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Journal of Legal Anthropology • Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2020: 78–99 © The Author(s)
doi:10.3167/jla.2020.040405 ISSN 1758-9576 (Print) • ISSN 1758-9584 (Online)
The Responsibility to
Prevent Future Harm
Anti-Mining Struggles, the State, and
Constitutional Lawsuits in Ecuador
Laura Affolter
uw
Abstract: Through the example of legal resistance to mining in Ecuador,
this article explores the shift towards suing states rather than corpora-
tions. Key to ongoing resistance struggles is the allocation of preventive
responsibility to ‘the state’ through the ling of constitutional lawsuits. I
show how both the shift from the ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’
and a shift in the imaginary of the state contribute to claims of respon-
sibility being increasingly directed at states. The article inquires into the
eects of the temporal reversal from assessing past harm (and ruling
retrospectively) to assessing the likelihood of future scenarios in order
to prevent future harm. Finally, I address the limits of such allocation of
responsibility, showing that while constitutional lawsuits are political
attempts to challenge the government’s economic programme and dis-
rupt the logic of global capitalism, many powerful policy-shaping actors
remain beyond the law’s reach.
Keywords: constitutional lawsuits, Ecuador, mining, politics of time,
preventive and protective responsibility, state
vt
In their introduction to this Special Issue, Julia Eckert and Laura
Knöpfel call for scholars to address the ‘conundrums [that] ensue from
shifts in claims of responsibility away from states towards corpora-
tions’. The other articles in this Special Issue show that this shift cer-
tainly occurs. But so does its reverse, as ongoing legal struggles against
industrial mining in Ecuador indicate. There, ‘anti-mining activists’ – a
term I discuss in more detail below – have started to increasingly sue
the state rather than corporations (or the people who work for them).
Since 2013, at least seven constitutional lawsuits, so-called acciones de
protección (writs of protection), have been led against Ecuadorian state
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institutions, particularly against the Ministry of Environment (which is
responsible for granting the necessary environmental licences for carry-
ing out mining activities) and the Agencia de Regulación y Control
Minero (ARCOM)1 (which is in charge of granting mining concessions
and regulating mining activities).2 The principal aim of these constitu-
tional lawsuits is to prevent mines from starting to operate in the rst
place rather than seeking remedies for and reparation of past harms.
This is done by attributing a preventive and protective responsibility
to ‘the state’ – a responsibility the state is seen to hold towards not only
its people but also nature itself.
Drawing on Stuart Kirsch’s analysis in Mining Capitalism (2014),
I show in this article how the shift towards directing claims of responsi-
bility at the state is linked to a shift in anti-mining resistance strategies
from a ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’. Kirsch describes how, in
the 1990s, environmental movements and resistance to mining focused
on political and legal mobilisation across space. Eorts were made to
establish transnational networks that linked actors with varying access
to resources, power, and political leverage in order to exert pressure on
multinational corporations and to sue them in their home state juris-
dictions (2014: 188). In contrast, more recently, prevention has moved to
the forefront of political strategies, and social movements have focused
mainly on ‘the period before mining begins’ (2014: 190). Kirsch explains
this shift via what he identies as a ‘crucial shortcoming’ of the politics
of space, namely ‘the length of time required to diagnose a problem,
enrol a network of supporters, and stage an eective intervention’ (2014:
122, 189). Drawing on his engagement with ‘the campaign against the
OK Tedi mine, which was ultimately too late to save the river’, he claims
that ‘new approaches based on the politics of time represent a more
hopeful political turn’ (2014: 191). From their own and others’ experi-
ences with extractive projects, social movements have learned that once
the necessary infrastructure has been built and the companies have
begun to operate, challenging and stopping these projects becomes
nearly impossible and that ‘political pressure may be most eective’ so
long as mining projects are still in the planning phase (2014: 190). This
is reected in the words of an activist from the Ecuadorian Íntag Valley.
After telling me what she had experienced when visiting mines and the
communities aected by them in Peru and Chile, she said to me:
But we don’t have to wait for damage to happen here. . . . Because if we can
see that there is a possibility that an activity will cause [environmental]
damage, then we have to do something. We do not have to wait and see
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
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whether the activity will contaminate. And with mining the case is clear;
it will always lead to contamination.
She went on to propose a potential solution: ‘Ever since the company
arrived here [to do exploration work] and since the rights of nature were
introduced [into the constitution] in 2008, I have said that we should
prepare a lawsuit with the rights of nature.’3 This is precisely what the
writs of protection against mining are doing.
In this article, I explore the increasing allocation of responsibility
to the state via constitutional lawsuits by analysing the various con-
tributing factors. I inquire into what brings prevention to the forefront
and what, for the activists, makes the state a self-evident, practical, and
potentially promising addressee of their legal claims. In doing so, I
show how in addition to the shift from a ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics
of time’, a shift in the imaginary of the state also means that claims of
responsibility are increasingly directed at states. I analyse the temporal
imaginaries that underlie and accompany these shifts, asking what ef-
fects the temporal reversal from remediating past harms to preventing
future harms has on court proceedings and the role of judges. Finally,
I explore the limits of this shift towards suing states by asking what
harms can be legally addressed in this way and what harms remain
‘beyond law’s conceptual grasp’ (Eckert and Knöpfel, this issue). I dis-
cuss these questions in dialogue with Suzana Sawyer’s analysis of the
Chevron-Texaco case in her article ‘Fictions of Sovereignty: Of Pros-
thetic Petro-Capitalism, Neoliberal States, and Phantom-Like Citizens
in Ecuador’ (2001).
