Socio-environmental balance: How environmental conflicts can support the climate-security nexus

Abstract

This article relies on interdisciplinary debates in geography, political ecology and political sciences in order to explore how interpretative analyses of environmental conflict can support the climate and security nexus debate. It analyses mining and environmental conflicts in Burkina Faso and mobilises a framework highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between the environment and human societies. From this perspective, environmental alterations are considered a central and multicausal factor that can lead to a profound change in social and political structures and thus lead to conflicts. This article will first contextualise mining development, environmental conservation and armed conflict in Burkina Faso before reviewing the literature on climate change, environment and conflicts and describing the conceptual and methodological framework. Then, it addresses the case study of four large-scale mining sites in Burkina Faso. Finally, the last subsection explains how this case study can enrich the climate and security debate with an interpretative understanding.

1. Introduction

This article investigates the way the changes in socio-environmental systems can lead to local environmental conflicts, which in turn can evolve or be connected to larger-scale violence. It analyses mining and environmental conflicts in Burkina Faso and relies on interdisciplinary debates in geography, political ecology and political sciences in order to explore how interpretative analyses of environmental conflict can support the climate and security nexus debate.

This research is a part of a larger project studying the ongoing conflict in Burkina Faso, for which several published articles already underline the role of national semi-authoritarian structures (Hubert, 2023), industrial mining impacts (Hubert, 2022) and conservation (Hubert, 2021) in the expansion of violence. The purpose of the project was to develop a better understanding of environmental degradation and armed conflicts. Climate and conflict nexus is characterised by forward-looking analysis, as well as few available data and qualitative studies (Buhaug et al., 2014; Courtland et al., 2018; Hsiang & Burke, 2014; Ide, 2016; Ide et al., 2022) able to provide in-depth analyses of ‘political violence beyond civil war and […] possible indirect mechanisms and intervening factors’ (Buhaug et al., 2014, p. 396).

By focussing on the long-term impacts of climate change, research on the climate security nexus also fails to consider direct environmental degradations caused by global economic systems, primarily relying on resource extraction in the Global South (Chakrabarty, 2017; Fagan, 2017; Latour, 2016; Watts, 2015). Although these environmental degradations are not initiated by climate change, they remain a cause of destabilisation and a potential source of conflict, which can be increased by the pressure of climate change on previously weakened ecosystems.

This research has chosen to focus on environmental degradations derived from mining development close to the Malian civil war epicentre and to mobilise a framework highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between the environment and human societies. This approach addresses environmental alterations as a central and multicausal factor that can transform living conditions and lead to a profound change in social and political structures. In so doing, this approach stands at the junction of four of the six main currents of environmental security studies identified by Ide et al. (2022, p. 4), namely, human security, political ecology, climate change and conflicts and decolonising environmental security. This article will first contextualise mining development, environmental conservation and armed conflict in Burkina Faso before reviewing the literature on climate change, environment and conflicts and describing the conceptual and methodological framework. Then, it addresses the case study of four large-scale mining sites and two natural protected areas in Burkina Faso. Finally, in the last subsection, it explains how this case study can enrich the climate and security debate with an interpretative understanding.

1.1. Mining development, protected areas and violence in Burkina Faso

A growing body of research addresses the problem of disputes and social conflicts over mining developments in West Africa, specifically in Burkina Faso, which has experienced a significant mining boom since the 2000s (Chouli, 2015). According to Drechsel et al. (2018, pp. 7–8) or Engels (2020, p. 2), three-quarters of the Burkinabe territory are now open to mining exploration. International and regional institutions promote this mining development strategy, which supports the full liberalisation of the extractive sector to attract foreign investment and transform macroeconomic growth to leverage for development (African Bank of Development [AfBD] et al., 2013; World Bank, 2012). These changes on politics, norms, governance and regulations favouring foreign actors and mining activities (Campbell, 2010; Ferguson, 2005). Studies on Burkina Faso’s mining sector have consequently emphasised the social and economic impacts of the mining development, namely the victims of the expropriation processes (Chouli, 2015), the conflicts arising from the opposition between small-scale and international mining companies (Capitant, 2016), the impact of pollution over health-related or agricultural socioeconomic activities (Bretzeler et al., 2017; Ouédraogo & Amyot, 2013; Porgo & Gokyay, 2017), the socioeconomic impact on local communities (Drechsel et al., 2018; Ouoba, 2018; Zabsonré et al., 2018) and the political opportunities that have risen from protests against the mining developments (Engels, 2018).

Partners and actors from international co-operations, in turn, insist on the need to meet sustainable development goals, increase population resilience and strengthen biodiversity and environmental conservation (Beck, 2010; Duffy, 2006; European Union, 2008; Obura & Treyer, 2022; Warren et al., 2006). In Burkina Faso, protected areas represent about 16% of the territory ¹ ; they are concentrated in peripherical areas, and are already contested and subject to violent environmental conflicts. These natural areas are mostly inherited from colonial domination and used as territorial and security tools of control where national rangers disrespect conservation rules to impose violent predation (Hubert, 2021; Hagberg et al., 1996; Poda, 2001).

Largely rejected by populations, the governance of these protected areas is even more unpopular since the development of large-scale mining sites in their borders or even inside restricted conservation areas. ² This situation is even more frustrating for the population, as the environmental degradation caused by mining activities adds to the environmental exclusions and restrictions associated with protected areas and previous and current climate change impacts. These grievances and frustrations negatively impact the legitimacy of national state institutions and foster the recruitment and territorial implementation strategies implemented by transnational armed groups (Hubert, 2021, 2022).

As in large part of the Sahel, in Burkina Faso, the major droughts occurring in the 1970s and the 1980s due to sulphur emissions from Asia and Europe (Ackerley et al., 2011; Chang et al., 2011), led to a regional food security crisis and to massive internal migrations (Ndehedehe et al., 2016; Paré et al., 2008). At the time, host communities welcomed displaced populations and gave access to collective lands for framing or breeding. However, over the last decades, displaced populations have gradually taken possession of allocated land and claimed ownership. This phenomenon appears as a recurring issue in the data collected for this research, even if no question was asked about it during interviews and focus groups. Most of the actors interviewed point out that land pressure and land grabbing resulting from these climate migrations must be understood as one of the first layers of the current violence in Burkina Faso.

