Overflow: The oppositional life of an environmental impact study in a Senegalese mining negotiation

Abstract

Since the 1980s, environmental impact assessment has been adopted by numerous countries in the Global North and Global South to evaluate the effects of industrial and mining development. However, as scholars of mining capitalism have suggested, this has become a technology of environmental government that often serves to bolster and legitimize extractive projects rather than improving environmental outcomes or opening space for public participation. Focusing on oppositional uses of an environmental impact study in a mining controversy in Casamance, Senegal, this article examines the work that environmental assessment does, and argues that it can be used as a tool of resistance, extended delay, and debate. Activists and local residents opposed to the proposed mining project highlighted “overflows”—ways in which the document and its strategies exceeded the intention of legitimizing the mine within Senegalese legal frameworks. As both a representational and material object, the study was used by activists to highlight conflicts of interest inherent in the evaluation process, to emphasize errors and flaws in the text, and to fuel alternative predictions about the mine’s effects. This article suggests greater attention to the oppositional lives of bureaucratic processes, and the ways in which community groups draw upon governmentalized technologies to undermine extractive development.