From a politics of space to a politics of time: The
Chevron-Texaco case and current struggles against mining
The Chevron-Texaco case is a legal struggle that has been going on for
twenty-seven years, moving through various jurisdictions in the United
States, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada. It nicely exemplies
what Stuart Kirsch (2014) has called the ‘politics of space’ and also the
above-mentioned problems associated with it. The legal struggle started
in 1993 when a group of people from the aected area led a class- action
lawsuit in a New York district court against the United States-based
oil company Texaco, which later merged with Chevron Corporation
in 2001. The plaintis accused the company of having polluted the
rivers and groundwater, causing severe damage to the rainforest and
people’s health through the ‘use of substandard technology’ including
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the dumping of toxic waste into open pits during its operations in the
Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1992 (Sawyer 2016: 226; see also
Ofrias 2017: 438–439; Sawyer 2006). The case was eventually dismissed
by the US Federal Court on the grounds of forum non conveniens, leading
to a new class-action lawsuit being brought against the company in 2003
in Ecuador. In 2013, Chevron was ordered by the Ecuadorian Supreme
Court to pay 9.5 billion US dollars as compensation and remedy for the
environmental damage caused by Texaco (and its fourth-tier subsidiary
TexPet) to the plaintis. However, to this day, the company has still not
paid. Instead, in an attempt to ‘prevent the enforcement of the Ecuado-
rian judgement in foreign jurisdictions’ (León Moreta and Liu 2018: 283),
Chevron successfully presented a case against the Republic of Ecuador
at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague under UNCITRAL
(UN Commission on International Trade Law) Arbitration Rules (2018:
283; see also Sawyer 2015). On the grounds of the US- Ecuador Bi lateral
Investment Agreement, Ecuador is now obliged to pay compensation
to the company for the reputational damage the latter claims to have
suffered as a consequence of the Ecuadorian court orders (Eckert
forthcoming). Furthermore, Ecuador was ordered to quash the court
order issued by its Supreme Court against Chevron and to prevent the
plaintis from ling lawsuits against Chevron’s subsidiaries in other
countries in an attempt to enforce the Ecuadorian court order and gain
access to Chevron’s assets.
The above-mentioned article by Suzana Sawyer about this case was
published at a time when the decision by the US Federal Court was still
pending and thus brings to light the plaintis’ hopes and struggles at
that particular time. Sawyer construes her arguments with the help
of two metaphors: prosthesis and the phantom citizen. She uses the
term ‘phantom citizen’ to describe the ‘condition experienced by sub-
altern groups when their rights of citizenship and national belonging
have been disavowed’ (2001: 158–159). Prosthesis describes, in the rst
instance, the relationship between parent companies and their sub-
sidiaries. A subsidiary, ‘like a prosthesis’, she writes, satises ‘the de-
sires of the parent company until it . . . [is] no longer needed’ (2001: 159).
It is ‘tractable, detachable, and ultimately discardable at the behest of
central command’ (2001: 158). This often makes it dicult for claimants
to successfully hold parent companies legally responsible for harms
caused by their operations abroad. At the same time, she uses the terms
‘legal prosthesis’ and ‘moral prosthesis’ to describe how, in the Texaco
case, the plaintis ‘strapped on’ US law, environmentalism, and human
rights to transform their ‘disavowed bodies into disruptive political
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
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subjects’ and to gain a political voice – both nationally and interna-
tionally (2001: 168). Furthermore, she shows how by submitting to a
court in New York and attributing responsibility to the parent company
for its decision to use substandard technology, the plaintis attempted
to disrupt ‘the logic of global capitalism that drove oil operations in
Ecuador’ (2001: 158).
Although the legal struggle Sawyer describes diers from the one
discussed in this article – the Chevron-Texaco case was about claiming
remedy for past harm, while the writs of protection are about prevent-
ing future harm – many parallels nonetheless exist. The anti-mining
activists I have been working with while undertaking eldwork also
seek to gain a political voice through their legal actions, albeit dier-
ent from the way described by Sawyer. They too challenge capitalism,
but more its specic ideas of economic development than its global
entangle ments. Finally, certain sets of rights – like buen vivir or the
rights of nature – are also ‘strapped on’ in order to make specic politi-
cal demands. I do not, however, wish to reduce all forms of legal mo-
bilisation to ‘mere prostheses’. At least for some of the actors I worked
with – especially those who were already involved in advocating for
the rights of nature and buen vivir in the constituent assembly – I found
that the mobilisation of those rights in the writs of protection against
mining projects was not just a ‘means to an end’, that mining be de-
clared unconstitutional, but to some extent also an ‘end in itself’ in that
the activists sought to give those rights a specic meaning through the
setting of legal precedents (see Lemaitre 2008: 331). Yet the concept of
‘prosthesis’ is nonetheless helpful in that it allows us to address how,
through the mobilisation of specic discourses, legal instruments, and
rights, certain claims can be given additional power. Moreover, it points
to the limits of such mobilisations. A hearing aid will not help us do
much more than hear better. And so, too, specic sets of rights and legal
instruments have their limits.
