Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines

Abstract

AbstractCentering temporality when discussing mineral extraction often points to an understanding of a mining life cycle that includes phases such as contracting, exploration, production, and closure. To center temporality when analyzing mining suggests both prioritizing and rethinking the time scale that shapes ongoing discourses and practices regulating the sector. Paying attention to silenced time–space dynamics within the mining life cycle is a key aspect of centering temporality. Yet the emphasis placed on each phase is determined by vested economic interests that pay little attention to the long-term, negative environmental consequences embedded within the mining life cycle and are not linear. This chapter takes a critical look at the limited statehood and legal vacuum confronting the governance of large-scale mine closure in Africa. It asks whether and to what extent global, regional, and country-level mining governance frameworks fail to hold mining companies accountable for the long-term environmental destruction they cause. The analysis is informed by Upendra Baxis’s concept of “geographies of injustice,” which in this context are reproduced by obscuring a key spatiotemporal dimension in the mining cycle: the mine closure stage. Bringing together scholarship of environmental justice, comparative environmental politics, and global norms, the discussion focuses on mine closures in Africa to illustrate how legal structures and norms collude with the state to render certain aspects of capitalist interests invisible. Current policy silences are anchored within exclusive ontological premises, which in turn reproduce geographies of injustice across the extractive cycle.