Goldmining, dispossessing the commons and Multi-scalar responses: The case of Cerro de San Pedro, Mexico 1

This chapter elaborates how conflict arose over common land and water resources between the inhabitants of Cerro de San Pedro and MSX, causing severe environmental impacts and affecting local communities at large. It explains how the communities redefine and reshape their level of engagement in the management of the commons, and how they create multi-actor and multi-scalar opposition networks strategized to defend the commons by interlinking the local with the national and global. Through multi-actor networks that creatively engage in multi-scalar action, mining-affected population groups together with a variety of mutually complementary advocacy and policy actors have worked hard to balance the two sides' negotiating power and force MSX to clean up the mining residue and facilitate alternative local livelihood opportunities. In this way, environmental justice struggles frame, deploy and entwine diverse scales and engage a plurality of complementary actors.