Mining, Criminalization and Developmentalized Sustainability Violence in the Peruvian Highlands: The Case of Conga

Introduction

The article explores the use of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) discourse in transforming longstanding socio-environmental development conflicts in the mining landscape of the Peruvian Andes shaped by historical patterns of dispossession and violence. Subject to three historical cycles of invasion (Yrigoyen, 2016),¹ mining has since colonial times challenged indigenous authorities, turning communities and territories into exploitable labour and “natural resources” subject to extraction. From forced labour conditions under the mita system to the criminalization of indigenous territorial protection, the legacy of dispossession and pollution is both a longstanding and contemporary phenomenon (Larsen et al., 2022). To what extent do the SDGs offer transformative agendas in this historical “mine field”: an extractivist ecosystem shaped by systemic structural violence, (under)mined commons and longstanding histories of displacement? Put slightly differently, how do new sustainability criteria and reporting practices reshape the conversations and structural tensions around indigenous commons and commons defenders?

The contested nature of water and miningscapes has been well-documented (Schoderer & Ott, 2022). If sustainability language and Corporate Social Responsibility commitments have long been questioned for their diluted aspirations, how do SDGs, alongside new environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting, due diligence and human rights safeguards, potentially shift the game and issues? As part of a larger research project on violence against environmental defenders,² we explore the role of sustainable development agendas in the dual move of further undermining the commons and legitimizing multiple forms of violence in the name of the public good.

Aligning major investments with sustainability criteria is today a growing requirement under the heading of sustainable finance within the neoliberal framework, particularly important for the capital-intensive extractives sector. If the adoption of the SDGs may be perceived as an impetus for a sustainable development vision and a basis for collaboration (Fraser, 2021) grounded in environmental and social priorities, we argue, on the contrary, that the “SDGization” of the mining encounter has the paradoxical consequence of normalizing the structural violence of extractivism. Our material suggests revisiting the relationship between sustainability discourse, mining and violence and considering it as integral to the different forms of violence currently affecting the sector. In what can polemically be labelled “sustainability violence”, we argue that sustainability agendas and discourses offer another cooptable layer or materialization (investing, reporting and projects) that normalize and perpetuate century-old forms of extractivist violence against indigenous commons and their defenders. The article displays the distinct translations and mediations between sustainable development measures and the structural violence experienced in the sector.

In this sense, extractive industries are not structurally violent per se through the sheer act of extractive activity. Violence is not a natural fact or property of the sector, nor are dynamics of dispossession, displacement or other forms of expropriation inevitable. Rather, it is worthy to explicate the specific meanderings, techniques and socio-political mediations that make or reproduce structural violence within seemingly protected, sustainable and developmentalized regulatory landscapes, what we have elsewhere called the post-frontier (Larsen, 2015). Escobar spoke two decades ago of global imperiality and “development and modernity as displacement-producing processes” (2004). Yet, what does this mean? Countering commonly held dichotomies of sustainability as a peaceful solution to violence, we propose the concept of “sustainability violence” as integral to hegemonic development politics. Contemporary forms of violence and displacement need to be understood in the context of how they are sanctioned, justified and legitimated by the state in natural resource extraction (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017). Contributing to the literature on the slow violence of mining (Heikkinen et al., 2023), we draw attention to the shifting socio-politics of sustainability as integral to extractive violence. Just as studies have increasingly broadened the gaze to different forms of violence from infrastructure (Rodgers & O’Neill, 2012) to its epistemic forms, the analysis connects wider forms of fragmentation and compartmentalisation of commons, identity and resource linkages. Whereas Kirsch described sustainable mining as a corporate oxymoron (Benson & Kirsch, 2010a; Kirsch, 2010) camouflaging its contradictory nature, we argue that a dual instrumentalisation of sustainable development discourse takes place, working at both governmental and corporate levels.

Just as Budds & Hinojosa-Valencia (2012) spoke of co-produced waterscapes, we emphasise the co-production of distinct mining development-scapes, where extractivism is not only enabled, but reinforced as both a value and objective to be pursued. We argue that the capture of the Sustainable Development Goals has contributed towards undermining the defence of indigenous commons, while perpetuating forms of century-old displacement and violence. Just as Corporate Social Responsibility-discourse had its moment (Dolan and Rajak, 2016) in sustaining “mining as usual” and building legitimacy for extraction and slow violence (Gamu and Dauvergne, 2018), the reenactment of SDG sustainability and ESG performativity of contemporary mining operations reflects the new bottles of financialised orthodoxy enabling, rather than blocking, the violence of neoliberal extractivism.

Developmentalized violence, we argue, is thus not only the physical presence, concession or the displacement resulting from extraction, but one equally shaped by sustainable development plans, objectives and reporting practices. The article demonstrates how the extractive sector in Peru has sought to highlight its contribution to SDGs in conjunction with national and regional SDG measures, renewing an age-old convergence and consolidation of mining as a national development priority. As the case study shows, this serves to maintain symbolic divides between mining as desirable mainstream development vs. anti-mining protests and defense of commons relegated as regrettable anti-development. In this sense, the persecution and attacks against both local authorities and indigenous leaders gain legitimacy to protect public development interests. In social landscapes of poverty and historical exclusion, this is not insignificant, revealing the production of development scapes as battlefields of normalcy.

