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The last environmental impact assessment (EIA) related to Ecuador’s first large-scale open pit copper mine, the Mirador project, was presented to the public in March 2015. In this article, we discuss how the rural mestizo population and Shuar indigenous people, who are under increasing pressure from the government and the mining company, contest the current politics of accountability related to the making and dissemination of this EIA. We analyse how formal instruments of governance related to participation (prior consultation) and environmental management (environmental impact monitoring), are re-used in the affected population’s resistance work. We look at how these formal instruments are put to independent and political use as part of an extended struggle for influence over the process of transformation that the mega mining project generates. The article contributes to a discussion around participatory strategies that build on new conversations between ‘popular environmentalists’ and social/earth scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Free, prior, and informed consultation and consent has become an important interface in encounters between governments, corporations, grassroots organisations, and other actors, particularly in cases involving extractive activities. Based on over two years of collaborative research, this article examines the consultation and consent processes for the Environmental Management Plan for a large hydroelectric dam in Afrodescendant and Indigenous ancestral territories in Western Colombia. We identified several problems lessening the effectiveness of the consultation processes, particularly the seeming impossibility of crafting conditions for genuine interculturality, and the state’s lack of political will to uphold consent. We conclude that the most significant variable in achieving concrete benefits for the communities is the strength of their political organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and to informed consent represents the basis of the new global model shaping state–indigenous relations. Consultation processes promise to enable indigenous people to determine their own development and are especially promoted when extraction projects with significant socio-environmental impacts are planned on indigenous lands. In this article we draw on debates on participatory development in order to analyse the first state-led consultations in Bolivia’s and Peru’s hydrocarbon sectors (2007–14). The analysis shows that effective participation has been limited by (1) an absence of indigenous ownership of the processes; (2) indigenous groups’ difficulties defending or even articulating their own visions and demands; and (3) limited or very general outcomes. The study identifies real-life challenges, such as power asymmetries, a ‘communication hurdle’ and appropriate timing – as well as simplistic assumptions underlying the consultation approach – that account for the unfulfilled promises of this new model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]