(Studying) resistance to mining in Ecuador
Unlike oil exploitation, which has been carried out since the 1960s,
industrial mining is a fairly new phenomenon in Ecuador. Although
there were earlier attempts by governments in the 1990s and early
2000s to develop industrial mining as part of the neoliberal reforms
propelled by the World Bank, it is only in the last ten years that the
goal of turning Ecuador into a país megaminero (mega-mining country)
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has been aggressively pursued (see Sacher 2017). Mining was declared
a stra tegic economic sector by the Correa administration in 2009 and
is being promoted by the government as the solution to the country’s
nancial problems and the problems associated with oil extraction,
namely falling prices and a dependency on oil revenues (see Báez and
Sacher 2014: 234; Riofrancos 2017: 281; van Teijlingen et al. 2017: 336).
Consequently, in numerous mining concessions across the country, ex-
ploration work is currently being carried out, and, in 2019 and 2020, the
rst two mines – the Cóndor Mirador and the Fruta del Norte mines in
Zamora Chinchipe – began to operate.
In my eldwork, carried out between July 2018 and June 2019, I
worked mainly with actors involved in resistance to mining in the
Íntag Valley in the northern province of Imbabura. Vast areas in this
valley have been granted as mining concessions to the Ecuadorian state
mining company Empresa Nacional Minera (ENAMI EP), the Chilean
company Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile (CODELCO), the
Canadian company Cornerstone Capital Resources, and the Anglo-
American multinational BHP. The most advanced mining project is
the Llurimagua copper mine, which is already well into its advanced
exploration phase. Its concessions intersect with the rural mestizo
villages (comunindades) of Junín and Chalguayacu Alto, where I have
been conducting eldwork amongst local residents active in the resist-
ance movement. Since my research focus lies mainly on legal resistance
to mining, I have primarily engaged with the actors involved in coordi-
nating and paying for various legal actions, planning and writing them,
going to court and in the social mobilisation surrounding the court
proceedings. My main interaction partners are thus private lawyers
hired by the Íntag-based environmental organisation DECOIN (Defensa
y Conservación Ecológica de Íntag), members of DECOIN and three
other key organisations in the resistance to mining – OMASNE (Ob-
servatorio Minero Ambiental y Social del Norte del Ecuador), CEDHU
(Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos), and CEDENMA (Coor-
dinadora Ecuatoriana de Organizaciones para la Defensa de la Natura-
leza y el Medio Ambiente) – and representatives of the Defensoría del
Pueblo (Ombudsman oce) both in Quito and the regional division
in Ibarra. CEDHU, a human rights organisation, and CEDENMA, an
umbrella environmental organisation, are both based in Quito. Their
representatives, or at least those I have been working with, are fairly
young and university educated. The same is also true for the grassroots
organisation OMASNE, which is based in the province of Imbabura.
OMASNE activists engage in gathering information about mining in
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
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the region, making it accessible, and distributing it amongst local pop-
ulations. This is also an important part of the work DECOIN does on a
more local level in the Íntag Valley. This environmental defence organ-
isation, whose members are all local residents, has been active in the
resistance against mining since its founding in 1995. Whenever I would
visit their little oce in Apuela on a Sunday – the only day it is open,
since DECOIN’s members all have other jobs or their own farms to tend
to – DECOIN’s members would be handing out pamphlets and other
information material to visitors, often locals seeking advice or support,
but occasionally also volunteers, journalists, and tourists from other
countries. Most of these organisations consist of a handful of highly
engaged individuals who know each other well and have close contacts
with other national and international organisations and anti-mining
activists. In the following, when quoting my interaction partners, I will
not state which organisations they belong to for reasons of anonymity. I
only distinguish between ‘lawyers’, regardless of whether they are part
of one of the NGOs or not, and ‘activists’, which I use to refer to all the
other non-lawyer actors I have been working with.
The writ of protection that I draw on as the main example in this
article is the Los Cedros case. It concerns the mining concessions Río
Magdalena I and Río Magdalena II, which intersect with the protected
forest and wildlife reserve Los Cedros in the Íntag region. The lawsuit
was led with the cantonal court in Cotacachi in 2018 by the municipal
government itself upon the initiative of local activists, and most of my
interaction partners became involved in it as amici curiae.4 While the
cantonal court in Cotacachi ruled against the plaintis in 2018, the case
was successfully appealed before the provincial court of Imbabura. In
May 2020, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court selected the Los Cedros
case for review because of the potentially grave threats posed to bio-
diversity and in order to develop further constitutional jurisprudence
on the rights of nature.5 The hearing took place on 19 October 2020 via
Zoom and was streamed on Facebook, allowing me to follow it from a
distance. As of this writing, the court’s decision is still pending. Apart
from this last online hearing, the material I draw on in my analysis
consists of observations of the court hearings at the provincial court in
Ibarra in 2019, observations of preparatory meetings between several of
my interaction partners guring as amici curiae, and the written case le
that I was allowed to photocopy.