Development is, in this sense entangled with elite capture, the legitimacy of extractability revamping century-old forms of commons expropriation while foregrounding a convoluted assemblage of cherry-picked SDG activities and reporting to qualify as sustainable mining. Such practices add another layer to the decade-old use of CSR strategies by mining companies to silence community resistance in different phases of mining operations (see comparative work by Niederberger et al., 2016). SDG interventions are not limited to instrumental tinkering, cosmetic developmentalism or doing good locally for the sake of a social license without transforming structural inequalities. Rather, SDG instrumentalizations reinforce the legal nature of the concession with the veneer of legitimacy through internationalized development washing with the normalization of violence of extractivism. This not only perpetuates inequalities but enables new forms of violence within normalized sustainable mining; not only legally sanctioned, but legitimate and open to further finance.

Case-study approach and methodology

This study employs a qualitative case study approach to examine how mining activities intersect with sustainable development and commons governance in the Peruvian highlands. The outset for the analysis is the defense of basin headwaters and water sources, water commons, in the region of Cajamarca in Northern Peru. We specifically explore the interplay between corporate mining and the role of the rondas campesinas, active in their protection of indigenous commons in the context of the Conga mega-mining project. Rondas campesinas, literally translated as peasant patrols, are indigenous social organizations organized around the administration of justice and security. They emerged as a distinct form of self-organization in the 1980s, later becoming central movements involved in mining conflicts among other things. The collaborative action research involved repeated field-visits between 2022 and 2024. Research design was informed by commons theory and political ecology, with particular attention to how local actors negotiate control over land and water resources in the presence of large-scale extractive activities. Fieldwork was conducted in several parts of Cajamarca, Peru. Methodologically, data collection involved collective meetings with rondero organizations, individual interviews and focus group discussions together with document analysis and participant observation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with diverse stakeholders, including community authorities, local farmers and herders, local officials and other stakeholders. The research team participated in several large-scale meetings, community assemblies and federation meetings. Document analysis included official documents related to mining concessions and development processes as well as corporate reporting. Further research data built on material collected by two of the co-authors active in Cajamarca in the field of strategic litigation for more than a decade.

The Conga case

The Conga project in Cajamarca, Northern Peru is an emblematic example of the deep-running and multi-facetted conflicts generated by extractivism, dispossession and deepening enclosures of Latin American commons (Svampa, 2015). In a context characterised by historical inequalities, contested property regimes, and asymmetrical power relations, the region has long experienced the expansion of large-scale mining, generating disputes over resource access, environmental impacts, and decision-making authority. Where the water commons from an indigenous perspective involve recognising their nature as living beings, underlining the importance of reciprocity and respect, this stood in contrast with the imposition of concessionary logics grounded in private property and extractability.

The Yanacocha company, owned by Newmont, had been active in Cajamarca since 1993. What is commonly referred to as the Conga conflict erupted in 2011 when the plans for a mega open-pit mining project were officially announced by the Yanacocha company projecting the drainage of several lagoons (Perol, Azul, Mala, and Chica) of critical importance for local communities. In 2012, social protests took another level with the Great March, Gran Marcha Nacional del Agua – framed around the slogan “Conga no va” (Conga won’t go ahead). The case is considered emblematic in terms of its activism by social movements paralysing one of the biggest extractive projects through “the defense of local worlds threatened by the aggressive expansion of extractive activity” (Li et al., 2019). From a corporate perspective, the unified patchwork of 26 concessions making up the Conga project, one of the biggest in the continent, offered extractive hope and economic promise. From another perspective, it overlapped with and threatened lagoons, streams and wetlands integral to indigenous territories and livelihoods. Interviews with ronderos underlined the lagoons as living interconnected common spaces. Commons have been described as “resources used or governed by groups of heterogeneous users through agreed-upon institutional arrangements” (Agrawal et al., 2023). This article specifically focuses on Indigenous commons characterized as:

These water commons were intimately tied to customary cosmology, settlements and practices of communities in the area, yet ronderos like Alvaro were also acutely aware of the highly unequal geographies of extractive landscapes dominated by sanitized lines, substitutable resources and officialized metrics constituting official concession geographies. The weakness of environmental safeguards systems, from an indigenous perspective, were far too evident. As Alvaro noted:

Braulio, another rondero, would also stress how:

Perceptions of losing control over their water commons were critical to local narratives shaping the local movement against mining. Another rondero, Santiago, expressed how mining:

Customary commons were not simply under attack; they acquired political significance pitching the open-pit copper-gold mine against sentient indigenous mountain ecologies.⁴ Analysis has emphasized the ontological multiplicity and competing designs of the land (Paredes Peñafiel & Li, 2017). Ontological clashes were also apparent in spatial practices and ordering. On the one hand, Quechua place names within miningscapes were toponymical reminders of other territorial configurations, ontologies of space and the deepening uncommoning or othering of indigenous commons. On the other hand, Rondero patrols wishing to inspect and thereby protect the lagoons reasserted territorial connection but also reported being harassed by police accusing them of infringing upon the company’s “private property”. Rondero authorities were blocked by physical barriers or corporate security forces enacting everyday politics of securitizing paths, lines and boundaries. Policing was literally about reinforcing a certain sense of privatized law and order between privatized security forces, on the one hand, and ronda campesina inspections of lagoons on the other hand. Confrontations were not minor incidents, but repeatedly displayed the highly unequal orders, where privatized pathways and fencing trumped over landscapes of commons.

