What Participation? Distinguishing Water Monitoring Programs in Mining Regions Based on Community Participation

Citizen monitoring in environmental disclosure: An economics perspective

Criticism is mounting that market-led and state-led initiatives for environmental impact disclosure are too limited in scope and that they rest on too strong assumptions about the quality and impartiality of monitoring and enforcement, with resulting insufficient effect on environmental sustainability. It has been proposed that citizen monitoring may contribute to counteract this void. However, to our knowledge, policy analysis in general and economics in particular has not paid much attention to this role of citizen monitoring. This paper aims to bridge that gap from an economics lens, by exploring the dynamics of disclosing local environmental impact and the potential role of citizen monitoring in environmental policy. To this end, the paper addresses monopolistic versus pluralistic environmental disclosure, letting citizen monitoring represent the latter. The study uses the mining industry as an illustrative case, because of that sector's particular transparency challenges in international value chains, typically with strong negative local environmental impact. It is shown how pluralistic information provision such as citizen monitoring can contribute to incentivizing more reliable information provision, especially in countries with weak state institutions, which is particularly important in the case of high-risk environmental impact. The findings should be of use for shaping environmental policy, providing valuable insights for both policymakers and scholars.

Conceptual and Analytical Diversity of Environmental Governance in Latin America: A Systematic Review

The analysis of environmental governance and the analytical frameworks used to study this concept in Latin America show that the term is diffuse and polysemic. The term governance refers to democratic societies that theoretically encourage the plural participation of actors in decision making to solve public or collective socioenvironmental problems. However, in Latin America, there is a broad social perception of a democratic deficit that affects the socioenvironmental sphere. The objective of this work is to determine the main trends in studies on environmental governance in Latin America, the most commonly used analytical frameworks and the predominant approaches to characterize the scientific and political uses of the concept. A systematic literature review is carried out on databases in English and Spanish, and 140 articles that consider environmental governance using various analytical frameworks are analyzed. The main finding is the predominance of a critical perspective on the effectiveness of environmental governance, as well as the associated institutional components and social organizations, because the democratic practices that should support it are questionable.

Citizen science projects in freshwater monitoring. From individual design to clusters?

Citizen science projects spring up in freshwater monitoring, with an increasing number of projects in river, lake, and groundwater monitoring around the globe. Citizen science scholars assume that these projects have different designs, including diverse characteristics of citizens, institutions, and forms of interactions, potentially affecting the outcomes of these projects. Given the strong focus on case studies or reviews in the field, there is, however, little comparative evidence of the different types of citizen science projects in freshwater monitoring. Based on a global survey, this study provides a systematic comparative analysis of the design of 85 citizen science projects in the field of freshwater monitoring. Descriptive statistics reveal how projects differ along 45 literature-based design variables raised in the survey. Factor analysis based on 31 of these variables yields ten key design factors, and cluster analysis, based on these design factors, allows to identify seven distinguished clusters of citizen science projects. While these clusters are rather heterogeneous, they reveal differences between groups of projects regarding institutional motivation, citizen characteristics, and interaction forms. These results significantly add to a systematic comparison of citizen science projects in freshwater monitoring and enable a more effective involvement of citizens in environmental management.

Assessing the Freshwater Quality of a Large-Scale Mining Watershed: The Need for Integrated Approaches

Water quality assessments provide essential information for protecting aquatic habitats and stakeholders downstream of mining sites. Moreover, mining companies must comply with environmental quality standards and include public participation in water quality monitoring (WQM) practices. However, overarching challenges beyond corporate environmental responsibility are the scientific soundness, political relevance and harmonization of WQM practices. In this study, a mountainous watershed supporting large-scale gold mining in the headwaters, besides urban and agricultural landuses at lower altitudes, is assessed in the dry season. Conventional physicochemical and biological (Biological Monitoring Water Party-Colombia index) freshwater quality parameters were evaluated, including hydromorphological and land-use characteristics. According to the indicators used, water quality deterioration by mining was absent, in contrast to the effects of urban economic activities, hydromorphological alterations and (less important) agricultural pollutants. We argue that mining impacts are hardly captured due to the limited ecological knowledge of high-mountain freshwaters, including uncharacterized mining-specific bioindicators, environmental baselines and groundwater processes, as well as ecotoxicological and microbial freshwater quality components. Lessons for overcoming scientific and operational challenges are drawn from joint efforts among governments, academia and green economy competitiveness. Facing a rapid development of extractive industries, interinstitutional and multidisciplinary collaborations are urgently needed to implement more integrated freshwater quality indicators of complex mining impacts.

From Water Management to Water Stewardship—A Policy Maker’s Opinion on the Progress of the Mining Sector

Water is a critical resource for mining operations, as it is for many other water users within any local catchment. With operations often located in water scarce areas, mining companies are increasingly experiencing competition for access to water resources. Concerns over the potential adverse impacts of mining on these shared resources has resulted in the sectors water management approach and practices being challenged by external stakeholders including local communities. This paper overviews the drivers that have resulted in the mining sector expanding its approach from water management within the operational fence line to catchment water stewardship, some of the major obstacles to continued progress and the related needs for guidance, research and research applications.