Political ecology in/of Sudan - Gold mining. Appendix 2C Source essay - Harm production

This is an essay on the scientific arguments surrounding pollution from mining in Sudan. The specific focus is on the role of causality, addressing one of the central problems of environmental law and politics, namely the identification of a discrete polluter to whom the ‘polluter pays‘ principle could be applied and who is targeted when sources of pollution are to be removed. 

The analysis of press material in 2B has shown that environmental pollution was treated contentionally as the result rather of lack of governmental control or rather of its application, the former applying as presumption a benevolent, the latter a predatory state at work in Sudan. As a question of governance, these debates looked at the general causes of pollution, its enabling environment, so to speak.

This essay rather looks at attempts to identify specific causes, which have to deal with both uncertainties: the general negative developments in environmental and individual health, for instance long-term exposure to contaminated water, and the specific cause in that time and place, for instance a specific mining site. I approach this here not as a legal problem – the subsequent accountability and its consequences – nor do I trace the political negotiation of demands subsequent to the identification of ‘culprits‘. I speak only about the principles according to which the few published scientific assessments of mining-related pollution identified its causation, scientific meaning here building on the epistemological conventions of physics, chemistry and biology.

The argumentative structure retraced in this essay is counter to the causal chain to be established: from the identification of a problem (B), in most cases perceptible deterioration of health, over a suspected cause (A) to the attempt of establishing a chain of causation between A and B. My specific phasing (problematization, identification, argumentation) is inspired by Callon’s model of translation (Callon 1986), where ‘interessement‘ turns into the specific targetting of a cause by ‘enrolment‘ into a claimed causal chain, whereupon ‘mobilization‘ is leading to societal engagement that, in this case, also often stands at the beginning of the enquiry, either as part of a communal demand for investigation or a company-driven process of environmental impact assessment as part of the licencing procedures.

I return to one of the core areas established in 2A: the north-eastern desert, especially mining areas connected through hydrogeological structures to the Nile. Core of the section on the Northern State is the body of work by Muḥammad Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd Al-Raḥman, an environmental scientist from the region who conducted a baseline study on behalf of the International Committee for Rescue of the Nubians and for Resistance to Dams, which was published as book in 2018 (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 2018), followed by a more focussed study on the village Sawarda commissioned by its population and finalized in February 2019 (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 2019). I relate his work both to other studies conducted in the wider region, and to our own collaboration in adding basic relief data and probable water flows during the flooding season to the argument.