Thirty years after the concept “sustainable development” was presented and twenty years after mining conflicts in Intag started, Rafael Correa, the Ecuadorian president under whose mandate was passed the Constitution of Sumak Kawsay —which recognizes nature as a subject of law— ends in 2017 its ten years in office.
In last decades, environmental conflicts arisen and sharpen at local and global level. In Ecuador, the neo-extractive model faces the Political Constitution of 2008. This paper analyzes convergences and divergences between discourses around conflicts regarding large scale cooper mining in Ecuador. Discourses are compared and related to weak (extractive), strong (efficient) or super-strong (ecologist) environmental models, and to liberal, cultural and eco-socialist approaches.
To carry out this study, several relevant actors from the principal sectors in dispute (the private, the public, and the social) have been interviewed; the Equatorial legal system (Constitution, legislation, doctrine and jurisprudence) has been analyzed; and a sample of corporate documentation (plans, projects, memories, reports of environmental impacts and corporate social responsibility, etc.) has been consulted. The aim of this communication is, firstly, to identify the undertaken environmental commitments from each part as a starting point, and, secondly, to compare them with the real evolution of the discourses, the legislation, the policies and the practices during this years until today.
The conclusion is that although there is a common ground between the actors, the positions still remain quite a long way apart. That means that in practice the extractive model imposes itself strongly on the ecologist model and even on the efficient model. As a result, the equatorial mining policy is stepping away from the constitutional mandates that call for the sustainability and the Good Living (buen vivir), Sumak Kawsay.
Keywords: cooper mining, discourses, environmental conflict, Sumak Kawsay, Intag.