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Shaping politics in court
In pursuit of political change – with the aim of challenging the govern-
ment’s economic policy and its extractive model – the activists I have
been working with make use of various political strategies. Examples
include organising marches and public workshops, sharing information
through social and mainstream media, political lobbying, launching
public referenda (so-called consultas populares), and ling constitutional
lawsuits. Legal actions thus constitute only ‘one of several weapons’ in
the resistance arsenal available to such movements (Brinks et al. 2015:
296; see also Kirsch 2014). Yet they appear to be gaining in importance.
This accords with a trend in Latin America that Rachel Sieder, Line
Schjolden, and Alan Angell (2005) refer to as the ‘judicialization of poli-
tics’. These authors show how, as a result of the constitutional reforms
that have taken place in nearly all Latin American countries since the
mid-1980s, ‘courts and judges . . . [have] come to make or increasingly
dominate the making of public policies that had previously been made
by other government agencies, especially legislatives and executives’
(2005: 3). This in turn makes resorting to the courts to advance one’s po-
litical interests a more promising avenue for social movements. Further-
more, other scholars have also described an increased tendency in other
parts of the world as well to resort to the courts and the language of law
as a means of shaping public policy and achieving political change (see
Brinks et al. 2015; Eckert et al. 2012; Kirsch 2012). In Ecuador, the writ
of protection has become an important legal means for doing this.6 In
the opinion of activists I spoke to, writs of protection are now often a
more promising way of gaining a political voice and challenging gov-
ernment policy than, for instance, lobbying members of parliament. Yet,
taken alone, writs of protection would also not have the political eect
that activist are seeking, I was often told. To exert the desired political
pressure, public attention also had to be drawn to cases via social and
conventional media and through social mobilisation across national
and international networks.
In writs of protection that oppose mining projects, the overarching
aim is always the same: to get the courts to declare industrial mining
per se as unconstitutional and, by setting such a legal precedent, to
force the government to change its economic policy. In more practical
terms, and as a kind of secondary objective, claimants aim to get the
courts to revoke mining concessions that have already been granted by
ARCOM and the environmental licences issued by the Ministry of En-
vironment by challenging the constitutionality of those specic actions.
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
86
In doing so, they attempt to prevent ongoing exploration endeavours
from developing into functioning mines.
Recent cases dealt with by the Constitutional Court have made very
clear just how high the political stakes are: the Los Cedros case and
a case in which it was debated whether it was legal for local govern-
ments to hold public referenda (consultas populares) asking local people
whether they agreed to mining on their territory or not. In both cases,
not only did numerous environmental and human rights organisations
become involved as amici curiae, but so did many multinational mining
companies that are currently operating in Ecuador. Furthermore, in
connection with the latter case, Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno – in
indirect reference to the Chevron-Texaco case and several other cases
that Ecuador has recently lost against multinational corporations before
international arbitration courts – made a ‘polite request’, as he called it,
to the constitutional judges: ‘if authorising any mechanism that would
ultimately lead to a breach of contract and would oblige . . . [Ecuador] to
pay an award [,] . . . to also invite the people to decide where the money
to pay those awards should come from’ (García 2019, my translation).
While Ecuador withdrew from the International Centre for Settlement
of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Convention in 2009, the new govern-
ment under Lenín Moreno in 2018 introduced the Ley de Fomento Produc-
tivo (Law for the promotion of economic development) in an attempt to
attract more foreign investment. The law ‘provides that disputes arising
out of investment agreements are to be resolved through arbitration
[under UNCITRAL or any other relevant institutional rules], and arbi-
tral awards arising therefrom are immediately enforceable in Ecuador,
without the need for any further recognition by the courts’ (Sanderson
and Partido 2018).
