Re-locating mineral-dependant communities in the era of globalization, 1979--1999: A comparative study of the Zambian Copperbelt and Timmins, Ontario

This dissertation investigates two mining communities---one in Canada in the global North and the other in Zambia in the global South. It seeks to establish the extent to which their economic development was over-determined by changes in the global economy in the late twentieth century. The focus is on the contestation by key social forces over the regime of economic organization as exemplified by key shifts in mining and mineral policy in the two countries.; The dissertation advances two main hypotheses: First, that late 20th century was a period of transition characterized by a shift in the mode of governance and economic development from a liberal nationalist to a liberal globalist economic order, increasingly, though not entirely, premised on the primacy of the market. The transition was defined by political and structural processes that sought to impose liberal policy convergence at the global level, shift control of the means of production into private hands, and re-organize the processes of production and consumption to maximize private rents and capital accumulation. By securing disproportionate control over the resources, global capital imposed changes that adversely impacted the everyday lives of local communities. Local mining communities became subject to processes of spatial displacement of production through rationalization of investment and production or outright abandonment, creating new relations and new economic insecurities.; However, the period of transition also had a dialectical impact on social relations, the scale and regulation of production and consumption, labour processes and the dominant ideology. Thus our second hypothesis is that the process of transition was not an undifferentiated march of capitalist triumph precisely because of its highly dialectical nature. Not unlike the era that preceded the great welfare and developmental states of the post-war period, social forces from below, responded to the 'predatory' mode of capitalist development articulated by capital in its condition of supremacy in the early part of the period of study, with both resistance and collaboration. As the dialectical nature of this engagement gradually took on local and global dimensions, social forces from above and from below articulated varied forms of political agency in processes of struggle and collaboration that generated new hegemonic discourses and practices of economic development, such as sustainable development, mapping the contours of a variant of capitalist development consistent with what we refer to here as stakeholder capitalism.; The empirical research for this project involved a macro-micro comparative analysis of the changing mining policy regime, its impacts on production relations, and the economic and social outcomes for two geo-politically varied mining communities---Timmins, Ontario and the Zambian Copperbelt---both involved in the exploration, extraction, processing and export of copper as a major economic and social activity between 1979 and 1999. Using these as representative case studies of a local-global process of transition in the economic organization of mining, the study considered the impact of changes in resource management and related regulatory regime on the communities, employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodology, including case studies and analysis of primary and secondary data drawn from a variety of data collections methods including personal interviews, focus groups and targeted random surveys conducted in Zambia and Canada.