Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Going Beyond the State to Strengthen the
Rule of Law: Local Activists, Transnational
Networks, and Gold Mining in Bulgaria
Barbara Hicks
We have become used to seeing large international corporations investing
in resource extraction in developing countries, and we often see trans-
national environmental justice issues as efforts of local communities in
these cases to prevent the investments or control the effects of production
on their natural and social environments and economy. These sorts of
investments also started appearing in the postcommunist transition coun-
tries in the 1990s. Coming at a time of major economic and political
transformation, the projects have taken advantage of and become entan-
gled in transition politics. This chapter seeks to understand what factors
infl uence whether local residents are able to protect their economic,
environmental, and communal interests by shaping or preventing these
projects.
While at one level this chapter is a case study of external investment
in resource extraction in postcommunist states, its fi ndings are applicable
to other countries as well. Phrased more generally, the research question
would be: What are effective strategies for local communities seeking
environmental justice in the face of major transnational investments in
small or mid- to low-income countries with weakly institutionalized
state decision-making procedures and weak rule of law? The states of
comparative interest here range from semiauthoritarian to democratic,
but they usually have enough of a participatory political process and a
suffi cient measure of general accountability to the public that their
governments cannot simply crush citizens with outright force, as can
more repressive states. While they may face selective repression, local
communities' greatest challenges in these states generally lie in having
their voices considered and in ensuring that the state follows its own
prescribed practices and standards or that it develops reasonable prac-
tices where there are none. These conditions are typical of transitional
regimes of various types and many developing countries.