A long series of social mobilizations and strikes followed prompting waves of repressive action from the spying on social movements, telephone threats and other intimidations; a toxic environment denounced by human rights organizations in terms of excessive use of violence and repression characterized by the escalation of violent clashes, militarization with arbitrary arrests and the imprisonment of protestors. John Ruggie, author of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights (United Nations, 2011), uses Yanacocha and Conga as the poster child cases of all that was wrong with (mining) business as usual in the introduction to his 2014 book (Ruggie, 2014). Within this bigger dynamic, we suggest that more was at stake than merely big mining displacing commons and communities through forced imposition of a new concession logic. If the Conga case is known for its defense of commons, the backside of the story has included the systematic attacks against indigenous commons defenders. New enclosures of commons relied on different forms of sustainability violence, which is unpacked in following sections. Lagoons were not merely projected to be dried out and turned into sites of extraction; they were subject to environmental impact assessments, efficiency calculations and offsetting plans readily reported as sustainable mining. This suggests how the violence of extractivism was naturalized (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017) through discourses of improvement and sustainability co-existing side-by-side with the criminalization of indigenous defenders.

Criminalization

A long-standing feature of the conflict has been the systematic criminalization of indigenous authorities and rondas leaders opposed to the Conga mining megaproject. Mining related conflicts are rampant in the Peruvian landscape making up roughly 58.4% of all social conflicts monitored by the Ombudsman’s office (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2024). Indigenous authorities, both in the Andes and Amazon, frequently face legal action and reprisals from the State and extractive companies, seeking to dismantle indigenous resistance and facilitate the implementation of mining or oil projects. Legal analysis of the Conga case (IACHR, Case: Comunidades Campesinas de Cajamarca y sus líderes 13.641 – Perú) reveals how criminalization was a systematic practice, and, as such part of the violent imposition of the Conga mining megaproject. Since 2011, several indigenous leaders have been subject to an unusually large number of investigations and criminal complaints. Numbers reveal how leadership of movements fighting for the protection of the lagoons and commons were being singled out. This was evidenced by the exponential increase of criminal investigations and accusations specifically targeting those in charge of protests or the lagoon inspections in defense of the commons. In 2021, a report by regional prosecutor’s office reported on some 584 cases of criminalisation, unfounded complaints and legal proceedings against 34 out of 43 commons defenders.⁵ 99 of these complaints were filed by two corporate lawyers and two State attorneys, revealing the active roles of both corporate and government actors in a highly uneven legal playing field. The nature of complaints is also revelatory. The 584 complaints against the 34 leaders involved some 1,107 charges for crimes (each complaint may contain more than one charge). The crimes most often charged against the beneficiaries included crime against property in 302 complaints, crime against public administration in 227 complaints, crime against life, body and health in 188 complaints, crime against public tranquility in 186 complaints, crime against liberty in 142 complaints, crimes against public safety in 24 complaints, among other crimes.

Accusations of violating private property whether in terms of damage or encroachment or violations of public authority and security, revealed how commons systems were being legally delegitimized, customary law stigmatized, and legal violence individualized. Private property mattered, not commons systems and collective rights, just as crimes against public administration signaled limited State recognition of customary institutions. What in the American convention on human rights (Organization of American States, 1978) constituted violations of the rights to life, personal integrity,⁶ and from an indigenous rights perspective violated indigenous territorial rights and the right to consent – were in the accusations replaced by violation of private property and disturbing the public order. This reaffirmation of privatized orders stood in contrast with the criminalization of customary rights.

The exponential increase in investigations and complaints focused on the main leaders of the ronderos of Cajamarca defending their commons. One leader alone was subject to nothing less than 109 legal complaints between 2012–2015. Criminalization targeted both the individual leaders and their collective institutions, the latter being criminalized for exercising customary jurisdictional functions, despite being recognized in the Constitution.⁷ Complaints against communal authorities and ronda members declined only upon the granting of Precautionary Measure 452–11 in favor of 44 leaders from Cajamarca, with the purpose of protecting their lives and integrity.⁸ Despite such measures, legal attacks have continued. In March 2023, the Third Provincial Corporate Criminal Prosecutor’s Office of the Fiscal District of Cajamarca opened yet another investigation against several leaders, including beneficiaries of the Precautionary Measure 452–11, on events and places where those accused denied not participated. Upon writing this article, most complaints had been archived, likely demonstrating that the main objective was to harass or pacify commons defenders and patrol leaders. The intensive criminalization demonstrates competing legal regimes and the continuous mobilization of legal warfare and violence by both corporate actors and the state apparatus. What is important here is how this was normalized rather than revoked by contemporary sustainability agendas. An important starting point is the contested nature of commons management being othered.

