Relocating Regulation in Montana's Gold Mining Industry

In this paper I seek to make a preliminary link between the discursive representation of the ‘environment’ and the regulation of economic activity. The contemporary Montana gold mining industry belies accounts that economic regulation can be situated purely in concepts of structures and institutions. In the 1990s, the Montana gold mining industry was fundamentally transformed in the absence of concomitant changes in the economic structure of the industry or in the institutions of regulation. Indeed, the changes in the efficacy of the Montana gold mining economy can only be explicated by adding a discursive account of regulation. In particular, I link a regulationist account of reregulation with the post-structural sensibilities found in cultural economic geography. This analysis, which focuses on how nature is represented in the mine-permitting process, illustrates that how we perceive ‘environment’ in particular places and times can influence access to resources and their subsequent physical transformation.