In contrast to the Chevron-Texaco case, where the plaintis at rst
purposefully appeared before courts abroad in order to be heard and
because they did not believe they would have the chance of a fair trial
in Ecuador (see Sawyer 2001), the anti-mining activists’ legal actions
today largely concentrate on the national arena in an attempt to change
government politics. Several factors contribute to this. On the one hand,
constitutional reforms have led to a change in legal culture and have
created new possibilities for taking legal action (see Huneeus et al. 2010;
Sieder et al. 2005). On the other hand, the allocation of responsibility to
the state through constitutional lawsuits is linked to how prevention is
conceptualised and has to do with it formally being states alone that
have the capacity to determine their economic policy and to decide
whether and which multinational corporations may operate in their ter-
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ritories. This is the case even if, in practice, these states (particularly in
the Global South) are under a lot of pressure from international nan-
cial institutions – and the countries that provide the bulk of the funding
to these institutions – to allow foreign investment and to adopt national
legislation and economic policies accordingly (see Eckert forthcoming;
Gomez and Sawyer 2012; Kaleck and Saage-Maaß 2008: 9, 12). Hence,
in formal terms, preventive action in the sense of disallowing mining
activities can only be presented against host states, either by submitting
to national courts through the ling of constitutional lawsuits or to
international human rights courts such as the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights, once national legal systems have been exhausted
(see Kaleck and Saage-Maaß 2008: 28). ‘[O]n a transnational level, it is
not possible to take preventive juridical action’, as Miriam Saage-Maaß
argues, since if the companies’ home state courts, for example, ‘by court
order were to prohibit corporations from operating abroad, that would
violate the host state’s sovereignty’ (2014, my translation). This does
not mean that prevention cannot be conceived of – and legally pre-
scribed – dierently. It could also be – and in many ways is – attributed
to actors other than the host states of multinational corporations: the
corporations themselves, their subsidiaries, their home states, and also
consumers. The due diligence principle, as invoked by the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights, the French loi de vigilance,
and the Responsible Business Initiative in Switzerland does precisely
that. It attributes a preventive responsibility to multinational corpora-
tions and thus indirectly, also to their subsidiaries, who are required
to report to their parent companies as well as – potentially – to ‘their’
home states, who must in turn impose this regulation on the compa-
nies or, alternatively incorporate the principle of due diligence into na-
tional legislation. Furthermore, multinational corporations operating
in Ecuador are obliged to follow constitutional law, which means that
the duty to protect the environment also applies to them. If they breach
the rights of nature, they can be held responsible retrospectively. Yet,
this is not the kind of prevention that mining opponents are seeking,
since it does not in itself prevent mining operations from taking place.
Since mining activities inevitably cause environmental damage, this is
regarded as the only eective form of prevention and protection from
future harm.
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Imagining the future: Negotiating the state’s duty
to protect
When driving through the Íntag Valley, it is not unusual to come across
handwritten or printed signs stating things such as ‘BHP get out of
Íntag’, ‘No entry for miners’, or ‘Íntag free of mining’. Such political
claims are translated into legal arguments in dierent ways in the
writs of protection. One common strategy has been to argue with the
right to free, prior, and informed consent in the case of indigenous
and Afro communities, which are entitled to collective rights, or with
prior consultation in the form of the so-called consulta ambiental as de-
termined by Article 398 of the Ecuadorian constitution in the case of
mestizo communities. Another important argument that is regarded
as a useful means for the long-term prevention of mining is the pre-
cautionary principle, which, according to Stuart Kirsch, is exemplary
of the politics of time since it only allows actions to take place if it has
been positively demonstrated that they are safe (2014: 260). The hope
for eective change linked to this legal argumentation is illustrated by
this statement made by a lawyer: ‘When you argue with the violation of
the right to prior consultation, that is something the Ministry of Envi-
ronment can then carry out and then the mining project will continue.
But if you can get the courts to apply the precautionary principle, that
is something that will never go away’.7
In the Los Cedros case, the claimants argued with this precaution-
ary principle by drawing on a body of international law that included
the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Convention
on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, and the Stockholm Declaration, as well as on Articles
73 and 396 of the Ecuadorian constitution. Article 73, which is part of
the constitution’s chapter on the rights of nature, states that ‘[t]he state
shall apply preventive and restrictive measures on activities that might
lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems and
the permanent alteration of natural cycles’ (Art. 73 EC).8 Article 396,
which is part of the chapter on ‘Biodiversity and Natural Resources’
in the section of the constitution on ‘The Good Way of Living System’
( Régimen del Buen Vivir),9 species that ‘[t]he state shall adopt timely
policies and measures to avoid adverse environmental impacts where
there is certainty about the damage. In the case of doubt about the envi-
ronmental impact stemming from a deed or omission, although there is
no scientic evidence of the damage, the State shall adopt eective and
timely measures of protection’ (Art. 396 EC).10 Both these constitutional
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articles thus clearly attribute a preventive and protective responsibility
to the state.
Natural scientists partaking in the court proceedings as amici curiae
have come to play a crucial role in corroborating this legal argumenta-
tion. In the hearing of the amici curiae by the Constitutional Court, for
example, which lasted for nearly seven hours, numerous biologists and
other natural scientists from universities and research institutions in
Ecuador, Latin America, the United States, and Europe gave presenta-
tions on species they had been researching in the Los Cedros reserve,
such as monkeys, mushrooms, bats, or orchids – many of them endemic
to the region and in danger of extinction – and on what would be likely
to happen to them if mining were allowed to proceed. In doing so,
they repeatedly stressed both the inevitability and the irreversibility of
damage caused by mining. The defendants countered these arguments,
albeit with less scientic support by arguing that the state, through the
Ministry of the Environment, was complying with its preventive duty
by carrying out the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessments.
Furthermore, they claimed that with modern technology it was pos-
sible to avoid causing environmental damage or at least to fully restore
the ecosystem after conclusion of mining activities. This is a common
strategy used by mining corporations to try and neutralise criticism
(Kirsch 2014: 3). Finally, the defendants argued that at this stage of the
mining project, it was not pertinent to think so far into the future, since
it was highly uncertain whether the project would ever reach the stage
of resource exploitation. The task thus falling to the judges, as the con-
stitutional judge acting as rapporteur himself said during the hearing,
is to ‘undertake a rigorous examination of the scientic soundness of
what is presented to them’ and to assess the various future scenarios.11
For the activists preparing the case, it meant building their claims on
scientic evidence in order to convince the judge, making it necessary
for them to invoke the precautionary principle and order the govern-
ment to revoke the mining concessions.
