Environmental judicialization and the crossover games of scales: The case of the spill of cyanide water at Veladero mine in San Juan, Argentina.

CHRISTEL, LUCAS G.

Lisboa

Conferencia; 2022 Global Meeting (Lisbon) - Law and Society Association; 2022

LAW and Society Association (LSA)

Disputes around the multiple scales of action and decision are one of the maincharacteristics of the environmental question. This multiscalarity comes into play indifferent aspects, such as the distribution of institutional responsibility and faculties, thestrategies of the actors, or the distribution of benefits or damages derived fromenvironmental exploitation. Particularly in federal systems, scale dynamics becomemore complex because the sub-national level usually gets some prerogatives over theenvironmental field.This work analyzes the game of scales involved in the strategies of judicialization of aspecific episode of environmental conflict in a federal context: The spills of cyanidewater at the Veladero mine in the province of San Juan, Argentina, in 2015, 2016 and2017. I argued that the judicialization strategies produced by environmental incidents ina federal system combine "bottom-up", "top-down" and "freezing" movements" andinvolve an non-linear, uncertain, and eminently unequal games of scales.