Othering commons

Are commons claimed, in possession or under effective collective property right arrangements? We here argue how commons institutions in extractive conflicts are subject to different forms of othering weakening their already fragile legal status. If indigenous commons and ancestral connections were central to rondero activism, their fragile legal protection despite constitutional commitments is important to note. Multiple devolution dynamics regarding land and forests have led to the emergence of new collective tenure security forms in Latin America from different titling schemes, territorial rights over the last few decades. These are at times bundled or aggregated to speak of “community control” highlighting the benefits of community tenure (https://rightsandresources.org/where-we-work/latin-america/). Peru is, for example, mentioned as having more than a third of the country under indigenous and community ownership “whose contributions to sustainable development and climate change mitigation are of particular importance”.⁹ Yet, beneath such birds-eye view statistics of community empowerment and benefits, are less visible statistics of unresolved land claims, deepening conflicts and contested commons in a “rollback” characterized by illegal invasions, deepening violence and land titling coming to a halt across the region. These are not merely matters of tenure classification and description, but connected to how wider socio-political contexts, resource grabs and rights regimes intersect with and govern how commons are managed and “othered” under neoliberalism. Commons are subject to multiple forms of enclosures from privatization to being “othered” as irrelevant.

We may consider such “uncommoning” as forming part of reproducing normalized extraction landscapes, where mining is considered an “essential component”. Commons enforcement by community patrols, in turn, is framed as irrelevant and considered infringements on private property. Such policing went hand in hand with the othering of commons as illegal, irrational, even radical in contrast with the privatised orders of concessions as the basis for the public good of the nation. Commons, bienes communes, as a possible legal territorial configuration, were othered and replaced by the Bien Comun (the Public Good) of the Nation alongside privatized sectoralized extractive regimes. The discursive erasure of commons was thus not merely a matter of absence or weak recognition in Peruvian legislation, but of continuous legal recategorization and dismissal of customary tenure deepened by neoliberal reform since 1990s to facilitate expropriation or authorization use by third parties. The most evident form was the neoliberal orchestration initiated during Fujimori government underlining how the mining industry was a matter of public utility and the promotion of investments as a question of promoting national interest. Whereas the 1993 constitution¹⁰ signaled how natural resources were the heritage of the Nation, land rights regime concentrated on agricultural lands, whereas other forms of lands were limited to the granting of use rights.

Indigenous commons were not only neglected, but their appropriation was also consolidated and facilitated through fragmented and sectoral resource regimes. Constitutional changes through time had not led to an incremental recognition of indigenous rights, but on the contrary, revealed a series of weakening measures disabling commons management under indigenous control. We may consider this as a form of constitutional othering of customary commons systems, limiting recognition of user rights and fragmentation.

Another twist to this came through the fragmented work on commons from certain environmentalist groups tending to downplay the collective nature of mining struggle. Consider the following description of the Goldman prize awarded to Máxima Acuña in 2016:

Acuña and her family had been sued by the mining company for “squatting on her own land”. Initially sentenced to a prison term, courts would eventually rule in her favour. While the Goldman award recognized the courage and efforts of this extraordinary woman, the overall focus was on individual achievement rather than the wider collective concerns and debates. This is not to diminish the courage and efforts, but rather to note how even environmental prizes and the front-staging of individuals may indirectly underplay the collective nature of environmental conflict and dispossession. Such narratives, in particular, risk underplaying the importance of the collective defense of the territory. It was indeed the peasant patrols, who took turns to take care of Máxima Acuña, her family and her lands, a collective effort targeted by the company. Many of the patrolmen who did this work have been persecuted and reported by the Yanacocha Company. To develop this in more detail we now turn to the SDGs as a contributing factor in normalizing the extractive landscape.

Poverty, SDG violence and normalizing extractivism

From one angle, sustainable development was a public governance matter from central level planning to efforts by local authorities. Cajamarca figured as the poorest department in the country home to 16 of Peru’s poorest districts.¹² SDGs such as those on Poverty, Clean Water and Sanitation, Climate Action, Affordable and Clean Energy, Health and Well-being, Quality Education were integrated in regional planning,¹³ and regional authorities were from early on vocal in mining matters and the need to protect water commons. Yet, regional government attempts to protect watersheds were ultimately nullified by the Constitutional tribunal on the grounds that large-scale mining was outside the regional government’s jurisdiction. While the company thus won one legal battle, the question of development legitimacy remained in deepening social conflict. Building development legitimacy became imperative and the SDGs.

A 2016 study “mapping mining to the SDGs”, (United Nations Development Programme, 2016) concluded that “the mining industry has the opportunity and potential to positively contribute to all 17 SDGs.” (United Nations Development Programme, 2016). Indeed, much literature enumerates how the mining industry may contribute to different SDGs (Endl et al., 2021; Monteiro et al., 2019; Endl et al., 2021) as a matter of potential.¹⁴ The list of positive actions may range from education support to the respect of indigenous rights and FPIC.

