Min(d)ing ethics: Dispersed value conflicts and contested time frames in the prospection for new mines

Sweden is the European country with largest mining sector. With the current technology-based transition strategy that most modern states are pursuing (or at least declare such ambition), the prospecting for new mines has increased. The environmental risks and consequences of technological development have previously mostly been externalized to less developed countries. However, the extensive need for minerals that electrification demand, means that Europe needs to secure access to essential minerals. Increasingly, moral arguments are raised for expanded extraction within Europe. Furthermore, the extractive damage that mining involves is motivated as a means of saving the climate. As a consequence, the “mineral reserve” in Sweden is gaining renewed attention. The mining permit process encompasses fundamental trade-offs between values and goals (environmental, social, and economic ones, relating to global security and local livelihoods) and conflicting understandings of sustainability. Several of the interviewees refer to the mine permit process as involving a lot of emotions. Accompanying the mining permit process is a struggle over what is sacrificable. Fundamental contestation is being squeezed into and fought within these long and complex bureaucratic processes. However, the fundamental issues and questions that mines raise are not always (a formal) part of the decision-making process. Thus, questions relating to how societies need to transform, towards what kind of sustainable future, are only indirectly part of the process. In this paper, we explore what value conflicts that are embedded in this process and what moral order shapes it. How does the process itself, through its institutional settings, condition or constrain the managing of value conflicts and trade-offs? What aspects are managed, and which are not? What futures are enabled and what perspectives are ignored? The material analyzed consists of governmental bills, public investigations, interviews with key actors (public servants), and legal cases from the Swedish Land and Environmental courts. The Land and Environmental court is the last step of the permit process. Once an environmental permit is granted the establishment of a new mine may start. The analytical framework builds upon Boltanski and Thévenot and their theorization on justifications. We map the different forms of justifications that are prevalent in the process and seek to analyze what role and influence different forms of justifications have. Different orders of worth lead to different judgments which ground their claims on different perspectives, facts, and experiences. The mining permit process is well-structured, firmly governed by law, and has a technical character. Nevertheless, it is embedded in a moral order. Incommensurable valuations of nature and the justifications reveal deep-seated conflicts between orders of worth, which are not resolved throughout these long bureaucratic processes. We discuss why this is the case. One of the critical components (discrepancy between different judgments and their justifications) is the perception of time. The dominating time frame is fundamental for the rationale of the process. The mine permit process also involves a struggle between indigenous people’s way of life and the global capitalistic society, as well as contestation regarding what sustainability is as well as what development means.