Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rural Communities, Mining, and Globalization

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Gary Paul GreenMichael L. DoughertyUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonGuatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sought to integrate into the global economy in the mid 1990s, in part, through foreign direct investment (FDI) in the mineral sector. Spatially incorporating rural communities into the global economy through gold mining has galvanized civic opposition to mining projects in the region. As these anti-mining movements have blossomed across Central America, governments have responded harshly to reassure foreign investors. Ironically, however, as state and civil society determinedly confront each other over the mining issue, this political instability has discouraged foreign investment in other economic sectors. Mining-led market integration has made Central America a less attractive investment environment for the kinds of FDI that best contribute to the economy through job creation, technology and learning spillovers, and linkages with other economic sectors. The prominent literatures on globalization and development?the dependency school, the neoclassical frame, and the developmentalist state literature, do not account for the emergence of this paradox. Instead, these cases may constitute the emergence of a new model of mineral-led market integration in the neoliberal era, where relationships between states, firms and communities are reconfigured. Incorporating political process theory to frame civic opposition, public choice theory to frame state intervention, and a commodity chain analysis of the global gold mining industry may help illuminate this reconfiguration. To explore the stand-off between state and civil society at the core of this development paradox, this dissertation poses two research questions: 1) how do rural communities make sense of their integration into the global economy through gold mining? And 2) how do these governments negotiate their social contractual obligations to civil society with their contractual obligations to foreign capital? Data collection will involve twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities in these three nations, as well as interviews with key informants in government, the mining sector, and civic society. This research advances discovery and sociological knowledge by probing the limits of the ?grand theories? of development and globalization in the context of current restructuring in the global gold industry, the growth of transnational and national social movements, and the political parameters of neoliberal foreign direct investment policies. The results of this research will be disseminated through university courses, public lectures, and Spanish-language publications facilitated by IARNA.