From very early on, the Yanacocha Company positioned itself as contributing to sustainable development in Cajamarca, articulating this as “our impact on and the opportunity to positively contribute to all 17 SDGs.” The company’s 2021 sustainability report of Yanacocha noted the challenge of mining in the highlands, where the “market hardly arrives” and the State faces challenges in delivering on its mission. The report prioritized seven out of 17 objectives; poverty reduction, zero hunger, producing compost for sustainable agriculture, health and well-being focus on capacity.¹⁵ Such reporting was not an isolated event, but part of a global trend of corporates selectively taking on global sustainability commitments.

Newmont had been part of the United Nations Global Compact since 2004¹⁶ also engaging actively in sustainability reporting (Amoako et al., 2017). If Yanacocha had been delisted from the Global Compact, upon writing this article, due to lack of updates, Newmont¹⁷ continued its own reporting. Reporting took place using Global Reporting Initiative standards (Global Reporting Initiative, 2024) a standard initially founded in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. From one angle, SDG reporting allowed for what we might call cont(str)ained reporting by “giving priority” to certain SDGs. Newmont, indeed, explicitly spoke of choosing SDGs aligned with the business strategy with the greatest potential for “positive contributions”. These included health (SDG 3), gender equality (SDG 5), Clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), decent work and growth (SDG 8), as well as partnerships (SDG 17). Whereas SEG literature calls for improved valuation (Mundaca & Heintze, 2024), sustainability reporting was often limited to a matter of reporting so-called good practices.

Newmont mentioned winning a prize for “good practices in public management” in 2023¹⁸ – a project involving the planting of a million trees to fight climate change. In 2022,¹⁹ it was also awarded a prize for “sustainable development and social management” by the national society of mining, oil and energy for its capacity building of sanitation organizations in rural Cajamarca. Such prizes exemplified development-related “good practices” with selected activities from compost production and “sustainable” agriculture to first aid training, local value chains and participation in education institutions.

Development, critical theory has long suggested, constitutes a distinct reading and way of knowing, a filter for scanning proposals, reports and practices in terms of the will to improve (Li, 2007). In the Peruvian context, corporate engagement with sustainability had a certain history. International mining companies had adopted sustainability language, and an extractive will to improve as part of their “à la carte” Corporate Social Responsibility programmes since the 1990s (Meza-Cuadra 2008) to build symbolic and social capital (Saenz, and Ostos 2020; Gifford and Kestler, 2008).

Sustainability and profitability were conveniently realigned through the language of modernized improvements, eco-efficiency and the proactive agency of the good to counter images of the intrusive extractivist backlog. SDGization, in short, involved careful alignment by the mining company with goals where contributions were possible, from education to local business development. This, conversely, contributed to the normalisation of structural violence, even to the point of the mining company offering development support to end domestic violence.

The incorporation of SDGs by the mining sector, indeed, tends towards demonstrating discursive coherence rather than constituting a substantive commitment and material transformations. A review of sustainability reports by mining companies referencing the SDGs spoke of a substantive “materiality mismatch” between stated impacts and the evident risk of SDG-washing resulting from uneven reporting and lack of evidence (Responsible Mining Foundation, 2020). Rather than representing empty Corporate Social Responsibility rhetoric, it builds legality, legitimacy and conformity. It also flattens differences among development alternatives, imposing a certain development vision crowding out community alternatives. This developmentalized violence demonstrated do-able extractability claiming science, policy SDG coherence and social legitimacy vs. the anti-development of social protest. This would appear to also fit a wider dynamic of corporate responses to criticism to “protect these industries from potential delegitimization and allow them to continue operating in favorable regulatory environments” (Benson & Kirsch, 2010b).

In a competitive investment environment, alignment with SDGs and other standards was not merely a narrative act but tied into (voluntary) ESG performance indicators and investment ratings. In the ranking of mining investments, Peru often scores low points on its performance in relation to social, political and institutional factors. Developmentalization was not just a matter of beautification, but a sheer necessity to increase ranking to ensure project viability, political acceptance and credit access.

The SDG agenda adds another space for sustainability performance, measurement and rating literally outperforming the silence of customary commons institutions. In this sense, the SDG cherry-picking exercise and selective reading are facilitated by a goal and impact framework, on the one hand, and the necessity for high credit scores on the other. Normalization in part passes through becoming legitimate through public recognition in terms of doing good alongside notions of belonging and recognition. The displacement or distraction effect is facilitated by the narrow statistical gaze of SDG reporting, which is poorly adapted to address complex socio-environmental conflicts. Furthermore, in the orthodoxy of multistakerholderism all societal actors are encouraged to join the collective SDG effort, yet the politics of voice, inequalities and power are frequently ignored or even questioned.

Legal othering and negating indigeneity

Ronderos were not only under physical attack, but othered, silenced or literally “outlawed” as radical in the mining-development encounter. Whereas positive company SDG profiles represented one side of the coin, leaving commons in the shadows through neglect, stigmatizing commons defense and community patrolling as the “anti-development others” were integral to developmentalized violence. “They call us backwards and say we are opposed to investments and progress”.²⁰

Selective SDG reporting fueled a strong divide between mining as true development, while protest alternatives were relegated as being anti-development. Whereas othering through essentialization and homogenization is often perceived as a matter of identity alone, the form of othering in development terms raised here had wide-reaching implications. It involved the valorization of neoliberal agency alongside the demonization of customary protective agency in a dual process of developmentalized ordering and othering.

