Alonso Barros will speak on "Governing the Transition to Renewable Energies: Towards a new global regulatory framework for key resources, with insights from the Lithium Project in the Chilean Atacama"
Jan 25, 12-2 PM
Claude Bissell Building (north wing of Robarts) BL205
At a time of rapid climate change, protracted socio-environmental crises and escalating commercial disputes, the sustainable and equitable management of essential resources is critical to the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet's transition towards a post-carbon world.
With the arguable exception of the European Union, the international institutions born during the 20th Century have often failed to prevent energy - based political and commercial conflicts. The dependency of the global economy on coal, oil and gas has undermined world peace, socio-environmental justice and economic stability worldwide. The current international framework (States, UN agencies like the WTO, NGOs and mega-events like Rio+20) has been consistently unable to steer energy transition out of its current deadlock.
Our research explores the different legal conflicts around sustainable development initiatives, social rights, mining rights and concessions, water rights and management practices, the free prior informed consent of Indigenous Peoples, as related to the extraction of lithium along with the latter's potential for energy transmission and accumulation: the Atacama Desert salt flats are an exceptional social laboratory at hand for ethnographic inquiry into related law and society issues across different scales.
Based on the study of interactions between Chinese and US corporations, the governments of Latin America, and the communities of the Atacama Desert, this talk explores the social life of Lithium along with the normative deficits and alternatives for a responsible exploitation of renewable energy sources and materials.
We propose alternative forms of governance regarding rare earth elements and strategic metals, including novel Impact Based Agreements (IBAs) between mining companies and local communities and their potential impact towards improving trade standards and regulations with respect to resources that are crucial to the sustainable future of humanity.
About Alonso Barros
Alonso Barros is a lawyer and anthropologist, with extensive experience in advocacy and mediation in resource projects affecting indigenous people in Latin America. He is based in Chile at the Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, Santiago. His work focuses on law in society in Latin America, where he has carried out extended fieldwork periods amongst the Mixe of Oaxaca (Mexico) and with Atacameño, Aymara and Quechua communities and peoples across the Argentinean, Bolivian and Chilean highlands. While undertaking research, he provided advice to these communities in their negotiations with public and private agencies in different legal and contractual settings.
Leaning on longue durée historical and legal data, this challenging experience translated into a historical ethnography of desert and highland peoples, mining cycles and property regimes (bonanzas and busts), that assesses the conflicting historicities involved (time and memory politics). He is interested in the cyclical (de- and re) territorialization of 'vertical' regimes of truth and domains of objects as expressed in property relations and commodity fetishism.
Between 2006 and 2009, he was the principal investigator of a project on "Discrimination, identity and inequality in periods of crisis: juridical and political ethnohistory of San Pedro de Atacama and Chiu-Chiu (XIX ? XXI C.)". He recently mediated an agreement between an indigenous community and a Lithium extraction company operating in the Atacama desert. One of its features is that the community audits the company's environmental license. It may become a model for future IBAs (Impact Benefit Agreements) in Chile and beyond.
For publications see http://unab.academia.edu/AlonsoBarros
For CV see http://unab.academia.edu/AlonsoBarros/CurriculumVitae)
twitter @alonsobarros
