Land Use Policy 49 (2015) 104–117 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy jo ur nal ho me pag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol The politics of Land Use Planning: Gold mining in Cajamarca, Peru Ruth Preciado Jeronimo a , Edwin Rap b,∗ , Jeroen Vos c a Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Graduate School, Av. Universitaria 1801, San Miguel, Lima, Peru b International Water Management Institute – Cairo, c/o ICARDA, 15 G. Radwan Ibn El-Tabib Street – Giza, P.O. Box 2416, Cairo, Egypt c Water Resources Management Chairgroup, Environmental Sciences Group, Wageningen University, PO Box 47, 6700AA Wageningen, The Netherlands a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 21 June 2014 Received in revised form 28 June 2015 Accepted 11 July 2015 Keywords: Gold mining Land Use Planning Ecological and Economic Zoning Power struggle Environmental conflicts Peru Languages of valuation Framing GIS a b s t r a c t Ecological and Economic Zoning (EEZ) is a Land Use Planning (LUP) methodology that aims at defining separate areas for productive uses and conservation. EEZ is designed as a method that balances different interests and it devises land use policy through stakeholder participation, technical expertise and GIS modelling. The article presents the case study of EEZ in Cajamarca, Peru to analyse the LUP process in a situation of conflicting interests over future land and water use. Cajamarca is a department with rich gold deposits in the headwater catchment area upstream of the city of Cajamarca. During the last decade, rural communities and urban populations have continuously protested against the opening of new open pit mines, as they fear this will affect their water supply. Therefore, the EEZ process became part of a controversy between a powerful pro-mining coalition led by the central government and a conserva- tion coalition led by the regional government. We conclude that in these circumstances, LUP cannot, technically or politically, accommodate the different values attributed to the headwater catchment. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Mining lies at the centre of the economic policy that many development countries currently adopt to boost economic growth according to the recommendations of international financial institutions. Peru is considered particularly successful with this neoliberal policy because it has generated high rates of economic growth in the past decade. However, neoliberal policy has created its own contradictions. Two of these contradictions are impor- tant for this article. The first contradiction is that the mining revenues are very high, but the mining areas remain very poor. The increased mining exploitation in Peru has raised the number of environment-related conflicts. Indigenous, peasant and urban communities have protested against the use of land and water for mining purposes. Second, this economic policy created unexpected tensions with another neoliberal policy, that of decentralisation. When the central government transferred the authority to develop Land Use Planning (LUP) to a decentralised level (the ‘depart- ments’, now called ‘regions’), it assumed that it was a neutral, technical and a-political planning process. However, such planning remained hugely controversial, and social protests continued. We ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ruthpreciadoj@gmail.com (R. Preciado Jeronimo), e.rap@cgiar.org (E. Rap), jeroen.vos@wur.nl (J. Vos). aim to understand why a technocratic approach to LUP remained so controversial and inadequate, and created political and scientific conflicts between the central and regional governments. The two contradictions introduced above, contextualise the case study that will be presented here. 1. In the region of Cajamarca, LUP became part of a mining con- troversy between the regional government that aimed to conserve the headwaters of strategic river basins (cabaceras de cuenca) and the national government which promoted investment in gold min- ing by transnational companies as part of a ‘national interest’ to generate economic growth (see e.g. Sosa and Zwarteveen, 2012, 2014). We argue that LUP cannot resolve a mining controversy technically or politically, when it fails to accommodate the compet- ing values attributed to contested resources by contending policy coalitions. The unit of analysis of this case study is a regional LUP process in Cajamarca, Peru. This planning process threatened the mining potential in the Mount Quilish and Conga areas for the Yanacocha mining company (Minera Yanacocha S.R.L) as well as other mining projects. The Yanacocha mine is the largest gold mine in South America and the second largest in the world, and is owned by the American Newmont Mining Company, the Peruvian Buenaventura Company and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). The mine produced approximately 530,000 kilos of gold between 2005 and 2013, worth some 15,220 million USD (Newmont Annual http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.07.009 0264-8377/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.