The Global Mining Cluster and Decoding Sustainable Mining

This article presents a series of reflections on the “Global Mining Cluster”, defined as the political coalition of transnational mining corporations organized to keep territories around the world open to their interests and counteract criticisms that denounce the social and environmental depredations of megamining. We argue that the International Council of Mining & Minerals (ICMM), founded in 2001, has acted as the organizing hub of the mining industry’s international public policy since it launched the so-called “Global Mining Initiative” at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. That document gave the Cluster its philosophical foundations, a public discourse and an action plan that allowed it to articulate converging interests in a unified, worldwide political block. In its capacity as a “global political subject”, the Cluster pursues two general tasks: first, developing “strategic intelligence” so it can strengthen its influence on the political class and national state institutions the world over, while simultaneously elaborating protocols and techniques for imposing “horizons of coercion” [1] on communities and regions to achieve one central goal neutralizing local resistance to its operations. Second, it has elaborated a “new international public discourse” summarized in the term “sustainable mining”, which presents the Cluster as a generator of “social goodness”, while legitimizing daily interventions by its agents to maintain social control over the lives of communities and regions. To illustrate this, we analyze the Cluster’s operations in a case in Mexico, but our reflections can be extended to other countries in Latin America and beyond, for similar scenarios of local conflict due to the imposition of mining have been documented in studies by the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts [2] and internationally, by the Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade project [3].