On the other hand, several studies have already shown that climate change in Burkina Faso is still altering rainy seasons and reducing rainfall (Ibrahim et al., 2014), contributing to desertification, the reduction of agricultural and livestock activities, food insecurity (Abubakar et al., 2023; Alvar-Beltrán et al., 2020; Lemenkova & Debeir, 2023; Rigolot et al., 2017; Sanou et al., 2023) and security issues (Cabot, 2016). These phenomena are similar to the environmental degradation caused by the mining sector and have come to be superimposed on the pre-existing impacts of climate change. By studying environmental conflicts led by mining development, we can access available empirical data to better understand the links between climate and security nexus.

It is important to emphasise that, as with any armed conflict, the ongoing violence in Burkina Faso results from complex and multiple factors. Indeed, the literature highlights the contagion of the Malian conflict, the overthrow of the Blaise Compaoré regime (Antil, 2020; Dwyer, 2017; Kadet, 2016), the persistence of his strategies for distributing authority, the superposition of banditry and transnational crime networks with those of terrorism (de Tessières, 2018; Snaibia & Weiss, 2020; Soto-Mayor, 2020), and even anthropogenic pressure and competition for access to natural resources (Benjaminsen & Ba, 2019; Gaye, 2018; Raineri, 2020). It is particularly instructive to note that Burkina Faso’s first and foremost insurgent hotbeds are located in protected natural areas and on the periphery of mining sites: the Soum province located into the Sylvo-pastoral and partial faunal reserve of the Sahel and hosted the Inata mining site and the W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) complex, about 10 km from the Boungou mining site.

1.2. Socio-environmental systems, climate change and environmental conflicts

From an environmental perspective, similar gaps may be observed in researches addressing mining or natural resources-based conflicts in Africa on the one hand, and climate change and conflict nexus on the other. Indeed, in African case studies, and more specifically in studies derived from political sciences and peace and conflict studies, extractive studies are often related to development, governance or political violence (Berman et al., 2017; Buss, 2018; Christensen, 2019; Collier, 2010; Collier & Ireland, 2018; LeBillon, 2001, 2003). At the same time, mining environmental conflicts are often understudied or understood only as components of other issues, such as peacebuilding (Babatunde, 2019), environmental pollution (Olufemi et al., 2018) or North–South relations (Bedford et al., 2019).

Whereas most of these studies mainly rely on a material and rational analysis of the environment and disputes over mining developments, some work addressing the political ecology of extractivism gives greater attention to perceptions, interpretations and normative scopes. For example, regarding mining developments in South America, Sánchez-Vázquez et al. (2016, p. 25) note that the conflicts involve much more than mere fights over resource ownership. They also include opposing perceptions and interpretations of regimes of norms and the environment. In other words, conflicts also oppose different ontologies, or cosmologies, to use Latour’s (2011) term and challenge political power and socio-environmental structures based on them.

This normative or interpretative outlook is also under-exploited in climate security analyses (Ide, 2016; Ide et al., 2022). From this perspective, environmental conflict studies can help to prompt further reflections on how and why environmental degradation profoundly impacts social, cultural and political structures, igniting disputes, conflicts and even violent armed insurrections. For this purpose, we must grant a more significant consideration to interdisciplinary theoretical perceptions of socio-environmental systems and, more specifically, to research questioning concepts of nature, sense of place and the normative and co-constitutive dimensions of human–environment relationships (Fagan, 2017; Fish et al., 2016; Masterson et al., 2017; Pirages, 2013; Ryfield et al., 2019).

As Fagan (2017, p. 296) notes, this understanding of socio-environmental relationships is relatively new for political sciences and peace and conflict studies, which still seems isolated from political ecology (LeBillon & Duffy, 2018) and more familiar to scholars from human geography. For example, with its emphasis on its co-constitutive perspective, the ‘sense of place’ approach appears adequate to understand how the environment influences different human social constructions. In this respect, Masterson et al. (2017, p. 3) explain that approach illustrates the relationship between human societies and their environments ‘as a social construction, a product of shared behavioural and cultural processes, rather than the result of perceptual and cognitive processes rooted in physical characteristics of setting’. This cultural interpretation of complex and socio-environmental systems enables us to understand more precisely the way life, values and historical processes shared by human societies and the material and symbolic practices are embedded in their immediate environment (Fish et al., 2016, p. 210; Masterson et al., 2017, p. 203; Ryfield et al., 2019, p. 1).

This interconnection includes a strong normative and interpretative scope that, in a co-constitutive relationship, influences the social construction of the environment (Descola, 2002; Escobar, 2008; Hagberg et al., 1996) and the environmental construction of human societies. This interpretation of co-evolution or co-constitution leads us to interrogate the notion of equilibrium, which is conceptualised as the balance between different components of the embedded systems permanently in flux (Fagan, 2017, p. 301; Pirages, 2013, p. 143). Thus, the equilibrium between human societies and their environments must be seen under the dynamic feature of equilibrium and therefore given a disequilibrium, which to Pirages (2013, p. 143), ‘can result either from changes in human activities or changes in nature’, or for Boas and Rothe (2016, p. 618) ‘require a constant adaptation and recalibration […] (and) need to reinvent or transform themselves constantly by forging new connections and by reorganising in creative ways’. Therefore, equilibrium must be understood as dynamic concept, not as a fixed one. Rather than representing an ideal to aim for or to preserve, the equilibrium is the translation of the co-constitution between human societies and their environments. From this perspective, it inevitably incorporates relations of power, inequalities, as well as processes of exclusion, as much gendered, social, political or ethnic.

