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Accepted Paper:
Mistrust as a way of preparation for an unsustainable future
Imola Püsök
(University of Göttingen)
In my paper I will examine how attitudes of mistrust have become a socio-cultural response in preparing for a(n un)sustainable future in a present defined by uncertainty in the permanentisation of a mining dispute.
Paper long abstract:
Roșia Montană is a settlement in a mono-industrial mining region of Romania. After the decline of the mining industry in Romania during the 1990s, a Canadian company proposed a large-scale open-pit mining project, which was met with opposition both by locals and by civil society. The events of the late 1990s, thus, marked the start of a mining dispute, which would lock the community in a state of ongoing liminality. With the inclusion of the settlement among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in July 2021, a new perspective for the future came to dominate the social and economic imagination of the still remaining local population: that of tourism and the somewhat obscure allusions to “sustainable development”. After quarter of a century of dispute during which the community has disintegrated due to relocations, the intensification of interpersonal conflicts and the everyday hardships of an increasingly difficult economic environment, the new decision –and the new direction– was met with the same attitudes of mistrust that have become the local strategy for navigating uncertain futures over the past decades. For many local people, uncertain is synonymous with unsustainable. Alternatives of tourism seem delusional to many, especially in the face of the hard materiality of the existing gold deposit, and in the light of a long history of mining activities and memories of stable mining jobs during the socialist period. Local attitudes of mistrust have, therefore, become a way of preparing for unsustainable futures, i.e. futures in which they see no way of participating.