The logical leap of othering alternative development alternatives as insignificant formed part of the everyday performance of structural violence, cementing neoliberal normality. Social actors questioning mining were stigmatised and othered as unrealistic and even dangerous by neglecting the significant SDG development contributions from mining. These included risking the loss of so-called canon, royalties and mining rights to public goods such as the transfer of resources to the regions and local governments or financing of the national education budget.

Yet othering did not stop there. Whereas Peruvian ratification of ILO Convention 169²¹ specifies recognition of indigenous peoples and their collective rights to define their own development priorities along with consultation, consent and participation provisions on wider development processes, such legal obligations were off the table; the negation of indigeneity, associated rights and the legitimacy of social critique in Conga was a central dimension of developmentalized violence. Rather than firmly embedding commons and indigenous rights as the legal foundation for territorial orders, customary legal orders were othered and replaced instead by clean concessions with “improved” voluntary environmental measures and development interventions.

Corporate participation in voluntary initiatives demonstrated “commitment to collaboration, transparency and accountability”, carefully curated to contribute to selected SDGs that aligned with the business strategy and international recognition. This allowed them to tick off the officially sanctioned SDG box, which not only legitimized but also enabled to additional funding to normalized “responsible” mining through ESG commitments by pension funds and others.

Mobilizing the SDG process thereby resulted in a simultaneous process of denying certain perspectives, acknowledging and strategic engagement with others in the making and financing of responsible mineral development (Benson & Kirsch, 2010).

The negation of indigeneity was central to this. There are more than 55 Indigenous Peoples in Peru recognized by the Ministry of Culture, representing 26% of the population, according to the national census from 2017 (https://censo2017.inei.gob.pe/resultados-definitivos-de-los-censos-nacionales-2017/, accessed 07 May 2026). They are organized into Indigenous nations, such as the Achuar, Wampis, Awajún, and Aymara peoples; peasant communities; native communities; and peasant patrols. The current Law on Peasant Patrols/Rondas Campesinas (No. 27908, 2003) recognizes that the rights of indigenous peoples apply to peasant patrols including the rights to self-identification and territorial control. In addition, the Ministry of Culture has recognized the National organization of Rondas (CUNARC-P) as a national organization representing indigenous peoples. Yet, SDG reports revealed a different demography.

Despite the evident social conflicts, Yanacocha company’s sustainability reports since 2011 affirmed that there were no direct or indirect violations of indigenous and human rights, even arguing that there were no campesina communities or indigenous peoples to be found in the concession area. Turning the blind eye to indigeneity, mining documents spoke of farming and neighbouring communities prompting a less demanding legal framework. Whereas indigeneity was mentioned as a training topic for corporate action in sustainability reports, it was dissociated from the specific socio-legal topography and territorial constellation of the Conga concessions.

This severing of identity ties also symbolically entailed severing customary bonds with territory and space, while redevelopmentalizing ronderos either as anti-development trespassers or vice-versa as docile beneficiaries of development support. What remained was a general reference to communities, which also severed ties to commons from a territorial perspective. What is interesting here is not only the seamless erasure or negation of identity and collective rights, but equally the creative reporting of rendering the indigeneity category non-applicable.

This process of reducing indigenous peoples to mere neighbours introduced a positive convivial term, which, in turn, rendered people potential development beneficiaries of mining-related opportunities. It conveniently replaced the onto-legal-material conflict and exclusion with narratives of needs, improvement and eco-efficient substitutability. While central human rights obligations were bypassed, this did not hinder the company from ranking 2nd among 110 companies in a 2023 “Corporate Human Rights Benchmark”.

Indeed, even if human rights institutions have sought to align SDGs with securing safe and enabling environment for human rights defenders (König-Reiss & Rask, 2021), such alignment remains marginal and outcompeted by other development narratives (See also Larsen and Fernandez-Hernandez, under review). Although sustainability reports from 2011 and onwards required the company to address human rights, the limited extent of this was carefully downplayed. Furthermore, given that indigenous peoples were not identified, there were no direct or indirect indigenous human rights issues to report, nor a need for accountability or specific measures in this respect.

Identity negation in this sense was not a matter of misunderstanding or misplaced identity politics alone, but instrumentalized politics, legal warfare and de jure consolidation of bypassing constitutional duties replaced conveniently by voluntary SDGization. On the one hand, this reinforced the notion underlined in mining policy since Fujimori government in 1992 of mining as a matter of public utility and investment one of national interest. On the other hand, negation of indigeneity ruled out the applicability of collective provisions. The Viceminister of intercultural affairs at the time in 2012, indeed, considered that FPIC was not applicable.²² As later reported to the Inter-American court, the Vice Ministry considered rondas campesinas as governed by different legislation, not indigenous rights. This de jure exclusion cemented rondas as non-indigenous organisations, an argument further cemented by further legal questioning, as part of being judicialized, of any objective or subjective criteria for indigeneity in Cajamarca, and subsequently in Conga.