However, for Boas and Rothe (2016) and Pirages (2013) conceptions of socio-environmental systems or equilibrium are still shaped by an anthropocentric and modern understanding of the environment. Nevertheless, this approach has the advantage of defending the agentic capacity of the environment. This allows us to understand the environment not as an object but as an actor influencing human societies’ normative interpretations and social constructions. And, it is precisely these normative interpretations that can shape, in return, the different modalities of access to and control over natural resources built on the social, cultural, spiritual, political and economic organisation of human societies, that ultimately determine the socio-environmental equilibrium.

This conceptual framework is quite interesting for the climate security debate. It has the potential to fill both the gap to cascade reaction and complex systems models developed by Homer Dixon et al. (2015) and to go beyond governance approaches supported by Binningsbø et al. (2007), Buhaug et al. (2008), Theisen et al. (2013), Buhaug and Nordkvelle (2014), Buhaug et al. (2014) or Meierding (2015). The latter emphasises human adaptation and resilience and argues that the main factor of conflict is not the environment but human actors and governance models who will manage the environmental change and resource access. That said, these approaches still fail to address questions about the politicisation of access and control of resources as well as regime of norms and model of governance that process embedded (Routledge, 2016, p. 73; Schlager, 2016, p. 68). What is particularly problematic given the association of these governance models with the normative regimes and power relations embedded, at different stages, within the economic and political models of the international system (Escobar, 2015; Falkner & Buzan, 2019; Watts & Porter, 2017), and more specifically with the global normative and governance regimes at the root of climate change (O’Lear & Dalby, 2016; Watts, 2015)?

It’s important to note that both opposing approaches remain framed and restricted by rational definitions of environmental issues (Ide, 2016; Ide et al., 2022; Selby, 2014). Wishing to enrich the scarcity approach (Homer-Dixon et al., 2000), Homer-Dixon et al. (2015) have highlighted the need to consider socio-environmental interdependence and systems as the cascading reaction that can result from localised environmental alterations or conflicts. However, the co-constitutive approach to ecosystem services seems more appropriate than the cascading feedback model proposed by classical theories of complex systems (Fish et al., 2016, p. 211).

This theoretical precision matters. Even if Homer-Dixon et al. (2015) emphasise the subjectivity of socio-ecological systems, this consideration remains only marginal within the causality model they propose, which establishes almost mathematically the equation from environmental stress and resource scarcity to the control and inequality of their distribution and leads to conflict. It fails to truly capture the multiple ways in which social structures, norms and processes shape environmental change and, as Floyd (2013, p. 26) points out, in turn, affect human societies differently depending on their insertions within socio-environmental systems.

Specifically, the conceptualisation of socio-environmental equilibrium helps to better understand the socio-environmental issues within its normative prism rather than under a modern ontology. On the other hand, it may represent an adequate tool to understand more precisely how environmental degradations affect the living conditions of populations and their cohesion and relations. This equilibrium also highlights the socio-environmental systems’ co-constitutive relationship and how the environment and human societies influence each other. It is precisely how anthropologists Héritier (2010, pp. 112–113) and Izard (1986a, p. 226, 1990, p. 71) describe Burkinabe holistic ontologies, which embed the cosmos, flora, wildlife, human bodies and shape-specific interpretations of the environment on which political and social structures as well as natural resources control and access regimes are built.

1.3. Methodology

Field research was carried out in Burkina Faso between October 2018 and April 2019. One hundred twenty-four interviews were conducted with security actors, national and international observers, country officials, locally elected and endogenous representatives and residents of communities surrounding these mining sites and surrounding natural reserves. The four Burkinabe mining sites, Kalsaka and Karma in the North region and Inata and Essakane in the Sahel region, were selected for field access, security concerns and their different steps in the extractive process. All mining sites were contested, leading to local protests of the mining development and revindications for better compensation, and two of these sites, Inata and Essakane, are developed into the Sylvo-Pastoral and Partial Faunal Reserve of the Sahel, which was already subject to environmental conflict

A qualitative approach was chosen to reduce security risks and emphasise actors’ narratives, perceptions and representations of the environment. A focus on a few mining sites and the collection of semi-structured interviews instead of a wide-ranging survey and data collection over a large area can minimise research participants’ and research assistants’ exposition to national authorities and armed groups. Interviews were conducted with local endogenous authorities, ³ local and national political, administrative and associative representatives, as well as focus groups of inhabitants, women and men, from local communities impacted by the development of the studied mining sites. Participants were sampled using the snowball method.

For security and ethical purposes, interviews for Karma, Essakane and Inata mining sites were conducted via investigation teams constituted by national research assistants. ⁴ Other interviews of national representatives or international actors involved in mining and security sectors were undertaken in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou. Collected data were thematically coded using a deductive approach based on key themes identified before fieldwork, local actors’ interpretation of and relationship to the environment, local actors’ assimilation and rejection of the mining development, local actors’ perception of interpretation of social environment changes induced by mining development and local actors’ perception of Burkinabe’s central authority concerning environmental destruction.

The following subsection will analyse how both material and normative environmental degradations contribute to the disintegration of endogenous political structures and the delegitimisation of state authority and, ultimately, trigger conflicts that can evolve towards windows of opportunity for transnational armed groups. We will first further develop the specificities of Burkinabe’s socio-environmental equilibriums before addressing how the environment’s material degradation affects the environment’s normative scope and leads to a mutation in socio-political structures. Then, we will emphasise how these mutations came to superpose and accentuate previous environmental degradations due to global warming and tensions due to national political structures.

2. Endogenous Burkinabe communities’ socio-environmental equilibriums

Burkinabe ecosystems integrate several socio-environmental systems as standard features rather than specific socio-environmental interpretations and interactions from the semi-arid Sahelian system in the north to the semi-humid Sudanese prairie in the south. Agriculture and pastoralism are the main activities of most of the rural population throughout the country, which depend on everyday goods and services provided by these ecosystems (Dayamba et al., 2016, p. 62). In other words, access to environmental resources is essential for Burkina Faso’s rural populations’ economic activities and is also constitutive of their social, cultural and political structures.

