0000000000420672
AUTHOR
Morgan Scoville-simonds
Mining indigenous territories: Consensus, tensions and ambivalences in the Salar de Atacama
Lithium mining in Chile’s Salar de Atacama (SdA) has a relatively long and controversial history, especially when it comes to the local Indigenous peoples. In this context, this paper looks at the ways mining activities, and different visions of territory and indigeneity co-produce each other in the particular context of the SdA. For this, we use historical and ethnographic methods and draw on studies in anthropology and geography. We aim to escape simplistic images of Indigenous peoples’ reactions to mining as reflecting victimhood, resistance, or strategic pragmatism, and show instead how individuals and groups organize and express themselves in ambivalent ways, maintaining complex relati…
Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance?
This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulnerability context; (ii) inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation; (iii) a retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas; and (iv) a lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined. Emerging literature shows potential avenues for overcoming the current failure of adaptation intervent…