That scientific experts come to play an important role in court
proceedings is, of course, not unusual and happens in other types
of court proceedings, too (see, for instance, Caudill and LaRue 2006;
Holden 2011; Phillips 2017; Roberts 2014). In the Chevron-Texaco case,
for example, Suzana Sawyer (2015) writes that ‘the bulk of the seven-
year trial consisted of five years of on-site judicial inspections of
former Texaco oil-production sites during which the judge, opposing
legal teams, associated scientic crews, local residents, and the press
trekked through scrub forest to examine alleged contamination and its
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90
purported eects on human health’. The temporal imaginaries expected
from judges and scientic experts, however, are reversed: in the writs of
protection against mining that argue on the basis of the rights of nature
and the precautionary principle, the judges are not required to look into
the past to assess damage that has already occurred and what might
have caused it in order to rule retrospectively, but must rather assess
the possibility and probability of future harm.
Imaginaries of the state: Negotiating the duty of care
Writing about the Andes, Christopher Krupa and David Nugent claim
that ‘it is certainly striking that so many people attribute to the states of
the Andes the ability to right historical wrongs, realize long-cherished
hopes and dreams, protect against dangerous and destructive foes, and
anticipate the unforeseen problems of an uncertain future’ (2015: 2).
This hope that the state, governments, and presidents can bring about
political change and provide for the well-being of the people, despite
the fact that the latter have been ‘let down by . . . [the former] time after
time after time’ (2015: 3) is an observation I share with the authors. The
underlying idea (or ideal) of the state seems to be that of a strong, co-
herent, integrated, and autonomous entity (see Migdal 2001: 16; Nuijten
2003: 15). Hence, despite a common perception being that governments
seldom full their promises and not much can be expected from them,
they nevertheless remain a focus for people’s hopes of change and mag-
nets for political action. I therefore interpret the writs of protection as
attempts to try to shape governments to t specic ideas of what the
state is or should be. One reason for this seems to be that the image of
the coherent state that provides for and ensures its inhabitants’ – and
nature’s – well-being is inherent in the 2008 constitution and was ex-
plicitly propagated during Rafael Correa’s presidency from 2007 to 2017.
According to Flora Lu, Gabriela Valdivia, and Néstor L. Sivla, Correa’s
political programme, the revolución cuidadana, pivoted
around three principal ideas for state-sponsored well-being: (1) the cen-
trality of buen vivir as the driver of modernization which includes ideas
of national sovereignty, US anti-imperialism, and the improvement of
public services; (2) the promotion of economic and social policies that
foster social equity (e.g., making social services and infrastructure more
accessible and redistributing wealth) without altering the model of capi-
talist accumulation; and (3) investment in development in order to pro-
mote citizens’ belief in the coherence of the state, in its capability to act in
their best interest, and in its willingness to do so. (2017: 13)
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Ever since it was introduced into the Ecuadorian constitution in 2008,
into whose fabric it is now thoroughly woven, appearing in the pre-
amble as well as in ninety-nine of its articles (see Altmann 2014: 89), two
opposing interpretations of buen vivir have dominated public discourse.
Jorge Guardiola and Fernando García-Quero (2014) call these the ‘con-
servationist view’ and the ‘extractivist view’. The conservationist idea,
according to the authors, can be found mostly amongst environmen-
tal, human rights and indigenous organisations, anti-extractivism
activists and academics and ‘promotes the respect of nature and the
search of alternative strategies to maintain Buen Vivir’ (2014: 101). In
this view, buen vivir is conceptualised as ‘value-based spiritual, ecologi-
cal, collective- social, and normative individual principles that should
ensure a sustainable, biocentric, and harmonious way of life beyond
material accumulation, extraction of natural resources, and exploita-
tion of humans or nature’ (Waldmüller 2018: 121). It is understood not
merely as an alternative form of development but rather as an alterna-
tive to (capitalist) development (see Altmann 2014: 89; Báez and Sacher
2014: 244; Sieder and Barrera Vivero 2017: 14). The extractivist view, in
turn, regards extractive projects as a necessity for achieving buen vivir
through the generation of economic growth and the elimination of pov-
erty (Guardiola and García-Quero 2014: 102). These opposing views on
buen vivir were also at the core of the legal dispute in the Los Cedros
case. While the defendants put the state’s responsibility to provide for
its citi zens in a material sense above all other responsibilities, the claim-
ants conceptualised the state’s moral responsibilities and duty of care
in a more extensive way. The state is seen to have moral responsibilities
not only towards its citizens – those living now as well as future genera-
tions – but also towards the environment and ‘the planet’ as a whole. In
contrast to the view of the proponents of mining, these responsibilities,
in the activists’ understanding, cannot be hierarchised: the state must
assume them all to full its role.
