Moreover, the thesis shows how industry standards provide explorationists with repertoires of values that are called upon in order to justify predictions as accurate and precise depictions of the future. With the aid of a detailed study of the valuation processes involved in measuring and predicting the future minability in exploration projects, the thesis demonstrates how risk management in mineral exploration relies both on a continuous addition of measurements and data on different dimensions of “risk” and the bracketing of any uncertainties unaccounted for in exploration practice and standards. Using data from industrial mineral exploration in Sweden, the thesis traces the production and use of predictions across the exploration process, from its early explorative phases to its development into a techno-economic hybrid in advanced stage exploration. Based on a combination of interviews, observations, and archival research, this thesis investigates how explorationists use predictions to manage the material complexities and the uncertainties that contribute to determining the future minability of mineral deposits. This has significant implications for the continued use of pilot projects and raises questions about responsibility and accountability for their outcomes.Īny forward-oriented enterprise must somehow manage the challenges posed by uncertainty and with its distant temporal horizons, high stakes, and low probability of success, mineral exploration is a good illustration of this general rule.
As such, this thesis reconceptualises pilot projects as agents of social change that cannot be contained within project objectives and timelines.
These results contribute to critical debates on international environment and development policy and practice by arguing that rather than delivering innovation and learning, pilot projects reproduce and reinforce the status quo. The final analytical chapter uses a recognition justice lens to explore pilot project evaluations, finding that the ways of knowing, values and perspectives of some actors are discursively reproduced through the process, excluding and delegitimizing alternative perspectives. The second analytical chapter explores the complex dynamics and implications of expectations in pilot projects, identifying a trade-off between fully piloting new initiatives and raising expectations. A contradiction is identified between the design of the pilot projects as experimental and outside of the constraints of existing institutions, and the ability of the projects to have meaningful, longer-term influence. The first unpacks the relationship between pilot projects, policy and practice. Findings are presented in three analytical chapters. An interpretivist-constructivist, actor-based approach to research is taken, using ethnographic data that includes over 150 narrative interviews with conservation and development professionals and actors involved in district and village-level pilot projects. Drawing on political ecology, social anthropology, science and technology studies, social justice theory, and policy studies literature, this thesis critically explores the phenomenon of pilot projects using a case study of REDD+ in Tanzania. However, despite the widespread use of pilot projects, their dynamics, impacts and implications are not well studied. They are framed as mechanisms that provide evidence of 'what works' in order to improve policy and practice. Pilot projects are used as tools to test new solutions to global environment and development concerns including climate change and natural resource management.