With more than 60 official languages, Burkina Faso is represented by almost as many ethnic communities, including Mossi, Peul or Songhai, who are dominant in the North and the Centre of the country and have their interrelation to the environment and socio-political structures. As the sociological and anthropological studies on the Burkinabe society emphasise (Hagberg et al., 1996; Héritier, 2010; Izard, 1986, 1990), the integration of and the interaction between the different socio-environmental equilibriums do not rely exclusively on the material and economic aspects of the environment. These interactions and interrelations include immaterial and interpretative scopes that shape socio-political structures and define the modalities of access to and control environmental resources. Izard (1986a, p. 226) describes the political construction in traditional Mossi kingdoms as the articulation between the two worlds, the visible and the invisible, in other words, the material and immaterial aspects of the environment. Hagberg et al. (1996) or Poda (2001) also emphasise the importance of interpreting both aspects of the environment for endogenous Burkinabe power structures. They explain that the sacrality of endogenous power, the invisible world, always refers to the environmental aspects deeply embedded in endogenous socio-political structures. Mossi endogenous authorities’ legitimacy and prerogative derive from their capacity to play the intermediary role between the visible and the invisible worlds, the material and the normative scopes of the environment.

In Burkina Faso, endogenous power and political structures are divided between two sources of authority: the village chief and the land chief. The village chief is a descendant of Mossi conquerors and is integrated into pre-colonial political structures, while the land chief hails from endogenous communities. He is the guardian of the socio-environmental connections: he must protect the invisible world and maintain access to environmental goods linked to agropastoral activities, health and weather, even if the land chief’s authority seems to decline with the modern ontology of the Burkinabe post-colonial state. From an endogenous socio-environmental understanding and through their regulations, environmental goods such as water, air, land, wild fauna and plants are collective properties for which land chiefs give the right to use and access but not to hold or possess.

We can clearly note here that the material environment shapes the social construction of human societies, granting the environment-specific normative features that rely on their own interpretation. Data analysed reveal similar practices and socio-environmental interrelations, notably for the social and political endogenous structures and environmental and land access and control. The analysis of these socio-environmental equilibriums also confirms the co-constitutive nature of the building process for environmental interpretations, equivalently for Mossi (mining sites of Kalsaka and Karma), Songhaï or Peul communities (mining site of Inata and Falagountou). All actors and populations interviewed emphasise the integration of social, cultural and economic structures into the environment. For example, the Conseiller Villageois de Développement (CVD) of Namissiguima, the Karma site’s municipality, explains that the ecosystem is closely linked to human life. ⁵ This is also true for communities living in Falagountou, the Essakane site’s municipality and several villages surrounding Inata. ⁶ The CVD of Falagountou stresses that humankind cannot live without the environment ‘because the environment is its home. Any activity of the community is linked to the environment.’ ⁷

In the same way, the CVD of Falagountou himself recognises the co-constitutive aspect of the socio-environmental connection: ‘Without the environment, populations are nothing, but without human populations, the environment is also nothing. You see, it is a synergy for action, it is complementary […] is it the soul of the community.’ ⁸ The mayor of Kalsaka shares a similar understanding and affirms ‘the environment represents […] a social aspect that is important. […] When we remove the environment in your life, you have nothing left, you do not represent anything more for the society.’ ⁹ The access to land and environmental services appears here central for several significant functions or ceremonies of these communities. This access remains, for example, essential for weddings and funerals, which require access to deadwood to construct the burial chamber. ¹⁰

At first glance, access to land and environmental resources appears crucial for the social integration of the communities, especially regarding economic and subsistence activities dominated mainly by agriculture, breeding, small-scale mining and, to a lesser extent, trading. However, it is essential to consider these activities’ integration at the socio-environmental equilibrium’s core. Indeed, agropastoral practices and other uses of socio-environmental services also maintain physical conditions on which the equilibrium relies. In Burkina Faso, most socio-cultural communities share the same interpretation of the interlinked invisible and visible worlds. This interpretation gives actors from the invisible world (genies or djinn) the agency through social and cultural roles attributed to the interaction with this dual environment (Izard, 1990, p. 71).

For communities studied, socio-environmental interpretations do not only shape the construction of endogenous socio-political structures, but they also determine the physical integration of human communities to the environment and also their interdependence, which incorporate cultural practices and social bans that regulate or forbid access to parts of the environment such as sacred forests, hills, lakes and animals. These practices and bans are fully integrated into the normative codification of socio-environmental interrelations and carry spiritual, economic and ecological aims. Thus, they allow these communities to keep the initial conditions upon which the endogenous socio-environmental equilibriums were built. ¹¹

As regulators of endogenous environmental regulations, endogenous authorities enforce bans on practices that have materialised in sacred hills, forests or genies and enable the interrelation between the visible and the invisible worlds, the material and immaterial sides of the environment. For example, the CVD assistant of Kalsaka explains that the community ‘did ceremonies, rituals, to interfere with gods to stop epidemics’, or in drought period ‘for that rain come back […]. It is how the community held a relationship with specific divinities and with the environment.’ ¹²

In such a fragile ecosystem as the Sahelian area, environmental preservation remains at the core of the communities’ social, political and economic organisations, even if, as Fournier (2011) notes, this relationship with the invisible world must not be fully understood as a practice of strict environmental conservation. In the different communities studied, a robust associative network is integrated into the socio-environmental equilibrium to preserve water resources and vegetation cover and to fight desertification. ¹³ At the same time, local authorities also invest strong efforts into reinforcing drinking water infrastructures and the supplies of agropastoral activities. ¹⁴ Inhabitants of Filio explain that, in their community, certain members were designated to be in charge of specific aspects of the environment, like the vegetation or the wild fauna, and to enforce good practices in agropastoral activities. ¹⁵

2.1. From equilibrium alterations to conflict

2.1.1. Physical degradations

By focussing on land grabbing, competition over water access, the degradation of endogenous ecosystems and disputes against national authorities, the mining development must be understood as a catalyst of global warming’s socio-environmental impacts in Burkina Faso. Indeed, the strong growth of the mining sector accentuates previous tensions over land, the overpopulation of grazing animals, and the desertification process already threatening Sahelian ecosystems. Above all, the establishment of large-scale mining industrial exploitation causes a sudden transformation of the geographic space, the socioeconomic structures and the access to and interconnectivity with the environment. This deep deformation of the endogenous socio-environmental equilibriums inevitably induces an alteration of socio-political structures and of the legitimacy of endogenous and national authorities, which, in the end, can turn into social contestation and conflicts.