For mining proponents, the state has a primary moral obligation to
generate income and provide for its citizens in a material sense. This
duty stands above the state’s other duties and is often portrayed as a
precondition for the state’s ability to full those duties: to provide for
people in a non-material way, for example, and to protect the environ-
ment. This is illustrated by the following statement made by former
president Rafael Correa on television: ‘We know there are fundamental,
aesthetic and moral principles for respecting nature [naturaleza] . . . who
could favour open-pit mining by itself? But, if that mining happens
to represent a value of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would be
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
92
immoral not to exploit it, losing a great opportunity for the country’
(Correa cited in Valladares and Boelens 2019: 71). Extractive projects are
considered necessary for achieving buen vivir through the generation of
economic growth and the elimination of poverty and unemployment.
Furthermore, as Carolina Valladares and Rutgerd Boelens have shown,
the government has used the rights of nature to defend its new mining
policy ‘which supposedly . . . [brings] in revenues needed for nature
conservation’ (2017: 1029). The duty to generate income thus comes
rst. The defendants in the Los Cedros proceedings pursued this line,
stressing the state’s duty to provide jobs and generate income, invoking
the local population’s right to work and to lead a dignied life. Local
inhabitants speaking out on behalf of the mining project argued that
their communities had so far been abandoned by the state authorities
and that was why they needed the mining companies; not only because
of the job opportunities they provided, but also for the infrastructure
they built and the productive and educational programmes they set
up as part of their CSR activities. Yet, as research has shown, ‘mining
companies rarely fulll such expectations and often fail to keep the
promises they . . . make’ (Kirsch 2014: 7).
The claimants challenged this argument from economic prosperity,
citing among other things the country’s experience with oil exploitation.
During the Constitutional Court hearing, one scientist giving a short
presentation observed the following: ‘I ask myself: Since the [19]70s,
with the oil companies we have been promised development. Have we
left the “third world”? Not that I am aware of.’ His argument continued:
Our planet is but a few centimetres away from reaching a point of no
return in a climate and environmental crisis that will put our whole exist-
ence at risk. It is that simple. . . . If strong measures aren’t taken by states
to try and reverse environmental degradation, our children will bear
witness to a true apocalypse. Ecosystem services in Ecuador yield 15,000
dollars per hectare a year, that is 39 billion dollars a year. We accept this
as free. But the day we lose these ecosystem services, how are we going
to pay for them? How many millions of dollars does it cost countries that
have lost natural pollination and now have to do it manually, like the
US or Turkey, for example? . . . We were born in a megadiverse country,
both culturally and naturally, and it is our moral duty – and by us, I
mean we, the state – to protect it from everything that could cause harm,
including mining.12
His statement is exemplary of the main arguments presented by the
activists. On the one hand, in line with a classic environmentalist
argument, the claimants stressed the state’s responsibility towards
future generations. On the other hand, they invoked the state’s moral
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duty towards ‘the planet’ or a kind of global community and ecologi-
cal order. This was echoed by the statement one amicus made at the
provincial court hearing: ‘The whole planet is suering from climate
change caused by extractive industries. Ecuador could develop a lot of
productive alternatives [to mining], and those forests are an important
source for scientic investigation, ecotourism and sustainable agricul-
ture. Yet the state does not help to realise these activities, but rather sup-
ports mining’.13 Furthermore, like the scientist cited above, several amici
speaking on behalf of the plaintis pointed to the Los Cedros forest’s
‘ecological value’ stemming from its capacity for natural pollination, for
example, and also to absorb carbon dioxide.
Through the ‘strapping on’ of dierent constitutional rights and
discourses, both the proponents and opponents of mining thus at-
tempted to turn what they perceived to be the state’s moral duties into
legal ones.
Limits of state responsibility
In this article, I have explored the combination of several factors
making the state an obvious and potentially promising addressee of
legal claims: its moral duty of care, which extends beyond humans and
current generations, its accessibility through the introduction of new
constitutional rights and mechanisms, and the shift towards a politics
of time and prevention. In accordance with the tendency observed by
many socio-legal scholars, the writs of protection against mining are
political struggles carried out through the mobilisation of law. Activists
are recurring to the law in an attempt to change public policy. This
kind of legal mobilisation that takes the form of ling constitutional
lawsuits is one of several political strategies. However, particularly
in contexts where opportunities for political participation are other-
wise limited, such strategies have come to play an important role in
resistance movements. Through the ‘strapping on’ of certain rights and
discourses, activists attempt to inuence processes of policy-making.
Yet, these ‘prostheses’ – in the form of existing rights and legal mecha-
nisms – have their limits. Policies are shaped through the interactions
of a range of actors on a global level, and certain actors, particularly
international nancial institutions and the countries that provide the
bulk of funding for these institutions, exert more power and inuence
than others in shaping these policies. However, the law has limited use
as a tool to contest such complex entanglements across transnational
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
94
space, as it is restrained by the political form of the nation state. States,
at least in formal terms, remain sovereign entities that determine their
own policies. Hence, they become (or remain) the obvious addressee of
legal claims. By addressing and suing states, global entanglements are
necessarily fragmented, and extractivism is rendered a national prob-
lem. The logic of global capitalism is thus, at best, partially disrupted.
