Boom times for technocrats? How environmental consulting companies shape mining governance

Scholarship has begun to acknowledge the environmental impact assessment as a key phenomenon in the mineral production process, but little literature has paid attention to the environmental consulting companies that produce these studies. This paper, based on semi-structured interviews in Guatemala with environmental consultants, representatives of the mining industry, and state functionaries, develops an ethnographic portrait of these consulting firms and their workers. Mining companies and environmental consulting firms, I argue, are structurally dependent on one another. Beyond their surface role as independent technicians, environmental consultants serve as facilitators for mining firms, helping them navigate the state bureaucracy and streamline the approval of their production licenses. These consultants further serve the mining industry by absorbing risk that corresponds with miners. As mining expanded between 2002 and 2012, the environmental consulting industry experienced a corresponding spike. This upstream boom in environmental consulting drove down the price of impact assessments, diluted their quality and rendered their role in environmental governance largely symbolic. Their roles as mining boosters traps environmental consultants between competing motivations-the drive of their expertise and training to act as competent and transparent technicians-and the flush of boom times which produces an inverse relationship between competence and lucre.