Closure and connection : a Southwest Pacific reappraisal of the mining enclave

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the interactions between large-scale mining and state-making/nation-building in four political settings in the Southwest Pacific: Indonesian West Papua (IWP), Papua New Guinea (PNG), and New Caledonia's North and South provinces. It argues that while, in mineral-dependent contexts, state-making and nation-building processes are shaped by large-scale projects, the nature of this influence varies depending on the complex relationships that co-evolve between corporations, governmental bodies, and the political sphere, including affected communities, NGOs, and other key actors, across multiple scales and levels. Large-scale mining generates multilayered enclaves that extend the influence of such operations well beyond the economic form in which this term is usually conceived. This multilayering can be broadly characterized as extending across three domains: (i) The material enclave (the effects of the necessary localization of mining and its environmental ?overflows?), (ii) the institutional enclave (the specific sets of arrangements and connections allowing the enclave to function from a normative/legal/political point of view), and (iii) the ideological enclave (the place of the mine in the local and national imagination and the construction of the ?extractive subject?). The cases used in this chapter are doubly comparative, as the authors explore the issue in two islands (Papua/Caledonia) and within the two islands (IWP/PNG and New Caledonia's South and North provinces). The chapter reappraises the enclave debate around a multidimensional dialectic of closure and connection, from an empirically grounded perspective