As the legal category of indigenous peoples exists in Peru, it became a matter of compartmentalizing identities to social forms without consent requirements. We might speak here of legal-ontological othering, negation or identity violence as indigenous commons were degraded or downgraded from a matter of collective territoriality to a matter of individual beneficiaries, development recipients and farmers within a corporate driven and SDG-sanctioned resource management framework. Indeed, the subtlety of having the public good defended, yet the indigenous identity and commons negated, revealed a distinct form of structural violence; it was a matter of defending the interests of the many (public good) vs. what was considered the indigenous privilege of the few. As commons (bienes communes) and public goods (bien comun) are at times used interchangeably, this illustrates the systemic neglect of commons systems at risk of being replaced by a normalized state dominion, negating indigeneity and private concessions.

While the law on water resources²³ stipulates respect for indigenous water rights within lands and watersheds, even considered superior to other rights and imprescriptible, the negation of indigeneity, reinforced a modus operandi – where indigenous politics were applicable elsewhere (in titled native or Andean communities), but not when it comes to “othered” rondero water commons and protests. This was enabled by a contested dynamic undermining and legally othering constitutional, jurisprudence and obligations under international law. If SDG commitments are of less importance from the standpoint of international law, in the blurry waters of sustainability governance they created normative distraction through alternative diluted standards. The realm of water governance is telling in this respect.

Substitutable water commons and SDG-sanctioned water tanks

The Peruvian constitution recognizes water as a public good and an inalienable domain of the nation. It also recognizes the right of everyone to have progressive and universal access to drinking water, while prioritizing human consumption over other uses. The Ley de Recursos Hídricos²⁴ even speaks to the sociocultural values of water from an integrated perspective mentioning how the State should respect use and customs of indigenous communities, while asserting the role of the state in protecting, supervising and controlling water. From a commons’ perspective, it is noteworthy how the law also rules out private property over water defined as a “good for public use”, whose management should take place in harmony with the public good (el bien común), environmental protection and the interest of the Nation. Nonetheless, other constitutional provisions enabled concessions to be granted for economic development (article 73)²⁵ pending authorization, which in turn required legitimacy. Already in 2011, the Cajamarca regional council unanimously declared the lagoons a matter of regional public interest to conserve the intangibility of the basin headwaters.²⁶ This was subsequently challenged as unconstitutional to maintain the concession as an investment field of eco-efficiency and improved well-being. Sustainability reporting took this a step further by turning water-based conflicts into water-related SDG contributions.

Newmont sustainability reporting spoke of contributing to SDGs even within highly contested waterscapes. The 2023 sustainability report spoke of “exploring potential public-private partnerships for water infrastructure investments in Cajamarca.” and reported on supporting drinking water supply in the city of Cajamarca.²⁷ If concessions from the perspective of the ronderos and regional authorities threatened lagoons and their water commons, the company was nonetheless able to report alignment with a certain nature-positive standard. This involved framing SDG contributions within neoliberal water development discourse and the delivery of clean water and sanitation services. What mattered from a hegemonic perspective were specific goals on clean water and sanitation as a convenient metric for demonstrating positive contributions, while cementing the dispossession of lagoons as legitimate. This both concerned what was reported on and was subjugated as epistemologically irrelevant; Knowledge of local waterways, flows, and connections was integral to local water commons, but fundamentally invisibilized, cleansed and relegated as irrelevant in the making of clean SDG reporting highlighting water and sanitation. Water tanks offered to peasants were visible SDG achievements, not indigenous commons. The gap between the two forces us to revisit the treacherous promises or illusion of a realist reporting panopticon (transparency, SDG indicators and data), challenging the idea of ever-improved understanding of sustainability issues, while distracting attention from clear-cut challenges. Gone were discontents, conflicts and commons, replaced by partnership projects for clean drinking water, carefully curated as part of corporate sustainability reporting for the public good and SDG alignment.

In 2024, the United Nations reported that 3.5 billion people globally lack safe sanitation, while half the world faced water scarcity. However, this meta-narrative easily overshadows the intricate process of water commons in specific settings, which are being undermined and replaced by a techno-quick fix and service delivery. The regional report on SDGs in Cajamarca in 2022 (Ames Brachowicz & Revoredo Mendieta, 2022), for example, did not address deep-running water conflicts, but rather stressed how 85 % of the population now had access to clean water, pointing to remaining gaps in terms of access to water. Newmont, in turn, reported collaborating with the provincial municipality and the drinking water and sanitation service provider (SEDACAJ) to improve the drinking water supply. One well had been funded by Yanacocha company, while six others would be built through public-private mechanism and tax revenues.²⁸ The Newmont report spoke of responsible water stewardship and stakeholder engagement with “performance objectives” and adequate monitoring framed around “nature-positive action”.

This dynamic also involved companies replacing the ineffective state in terms of development provisions. In this sense, the very distribution of water tanks in both material and symbolic senses represented SDG delivery on clean water and sanitation despite very mining activity threatening fragile water commons. Even if risks were indirectly acknowledged, the training of students in water treatment through local NGOs exemplified corporate care and water stewardship. The very distribution of water tanks stood as physical evidence in poverty landscapes, but at another level illustrated the idea of substitutability. Mining plans to replace lagoons with water tanks were grounded in notions of weak sustainability and resource substitutability, carefully socio-politically engineered logics reproduced and structured to consolidate environmental performance, enabling the concession to move forward and capture the space of developmentality, while undermining commons systems.

