Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding Community Resilience in Response to Industrial Mine Closure and Industrial Decline

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Throughout the United States many communities closely tied to extractive industries have been subject to intensive periods of booming growth and often-subsequent decline. Closures of industrial extractive industries often have long standing social impacts that are currently poorly understood. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores what role local moral, ethical, and religious values have for people in these communities struggling against dramatic geopolitical and economic decline. The findings can be extrapolated and inform other contexts where scientists are attempting to understand human resilience in response to socioeconomic and ecological stress. Jordan Haug, under the supervision of Suzanne Brenner of the University of California at San Diego, aims to understand the impact of industrial mine closure and industrial decline on local communities, as well as how communities vary in their response to those impacts. The research takes place on the island of Misima, Papua New Guinea, which in 2004 became the site of one of the most significant industrial mine closures in Oceania. Since that time, the possibilities for the island's geopolitical, infrastructural, and economic advancement have dramatically declined. Misimans have responded to these challenges by engaging in a number of moral projects in the area of education, cooperative fund raising, and Christian worship. This research asks whether these moral projects enable Misimans to overcome the seemingly insurmountable pressures of inequality and decline. Through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methods approach of participant observation, personal interviews, group discussions, and household surveys, this project will seek to understand the long-term social impacts of mine closure on the island of Misima. In doing so, this project aims to make broad contributions to the scientific study of the economic and social impacts of extractive industries on vulnerable communities and how such communities seek to overcome the challenges of decline. By understanding how Misimans respond to a decade of decline, this project seeks to provide possible answers for similar communities through the world, and the United States, may be able to similarly deal with the pressures of industrial closure and decline.