The mining development not only grabs land and water resources but also grabs space and deeply reconfigures geographic areas of the establishment, the first layer of socio-environmental interpretations and the sense of space. Beyond their visual impact, mining sites also physically divide villages and municipalities and restrain access to environmental resources. Inata and Falagountou sites’ exploitation perimeter, for example, extends only to a few tens of metres outside the remaining houses. ¹⁶ The village chief of Falagountou explains that this has resulted in the deviation of roads leading to fields and the seasonal habitations used during agricultural seasons. ¹⁷ Furthermore, the multiplication of trucks, heavyweight transports or mining vehicles damage the existing roads. This leads to rainwater flood and dust over the fields, considerably reducing the crops’ quality and quantity. This situation has led to several protests and roadblocks by communities surrounding the Karma site. ¹⁸

The mining development also reduces the space available for agropastoral activities. The reduction of space combined with the previously intense demographic pressure inevitably leads to overexploitation of the remaining spaces and, consequently, soil erosion and depletion. In Inata, mining activities led to deforestation ¹⁹ and the loss of a crucial agropastoral area in which ‘people often mowed to sell hay or stock it for the hungry season’. ²⁰ Expropriated populations have moved to other agropastoral areas, overpopulating and overexploiting them and accentuating the desertification process of the entire area, which is aggravated by large-scale mining activities. ²¹

The high mining consumption of water is a critical threat to local and interconnected regional water networks. Water networks are de facto fragile and close to scarcity in the dry season in a semi-arid Sahelian ecosystem. Mining development has come to affect not only the quantity of water available for populations and the environment but also its quality. It has altered endogenous socio-environmental practices that previously enabled the preservation of these networks. Furthermore, the diminution of agropastoral activities also profoundly impacts the sustainability of the ecosystem. Inata neighbouring communities were used to build dykes to provide artificial water reserves to irrigate crops and prevent surface flows and soil erosion during rainy seasons. However, these endogenous practices seem to be gradually disappearing due to high water consumption and the monopolisation of water by mining activities. ²²

Even when mining companies, such as the Canadian IAMGOLD in the Essakane mining site, make a significant investment to compensate for water access by drilling, it is still not enough to fully compensate for the human and ecosystem loss of water due to the competing access to resources. ²³ As has become apparent on the Kalsaka site, even several years after the end of the mining activities, changes to the water networks still impact surrounding communities. A water analysis done by the municipality in 2018 revealed arsenic contamination in several drills; this is not a surprise for residents when mining waste tailings were used to overflow and contaminate the area’s irrigation network during rainy seasons. ²⁴

Mining developments significantly impact all the regional interlinked ecosystems, already weakened by climate change, by spilling mining waste and contaminating groundwater, air and soil. Water pollution directly affects livestock and contaminates crops by irrigation and soil pollution. ²⁵ The breeding agent of Falagountou explains, ‘the area is becoming unexploitable for agriculture, even for breeding. It is turning into a blasted area’. ²⁶ Between 2017 and 2018, high wild fauna mortality rates were observed in the Falagountou area, while water contaminations affected all the regional water networks. ²⁷ The environmental degradation caused by the mining development has led to simultaneous space reconfiguration, pollution and intense competition over environmental resources, which increases the mining’s impact on socio-environmental integration and thus adds to the desertification process and climate change impacts.

2.1.2. Normative degradations

When considering the co-constitutive construction between the environment and human societies, we observe that material environmental degradation has also altered the environment’s normative scope. Moreover, this alteration can be related to diverse repercussions and interpretations of socio-environmental interrelations. Indeed, physical environmental degradation leads to a cascading reaction which accentuates the mutation of socioeconomic and socio-cultural structures and, thus the alteration of norms, institutions and power structures on which they rely.

The first and most apparent change is the physical destruction of environmental features and places of worship and the erosion of the link between the visible and the invisible worlds. The destruction of sacred groves, hills and graveyards has been observed on almost all studied sites, except the Karma site, where tensions and disputes were settled by the displacement of sacred environmental features and places, ²⁸ which can be moved following specific rituals (Fournier, 2011). However, this relocation process cannot be applied to all holy environmental places, precisely when they rely on local landscape elements such as lakes or hills. Furthermore, except for the Karma site, most exogenous actors involved in mining developments do not take into account or ignore the importance of these sites for local communities.

Several sacred hills were torn down in Inata, Essakane and Kalsaka, often without asking local communities. ²⁹ In Kalsaka, destroying religious and environmental features results in the disappearance of endogenous species, such as the African rock python, that played a role in ensuring the connection with the invisible world. ³⁰ The CVD of Kalsaka explains that the sacred hill destruction occurred at night while people were asleep, without the authorisation of the land chief and in violation of previous negotiations during which Amara Mining had committed to respect and protect all sacred sites located within the exploitation perimeter. ³¹ By preventing endogenous communities from performing the necessary rituals to interfere with the invisible world for weather, health and other purposes, destroying sacred sites profoundly alters socio-environmental practices and structures, even the endogenous cosmology. As for the Essakane and Inata sites, Kalsaka inhabitants directly linked the teardown of sacred hills with drought persistence, new disease apparitions, increased traffic accidents and even sudden and inexplicable deaths.