As Boelens has argued, “water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses that are mobilized to sustain water governance structures and rights orders” (Boelens, 2008). SDGs in this sense contributed to epistemological othering of water commons no longer connected to local collective needs, but silenced and substitutable replaced development intervention. If reporting in a narrow sense merely informs, we here stress the role of sustainability reporting as a form of narrative violence, where the cherry picking of water service delivery indirectly erases the water conflict at stake. A consequence of selective reporting concerns what is officially known or “dis(kn)owned”. The neologism here seeks to underline the epistemological implication and dual move of both disowning and knowing. Water tanks distributed to people in target areas become indicators of clean water distribution and SDG delivery, while remaining silent on the material sustainability mismatch, lagoon dispossession and legitimizing extractive intervention. The normalization, in this sense, is not only discursive, but becomes material with deep-running socio-environmental implications for revitalizing commons.

Concluding remarks

What is the potential of the SDGs in transforming longstanding conflicts in mining areas? The Peruvian economy has long been described as extractivist. However, rather than situating this as a structural characteristic or statistical fact, this article draws attention to the multiple discursive, judicial and policy forms of agency shaping and deepening the extractive agenda as legitimate sustainability in the making, while deepening forms of outlawing and criminalizing environmental protest. In the global drive for (transition) mineral extraction, understanding the diverse ways through which mining companies operate, are resisted or supported by indigenous and local communities is primordial (Niederberger et al., 2016). Nowhere is this more evident than in the entrenched socio-environmental conflicts. The development card has long played multiple roles; from public finance justifications to justify extractivism towards local CSR activities and development pacification to counter local forms of resistance. Social acceptance of extractive licenses is not a given and revisiting dynamics in contested developmentscapes reveals the contentious nature of sustainability.

The Conga case reveals how the very normalization of mining relied not only on legal concessions, but also on sustainable reporting and what we call developmentalized violence, starting from the premise of retaining mining as an “essential component of Peru’s sustainable development” (see also Benavides et al., 2016).

Rather than resolving longstanding legacies, sustainability commitments and SDG indicators are far too easily hollowed out or instrumentalized through dynamics of selective capture, stigma and uneven legal terrains. This is far more than a form of institutional distraction. Capturing the sustainability agenda builds legitimacy, enabling concessions that allow for the drying up of lagoons, while stigmatizing indigenous people as anti-development against the public good. Where this is combined with wider governance capture of consultation regimes (Gamu, & Soendergaard 2024), it perpetuates, and even intensifies, the slow violence of extractivism through SDG-sanctioned credit, sustainable reporting and public policy buy-in.

SDG alignment is about selling hope; the same hopes that concession developers bank on when re-selling potential extraction sites not only concerned with mineral and metal reserves, but pitching resources for poverty and hunger eradication, health, clean water and education. Engagement with the SDGs is thus not just a matter of normative meta-alignment, but more fundamentally used to reproduce unequal relationships, while undoing the legitimacy of indigenous territorialities and their defenders in contested geographies. Extractive violence, in other words encompasses much more than physical displacement and legal enclosure of commons fueled in discursive and capital terms by the legitimacy of sustainability.

The paper furthermore demonstrates how other forms of identity stigmatization, legal and narrative sustainability violence are intertwined and arguably constitutive of mutually enabling the structural violence of the extractive industries. Indeed, the very compartmentalisation or fragmentation of commons management replaced by privatised territorialities is not coincidental, but a form of institutional violence. This not only fails to reassert the relevance of alternative development visions but also deepens the stigmatization and othering of commons defenders criminalized anti-development activists. SDG normativity thereby does not alleviate socio-environmental pressures, but legitimizes and thus conceals dynamics of dispossession, commons enclosures and the cheapening of land and people in a normative hierarchy shaped by neoliberal discourse. If the SDGs have specific targets to end violence against children, their contributing role in reproducing structural forms of violence, highlighted here, is rarely discussed sufficiently.

Unpacking new forms and practices that render mining acceptable, sustainable and viable, while perpetuating violence, is long overdue. In 2023, the Peruvian minister of economy and finance noted how they “worked a series of means to improve mining projects” … “without lowering standards of quality, environment respect of communities”.²⁹ The notion of maintaining the viability (viabilidad) of mining projects was at the heart of the strategy, as a balancing act between different ministries and the corporate sector to reactivate strategic projects, even if it threatened community viability. Within hegemonic extractivism, governing through development policy and the SDGs reveals not just the powerplay and antipolitics involved, but also the uneven terrains of socio-ecological debate within the official development agenda. To put it simply, if development objectives are being weaponized – serving to hurt and do harm – then this obviously needs public policy attention and a paradigm shift.As a hollowed-out mode of governance, it reveals the urgency of policy debates that link discussions around commons with intersecting questions of identity politics, collective rights and extractive violence in the mining field.