Gold Rush and Its Implications for Communities Near Mines in Tanzania

The first paper, "Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania", draws on theorizations of sovereignty from political geography to analyze the controversial role of the Tanzanian state in the capitalist relations concomitant with the growth of gold mining activities. We argue that resource sovereignty must be understood in relational terms if we are to account for the role of non-state, non-local actors in shaping access to and control over natural resources in the contemporary world economy. We demonstrate that there has been a mutually constitutive set of interdependencies between mining capital and the Tanzanian state in the accumulation of resource wealth, and that the reregulation of Tanzanian property regimes has been a critical means for attracting global flows of investment capital from colonial to contemporary times. We first examine the history of the colonial state in Tanganyika to illustrate how land and mineral rights were adjudicated through the power of the colonial state with the hopes of attracting foreign capital investment in the mining sector. We then examine contemporary efforts on the part of the independent United Republic of Tanzania to again enact legislation meant to attract foreign mining companies---and the consequences for local populations living near sites of extraction.;The second paper, "Problems with Reporting and Evaluating Mining Industry Community Development Projects: A Case Study, from Tanzania" . Reporting on contributions to community development is one way gold companies communicate the expanse and depth of their commitment to community development projects. This paper present empirical data that shows a 'disconnect' in what companies reported and what actually happened on the ground. Much of the effort labeled "community development" benefited the companies directly. The lack of local community development reports in the language understood by local people suggests that much of these reports serve the purpose of communicating company image, credibility, and compliance to consumers, shareholders, financial analysts, and governments. In this paper we argue that, if CSR projects are to be the primary way local people directly benefit from mine development, the relationship between the value of those projects and the wealth taken from the location should be considered, community projects should be well defined and differentiated from company-oriented projects, and community representatives should participate in monitoring the success and impact of community development projects.;The third paper, "Calling for justice from Tanzanian goldfields", examines local perspectives on the environmental injustices associated with gold mining activities and assesses the prospects for more effective strategies of community resistance to large scale gold mining. We first draw on Kuehn's (2004) taxonomy of environmental injustice to show how mining activities can be linked to procedural, corrective, distributive and social forms of injustice, each having a particular causal basis and set of challenges to its resolution. We then show communities have responded to these through various strategies of resistance including civil disobedience, violent demonstrations and vandalism, forming coalitions with village governments and civil society organizations, and through local political processes. The findings demonstrate that despite their resistance strategies communities remain unable to significantly ameliorate mining injustices as they are hampered by a lack of access to political space, insufficient financial and legal resources, low levels of assistance from state and civil-society organizations, and, at best, only superficial concerns on the part of corporations as manifest in their limited CSR initiatives.;The fourth paper, "Gold mining, water quality, and indigenous knowledge in Tanzania: Qualitatively rethinking monitoring strategies" is a case study of how communities, in absence of scientific data, perceive and understand changes to the quality, utility, and accessibility of local water resources. The specific objective of the study are to identify how water use, accessibility and equity are understood by local people, to assess how communities monitor changes in their water supplies, and to determine the effects of these changes to attitudes and perceptions of various water sources. The paper uses qualitative data collected through archival, field observation, consultative interviews and in-depth unstructured household interviews. The findings revealed four (4) monitoring criteria or sets of knowledge that are used by local people to understand changes in surrounding water. These are landscape transformations that are linked to water quality, aesthetic changes to water quality; health responses in people or livestock due to water quality; and socioeconomic changes with regard to water access and quality. These water monitoring criteria reflect entrenched and often tacit forms of knowledge that are acquired through everyday practices. As such, they are, despite their accuracy and relevance for assessing water quality, decoupled from the scientific approaches relied on by companies and the state to assess the environmental and public health impacts of large-scale gold mining operations. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).