The physical destruction of sacred sites and the general degradation of the environment are seen under the same prism by neighbouring communities. They are also closely linked to global climate changes and the degradation of living conditions. At the same time, these environmental disasters led to several protests and conflicts between mining companies, local or national authorities and communities impacted by the mining development. ³² They also trigger significant transformations of endogenous social, economic, cultural and political structures, including privatising and monetising land.

Indeed, the physical reduction of space and land availability accentuates the land pressure and changes its normative scope. The expropriation process that accompanies mining development transforms previously endogenous land management relying on specific socio-environmental interpretations by altering, on the one hand, social and cultural roles embedded in endogenous political representations and power structures and, on the other hand, by modifying the property regime through financial and individual compensation supported by the national land code reform. Thus, socio-environmental equilibriums evolved from a semi-collective regime of land property and natural resource access, closely linked to the authority structures and the legitimacy of the land chief, to a privatised financial regime.

A Burkinabe working in a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) intervening in land pressure, management and conflicts explains, ‘Before, the land was sacred. We did not talk to sell it. For endogenous leaders, the land was a natural resource gifted by god to everybody […] But increasingly, with the modernity and new laws, we feel that we are losing this aspect.’ ³³ For these communities, the alteration of the physical environment is explicitly associated with its normative scope. In this respect, the CVD of Namissiguima explains, ‘it maybe all the land, including the land of your ancestors that [the mining company] took here. Now, you are obligated to ask for another land from someone else. It is a pain!’ ³⁴ The pain expressed is due to the loss of social status linked to landowning and associated environmental service, and the new financial value created by the compensation process.

Money and financial value are directly associated with danger because they negatively transform life habits, relationships inside communities and the normative interpretation of the land. ³⁵ The youth representative of Falagountou argues, ‘money and land, we cannot compare’, stressing that when the amount of money received is depleted, ‘you have no more land to cultivate. Your livestock suffers because you have no more grazing space. All of us suffer because groundwater dried up.’ ³⁶ In the same way, the mayor of Kalsaka emphasises that environmental services are priceless: ‘These are not the things that you can exchange for money.’ ³⁷

Besides increasing land pressure and transforming endogenous land management, the expropriation and compensation process also contributes to the impoverishment of neighbouring communities by accentuating unemployment and price inflation. As a significant economic actor providing activities and employment, sometimes presented as development projects, the mining process is itself a driving force of socioeconomic mutation. However, mining development imports socioeconomic regimes relying on wage earning, far from the endogenous regimes rooted in land relationships and agropastoralism. The normative mutation surrounding socio-environmental interrelations leads to an important alteration of socioeconomic structures. The land pressure and overexploitation exclude the youth from agropastoralism and small-scale mining activities. Generally, people from surrounding communities haven’t diplomas or networks allowing them to find employment within mining sites. ³⁸ Indeed, national and international professionals exogenous to neighbouring communities occupy most of the jobs created by the mining development. In the same way, subcontracting for supply chains mainly involves regional or international companies in closed networks and cannot support local investments or entrepreneurship. ³⁹

This observation is similar for all mining sites studied. For Kalsaka, communities currently experiment with a post-exploitation period without rehabilitation or investments. The assistant of Kalsaka CVD states that since the installation of the mine, ‘there is a full disorganisation of the social structure’, ⁴⁰ notably due to the mining impact on breeding and farming activities. ⁴¹ Falagountou’s village chief stresses that neither financial compensation nor the creation of new agropastoral spaces can prevent the socioeconomic alterations of neighbouring communities. He also states that the measures taken to compensate the communities for environmental degradation intensify the alteration of the environmental normative scope. ⁴² Indeed, endogenous communities know their ecosystems well and interact with them depending on their socio-environmental constructions and superposed equilibriums shared by different communities. However, mining companies’ alternatives do not consider these specificities and accentuate tensions within the communities. ⁴³

Consequently, we can observe a strong trend of youth emigration, which accentuates the social mutation initiated by the mining development. Due to the interlinked alteration of the environment’s normative and physical scope, this mutation directly affects the socio-demographic and socio-political structures of impacted communities. These alterations simultaneously affect endogenous socio-environmental constructions and socioeconomic systems, further deconstruct endogenous norms and institutions relying on previous socio-environmental equilibrium. Then, this deconstruction will emphasise the ongoing fragilisation and loss of legitimacy of endogenous power structures on which socio-environmental regimes relied, continuing to accentuate both environmental degradation and socioeconomic mutations.

2.2 From socio-environmental change to conflicts

For surrounding communities, frustration and grief initiated by the mining development are taken to be the consequence of local authorities’ incapacity to protect them. Decisions are also conceived as imposed by the capital, Ouagadougou, which overlaps with the regional disengagement of central authorities. Disputes, protests and violence are also oriented towards international mining companies as the representations of decentralised state authority. Populations also link the violence of mining development to national authorities when national security forces directly protect mining sites while repressing local protests and while the national justice severely sanctions the people arrested.

However, surrounding communities generally attest to their proximity and confidence in local representatives, especially when they can defend their interests and protect their socio-environmental equilibriums. Nevertheless, although CVDs are the leading local representatives mobilised on the field, they are also often associated by residents with municipal boards and decentralised national representations, even when issues exceed their competencies, ⁴⁴ which can also push inhabitants to associate them as collaborators close to the mining companies when they cannot ensure the rights of the surrounding communities.

Yet, even central authorities are sometimes powerless to impose their view on international mining companies. ⁴⁵ In contrast, when pollution caused by mining is observed, decentralised authorities and state technical agents have neither the means nor the power to intervene. This incapacity to directly act and protect local populations increases the discredit of both national and local authorities. Impacted communities share a common perception of the responsibility of both mining companies and national authorities to alter their socio-environmental structures. Most of the population interviewed share the feeling of state abandonment when facing the obliteration of environmental and socioeconomic structures. The belief that the state has sacrificed its population for mining development is now generalised to Burkina Faso’s regions.

