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Paper short abstract:

To portray deep sea mining as more sustainable than onshore, corporations emphasize the absence of the mining-affected community. Here I scrutinizes the "absent presence" of communities, showing how DSM's construction of social license to operate perpetuates the logic of social dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

With the slogan “A Battery in a Rock,” deep-sea mining (DSM) poised to revolutionize mineral extraction crucial for transitioning to a low-carbon economy. Represented as an environmentally and socially responsible alternative to conventional onshore mining, DSM exploits the perceived “placelessness” and remoteness of the deep ocean to sidestep social obligations (Childs, 2019). The efforts to depict DSM as more sustainable than onshore mining often emphasize the physical absence of the so-called “mining-affected community”. It is imperative to critically examine and scrutinize this loss of local community presence in terms of their intimate connection to mined territories, resistance, and the subsequent vigilant monitoring of resource extraction operations. In this “discombobulated actor-network” sector (Filer et al., 2021), local communities become missing stakeholders (with states assuming more power), losing the right to claim royalties or other forms of land ownership. Moreover, communities, such as those in island states of Oceania, will be the first impacted by DSM operations in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. In this paper, I aim to problematize the “absent presence” of mining-affected communities (Bainton, Skrzypek, 2021) to reflect on how the construction of the “social license to operate” and “zero impact” in DSM perpetuates the logic of social dispossession. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in New Caledonia concerning a land-based mining project and on the analysis of the current “rush for Oceania”, this paper show the vital importance of the community as stakeholder to challenge and resist the colonial and extractivist logics.