had relied exclusively on a different court that handled constitutional claims. Thus, the movement against Crucitas established a new docking point. For their part, powerful elites could block a movement’s access to institutions. In Nicaragua, “mining advocacy penetrated deeply into the state apparatus, precluding the development of opposition enclaves within executive agencies, legislative commissions, municipal governments, or the courts” (65).
Following the book’s close empirical analysis of mining policy in the four countries, a concluding chapter examines several cases in which foreign mining firms initiated international investor–state dispute-settlement processes against Central American governments. The analysis reveals how this strategy has pressured governments to adopt and retain mining-friendly policies and suggests that it constitutes a serious impediment to movements that strive to limit large-scale mining.
Breaking Ground stands out for its conceptual rigor. The study’s innovative, detailed typology of mining activists’ demands is noteworthy. At a broad level, the book distinguishes between demands for “restrictive regulation” and “prohibition.” Subcategories highlight variation in the type and degree of constraints on mining. Restrictive regulations include environmental restrictions, compensation requirements, and mandates for community consultation. Within each of these three types of restrictions, Spalding sorts policies according to the level of constraints on firms. “Prohibition” can be temporal, geographic, or national, with each prohibition type varying in its reach; for example, temporally defined prohibitions range from project-level delays to national moratoria. Future research might productively employ this useful typology, including by exploring potential patterns in how regulations and prohibitions interact. For example, the temporary ban of a project pending citizen review—a “prohibition”—can exist only where community consultations, a kind of “restrictive regulation,” are required.
The book also raises interesting questions about levels of analysis. Spalding deliberately focuses on national mining policy and not on individual project outcomes. However, in the book national policy seems fused to projects in important ways. First, organizing around a single mine project can lead directly to discussions and change in the national policy realm. In El Salvador, activism against the El Dorado mine project led the environment ministry to assess critically not only El Dorado but also the ministry’s practices for reviewing (all) proposed mining development. Second, at times the study only arrives at a national assessment by aggregating project-level events. Most obviously, Spalding characterizes Guatemala as a case of “intermittent” mining based on the suspension or temporary closure of three large-scale mines (135).
Certain connections between project and national policy outcomes might be caused by how different docking points operate. Anti-mine groups accessed the courts in Costa Rica and Guatemala and the state bureaucracy in El Salvador through mine-specific filings. These docking points helped bring about national mining policy change but only, it appears, because organizers also could use docking points in political parties and the legislature, which ultimately passed laws banning mining in Costa Rica and El Salvador. In contrast, struggles necessarily remained at the project level in Guatemala, where activists lacked connections to parties and lawmakers.
Spalding’s mastery of national political dynamics and rich descriptions of mine conflicts in her country cases are what enable us to contemplate such potential connections between project trajectories and national policies. Hers is a highly informative, rigorous, and convincing study. Breaking Ground is a major contribution to our understanding of social organizing, elite power, and political institutions in the realm of resource extraction.
