“I will sample until things get better – or until I die.” Potential and limits of citizen science to promote social accountability for environmental pollution

Désirée Ruppen and Fritz Brugger

World Development, 2022, vol. 157, issue C

Abstract: Mining can cause harm to both human health and ecosystems. Regulators in low-income countries often struggle to enforce decent environmental standards due to financial, technical, and personal capacity constraints and political capture. In such settings, social accountability strategies are often promoted through which citizens attempt to hold governmental and private actors directly to account and demand better governance. However, social accountability initiatives are rarely effective. We demonstrate how political ecology analysis can inform social accountability theory and practice by identifying the power structures that define the potentials and limits of a social accountability strategy. We study the coal mining area of Hwange in Western Zimbabwe, where mining not only supplies coal to power plants and factories of multinational companies but also pollutes the Deka River. Together with local community monitors, we implemented the first citizen science project conducted in Zimbabwe and identified the sources and extent of the pollution. The scientific data strengthened the community monitors’ advocacy for a cleaner environment and empowered them in their exchanges with the companies and the environmental regulator. However, only some of their demands have been met. The political ecology analysis, spanning from the local to transnational levels, reveals why local social accountability initiatives are insufficient to spring the low-accountability trap in a state captured by a politico-military elite, and why corporate governance regimes have not been successful either. We argue that pro-accountability networks are more effective when they include complementary players such as multinational enterprises, provided their responsible procurement approach moves from a corporate risk management to a developmental logic.

Keywords: Social accountability; Citizen science; Political ecology; Water pollution; Mining; Zimbabwe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22001425
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:157:y:2022:i:c:s0305750x22001425

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105952

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().