Drawing on Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001),
Monique Nuijten writes that ‘[i]t could be argued that while the state
apparatus is being dismantled the notion of the state is becoming cen-
tral in fantasies of rule, governance and order’ (2003: 1). The writs of
protection led against extractive projects seem to be an expression
of this. They (implicitly) call for more state sovereignty, in the sense
that policies should be determined by the state’s own agencies and,
particularly, by the people living there. Yet, at the same time, the idea
of state sovereignty is challenged by activists, who argue against indi-
vidual states’ capacity to do what they want within and in their terri-
tories where this potentially has a global impact on the environment
and ecosystems and demand that the state submit to international
human rights and environmental law. Here there is a global respon-
sibility at stake, which falls to all individual actors, including states.
In terms of the legal attribution of preventive responsibility, however,
the problem persists that many powerful policy-shaping actors remain
‘beyond law’s conceptual grasp’ (Eckert and Knöpfel, this issue). In a
recent self-critical essay, César Rodríguez-Garavito (2019) claims that
the human rights movement has for a long time mainly been concerned
with ‘going beyond the barriers of space’ and that it must ‘recover’ time
in order to ‘have a future’. Yet, legal struggles against industrial mining
in Ecuador suggest that it is also time to think about how to make a
politics of time work across space. This could involve thinking about
mechanisms for the legal attribution of preventive responsibility that
would work transnationally.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Julia Eckert, Laura Knöpfel, Anne Lavanchy, and
the HIS Sociology of Law group for their careful readings of and helpful
comments on earlier versions of this article. Thank you also to the three
anonymous peer reviewers whose insightful and detailed recommen-
dations have helped me greatly in revising the article. I am very grateful
to Siân Aolter, Angela Lindt, David Loher, and Philipp Müller for the
95
The ResponsibiliTy To pRevenT FuTuRe haRm tv
thought-provoking discussions, to Kiri Santer for her last-minute help,
and to Graeme Currie for giving the article its nal language tweaks.
Finally, I would like to thank all my interaction partners in Ecuador for
their time, openness, trust and for patiently teaching me. This research
was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
uw
Laura Aolte r is a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Group on Sociol-
ogy of Law at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and associate
researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Bern. She is co-editor
of TSANTSA, journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association.
Email: laura.aolter@his-online.de
(ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7203-1840)
vt
Notes
1. ARCOM has recently become ARCERNNR (Agencia de Regulación y Con-
trol de Energía y Recursos Naturales no Renovables).
2. Writs of protection were led against the Cóndor Mirador mine in 2013, the
Río Blanco, Río Magdalena, and Cóndor Mirador mining projects in 2018, mining
on the territory of the A’i Cofán de Sinangoe also in 2018, mining in the canton of
Pangua in 2019, and against the Llurimagua mining project in 2020.
3. Activist, interview transcript, November 2018, my translation.
4. An amicus curiae is a ‘person or organisation who/which is not a party to the
proceedings . . . [but] set[s] out legal arguments and recommendations in a given
case’ mostly in the form of a written brief (ECCHR, ‘Amicus curiae brief’, https://
www.ecchr.eu/en/glossary/amicus-curiae-brief/ [accessed 3 November 2020]).
5. See Corte Constitucional del Ecuador, ‘Caso no. 1149-19-JP’, https://
therevelator.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Auto-caso-1149-19-JP.pdf (accessed
31 October 2020).
6. For a detailed discussion of the acción de protección, also in comparison with
similar forms of constitutional lawsuits in other Latin American countries such as
the recurso de amparo or the recurso de tutela and with its predecessor in Ecuadorian
constitutional law, the acción de amparo, see Ramiro Ávila Santamaría (2011), José
Luis Castro-Montero et al. (2016), Claudia Storini and Marco Navas Alvear (2013),
and Alex Valle (2012).
7. Lawyer, interview transcript, December 2018, my translation.
8. Political Database of the Americas (2011), ‘Republic of Ecuador: Constitution
of 2008’, https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html.
9. Translation provided by Georgetown University’s Political Database of the
Americas. Political Database of the Americas (2011), ‘Republic of Ecuador: Constitu-
tion of 2008’, https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html.
10. See endnote 8.
wu l au R a a FF olT eR
96
11. Judge, Constitutional Court hearing, October 2020, my translation. See
Corte Constitucional del Ecuador (2020), ‘Audiencia Pública Caso Nro. 1149-19-
JP’, 19 October, https://www.facebook.com/CorteConstitucionalDelEcuador/
videos/374961090354065, approximate time 1:45:15.
12. Amicus curiae, Constitutional Court hearing, October 2020, my translation.
See Corte Constitucional del Ecuador (2020), ‘Audiencia Pública Caso Nro. 1149-19-
JP’, 19 October, https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=645221926364006&ref=
watch_permalink, approximate time 1:14:00 (accessed 4 November 2020).
13. Transcript of the second provincial court hearing, February 2019, case le,
my translation.
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