The mayor of Falagountou notes that, before his election in 2016, ‘relations were tense between the state, its local representations, and communities’. ⁴⁶ Indeed, several protests challenged the mining development and repression, and court sentences have deeply marked the residents’ perception of the state, which they see as responsible for the destruction of their environment. ⁴⁷ Concerning impacted communities of Inata and Karma, which are also exposed to intrastate violence, the breakdown with local and national authorities and even with some endogenous leaders are directly linked to socio-environmental degradations. The second assistant of the mayor and the CVD of Namissiguima explains that socio-environmental degradations have favoured the intensified mistrust of local representatives and a direct attack against the mayor’s house. ⁴⁸

For example, for population surrounding the Karma site, attacks and the presence of armed groups are note due to coincidence but are rooted in the resentment and discontent against the mining site. ⁴⁹ A perception confirmed by the CVD of Namissiguima who affirms that people close to armed groups ‘talk until problems arrive. Until we made the prefects suffer here, the mayor suffers here […] the CVDs, the councillors …’ ⁵⁰ This situation is even more manifest in Inata site, where inhabitants directly taken up arms and attacked the mine in revenge for non-payment of salaries for the few people working into the mining site and the grabbing of fertile fields, on which others relied to ensure their needs, have been taken away. ⁵¹ In consequence, in the Inata area, armed groups have not only directly attacked the large-scale mining site, which forced the Barkan French army force to an airstrike intervention, ⁵² but also targeted the mining water infrastructures to redirect it to the local populations. The latter had, in fact, been dispossessed to the benefit of the mining activities, which compensated for this loss by supplying water by tanker truck. ⁵³

This situation is similar in Falagountou, where environmental degradations represent ‘the first vulnerability factor of the area’ ⁵⁴ and where, according to state and security forces representatives, young people are forced into exile and exposed to the armed groups’ recruitment during their migrations. ⁵⁵ On the other hand, the Falagountou site also seems to have developed a stronger resilience against violence and armed groups’ propagation. The site appears yet to be exposed to the same environmental degradations and regional conflict dynamics and protected by the same security measures as Inata. For national and local actors, and even for part of the population, this situation must be credited to the mayor of Falagountou initiatives, who seized the opportunities offered by the arrival of the mine to reshape endogenous political structures in his favour and strengthen the cohesion of the community. ⁵⁶

3. Discussion

The data collected and analysed for this research will enable us to strengthen our understanding of the co-constitutive relationships between human societies and their environments, to test the theoretical concept of socio-environmental equilibrium and to further highlight the existing links between the alteration of socio-environmental systems and conflicts. A case study of the socio-environmental impacts of mining development in Burkina Faso allows us to argue that the alteration of both the material and immaterial scopes of the environment leads to a new definition of privileges and exclusion relying on natural resources access and control, which are fully integrated within endogenous power structures and developed in function of specific socio-environmental interpretations. The transformation of endogenous norms and regimes also affects the different mechanisms and strategies that rely on the distribution of endogenous authority and its connection to national clientelist political networks. In the end, these changes increase the mutation of resource access modalities previously defined by endogenous socio-politics structures.

When debating the cultural materialism approach in international relations, McCarthy (2011, p. 1215) explains that ‘social practices are thus not only a function of the dominance of certain ideological formations but also the product of the material environment itself and how the human metabolism with nature must function through these physical constructions’. This approach enables us to have a better understanding of the contributions of the extractive industry and the development models to the imposition of modern interpretations of the environment, which are embedded in power relations and domination structures rooted in ‘social relations of production, access to and control over resources’ (Watts, 2013, p. 86).

Indeed, we can observe here that the destruction of both material and normative environmental scope leads in this way to a profound deformation of impacted communities’ social representations and political relationships and their substitution by the mining development model, which in the end increase the breakdown between rural and peripherical affected communities and the central authority. From a national perspective, this breakdown accentuates the obliteration of state legitimacy even more than it came with economic predation and political violence.

From this perspective, the study of such environmental conflicts is also helpful to provide new insights into the climate and security debate, and more in particular, into the importance of considering the contribution of interpretative approaches, as well as the need to adopt more systematically a co-constitutive grasping of interrelations between human societies and their environment.

Based on our analysis of the four mining sites, we have found that environmental degradation has significant socioeconomic consequences and also influences social constructs and political structures. Our findings align with the conclusions of Sánchez-Vázquez et al. (2016, p. 25) regarding their case studies in Latin America, emphasising that conflicts over environmental or natural resource management involve more than just disputes over resource ownership. They also involve conflicting beliefs and challenge political power and socio-environmental structures. Our research indicates that environmental changes create both physical and normative stresses in socio-environmental systems, leading to cascading reactions and creating opportunities for actors within these systems to redefine them to their advantage. Depending on the conditions and stress levels within socio-environmental systems, this situation can contribute to the emergence, accentuation or worsening of conflict dynamics.

Interpretative in-depth analyses of socio-environmental systems and interrelations have not only the potential to give a better understanding and contextualisation of conflicts analysed by large-N quantitative approaches, but they also can contribute to refine and nuance both system complex and cascading reactions model developed by Homer-Dixon et al. (2015). From this view, a socio-environmental equilibrium approach helps to better understand how climate change affects human societies differently depending on their insertions within socio-environmental systems; it also enables us to better understand how climate change can contribute to the emergence or aggravation of armed conflicts.

