Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) - German Development Institute, Germany; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), the Netherlands.
German-Mongolian Institute for Resources and Technology (GMIT), Mongolia; United Nations University Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU-FLORES), Germany.
J Environ Manage. 2021 Aug 15;292:112767. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112767. Epub 2021 May 12.
Waterscapes with mining activities are often sites of water resource degradation and contestation. To prevent this, policy-makers deploy an increasing number of measures that purportedly align the interests of different water users. In Mongolia, mining-related protests led to the prohibition of mining in and close to rivers. However, implementation of these regulations has been slow. In this paper, we investigate why that is the case, drawing on an extended elaboration of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to disentangle the web of formal and informal rules, incentive structures, discourses, and other elements that characterize Mongolian miningscapes. We find that i) a combination of insufficient resources for lower-level actors, large areas to cover and high mobility of extractive operations, ii) a lack of information among implementing entities, combined with time pressure on decision-making and a lack of involvement of local actors, and iii) cultural norms and political context conditions that privilege the pursuit of private interests are key obstacles. Irrespective of these challenges, the prohibition of mining in riverbeds entrenches a social imaginary in the Mongolian governance framework that prioritizes water resources protection over resource extraction, offering a counterweight to dominant discourses that cast mining as a necessary requirement for social and economic development. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of looking at implementation processes through the lens of mining- and waterscapes to identify how social power is embedded in social-political artifacts and impacts hydro-social outcomes. Strong discrepancies between the formal description of governance processes and interactions on the ground support the need to look at how processes play out in practice in order to understand implementation obstacles.
采矿活动的水域景观往往是水资源退化和争夺的场所。为了防止这种情况，政策制定者部署了越来越多的措施，旨在协调不同用水者的利益。在蒙古，与采矿相关的抗议活动导致了禁止在河流内和附近采矿。然而，这些法规的执行一直很缓慢。在本文中，我们利用制度分析与发展（IAD）框架的扩展阐述，研究了为什么会这样，以梳理正式和非正式规则、激励结构、话语以及其他特征的网络，这些特征构成了蒙古采矿景观。我们发现：i） 基层行动者资源不足，覆盖范围广，采掘作业流动性大；ii） 执行实体之间缺乏信息，加上决策的时间压力和地方行为者的参与不足；iii） 文化规范和政治背景条件优先考虑私人利益，这些都是关键障碍。尽管面临这些挑战，禁止在河床采矿却在蒙古治理框架中巩固了一种社会想象，即优先保护水资源而不是资源开采，这为将采矿视为社会和经济发展必要条件的主导话语提供了制衡。我们的分析表明，通过采矿和水域景观的视角来审视实施过程，以确定社会权力如何嵌入社会政治人工制品并影响水社会结果，这是很有用的。正式描述的治理过程与实地互动之间存在强烈差异，这支持了需要了解实际过程如何发挥作用，以理解实施障碍的观点。