The studying of socio-environmental equilibrium and environmental conflicts is also crucial to develop a better understanding of cooperation and governance models (Binningsbø et al., 2007; Buhaug & Nordkvelle, 2014; Buhaug et al., 2008, 2014; Theisen et al., 2013). Indeed, as Duffy (2006), Hartmann (2014) and Verhoeven (2014) remind it for protected areas, or Campbell (2010), Butler (2015), Escobar (2006), Ferguson (2005), Watts (2010) and Escobar (2015) for extractives industries, in the Global South, international norms and governance strategies are developed and implemented to optimise the insertion of northern international companies into national economies and territories, to maximise both good governance practices and foreign investment competitiveness. This process implies a transfer of competence to external actors in territorial control and social and environmental regulations in the areas where they operate. Beyond the fact that it manifestly contributes to altering and shaping interconnected local and non-Western socio-environmental systems or equilibriums, it is also primordial to remind us that modern Western ontology (Chakrabarty, 2017; Latour, 2016), which relies on both international power and economic structures, remains at the heart of the current climate crisis. In this vein, Fagan (2017, p. 298) stresses that it poses a ‘challenge (or should motivate a challenge) to dominant structures of production and consumption, and to modern narratives of growth and progress’ and adds ‘as biopolitical analyses of climate governance have shown, environmentalism itself has become a system of governance within the liberal model’ (Fagan, 2017, p. 299). This is a perception shared by Chakrabarty (2017, p. 29), who stresses that the Anthropocene concept itself embodies a strong colonial representation as it frames global warming, caused by the wealthiest societies, as a worldwide issue shared by world populations.

This focus on relations of domination shaping systemic structures and sovereignty is particularly relevant from a socio-environmental equilibrium grasp. From this perspective, a greater attention to interpretation and the normative scope would offer a deeper understanding of the environmental construction of actors’ representations of the world and, thus, the interactions between interconnected socio-environmental equilibriums. Such an ontology, which would be similar to McCarthy’s (2011) Gramscian approach, would emphasise the need to integrate social structures into the non-human world to understand ‘how the physical materiality of non-human objects expresses political and cultural norms that structure social relations and discourse to understand the specificity of historical change and world order’ (McCarthy, 2011, p. 1215). McCarthy (2011, p. 1215) adds that ‘social practices are thus not only a function of the dominance of certain ideological formations but also the product of the material environment itself’.

Considering this point, it seems necessary to understand the way the material destruction of other political and cultural norms embedded in non-Western socio-environmental equilibriums supports the Anthropocene’s expansion of international structures and asymmetric power relations. From this perspective, liberal and democratic norms and governance models should be perceived as conflictual factors per se rather than a factor of resilience and adaptation when societies face environmental degradation. Indeed, from an environmental critic and post-colonial view, we also need to understand how the Anthropocene normative shaping process, as well as localised extractive activities in the Global South, contribute to affecting the global socio-environmental systems integration and interdependency and thus foster climate changes as well as Anthropocene’s socio-environmental model domination.

This is the same socio-environmental model that underpins the international political and economic structures determining the normative regimes enabling the massive environmental degradation associated with natural resource extraction in the Global South, which at the same time incorporates the areas most exposed and vulnerable to climate change. Critical analyses related to dependency and world system approaches grasp this process under the Ecologically Unequal Exchanges (EUE) concept (Ciccantell, 2019; Frame, 2019; Sommer et al., 2019). EUE makes it possible to integrate the accumulation of environmental degradation in extractive countries as an additional inequality and domination relationship for countries benefiting from the accumulation of capital and consumer goods without integrating their environmental externalities. From this perspective, the environmental conflicts associated with extractivism must be understood as one of the first layers of the climate security nexus. They result from the normative, political and power regimes embedded within governance systems at the heart of the Anthropocene.

These interrogations and ontological prospects are not only valuable for questioning and grasping the evolution of Westphalian’s concept of sovereignty, territoriality or power to Anthropocene’s concept of interdependency, transfer of authority, economic integration, development or resilience but also to question and grasp in which way the alteration of integrated local socio-environmental equilibrium may lead to a cascading reaction in the global social and environmental systems. To return to the Burkinabe case study, it is essential to remember that the significant droughts affecting the Sahel during the 1970s and the 1980s were due to sulphur emissions from Asia and Europe (Ackerley et al., 2011; Chang et al., 2011). These droughts had particularly affected Burkina Faso and led to massive internal migrations, mainly from the Mossi’s Plateau-Central region to peripherical areas (Ndehedehe et al., 2016; Paré et al., 2008). This phenomenon is a recurring issue in the data collected for this research. Most actors interviewed point out that land pressure and land grabbing resulting from these migrations must be understood as one of the first layers of the current violence in Burkina Faso. These assertions must be seriously taken into account and should constitute a next step of research, which would have the potential to confirm some conclusions advanced by Wiederkehr et al. (2022).

In the same vein, it is also important to stress that the Burkinabe mining boom since the middle of the 2000s considerably accentuates the pressure over regional interconnected socio-environmental systems already weakened by global warming and already exposed to rainy seasons and rainfall alterations (Ibrahim et al., 2014), desertification, farming and breeding activity reduction and food insecurity (Abubakar et al., 2023; Alvar-Beltrán et al., 2020; Lemenkova & Debeir, 2023; Rigolot et al., 2017; Sanou et al., 2023).

As we can constate in this research, mutations of socio-environmental systems led by mining impacts affect endogenous socio-political structures and transform the integration of impacted communities’ social practices and economic activities. The alteration of the socio-environmental equilibrium is thus perceived as harmful by impacted communities that associate it with environmental degradation, pauperisation and living conditions degradation. The degradation of both material and normative scopes of the environment, as the implementation of new socio-environmental interrelationships through the mining development, came to accentuate previous breakdown between rural and peripherical impacted communities and the central authority and then trigger localised conflicts over the mining development, which can be instrumentalised and connected to the current regional and transnational armed conflict dynamics.

Author biography

Nicolas Hubert is a post-doctoral fellow at the Chair Raoul-Dandurand en Études Stratégiques, Université du Québec à Montréal. He works on environment and conflict nexus, natural resource management, peacebuilding, development and peace and security issues. His PhD thesis questioned the links between environmental degradation and conflict in Burkina Faso. Nicolas Hubert is also deputy editor-in-chief of VertigO – La revue électronique en Sciences de l’environnement.