Romanian Glocalization. Case Study on the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation Mining Project

At the end of the communist era, which was characterised as a closed social experiment, Romania found itself in the middle of a globalization process. Its industrial capacities have been considerably reduced through a poor and spendthrift management. There was a mass exodus of the labour force abroad and the educational background for the remaining part was no longer in agreement with the labour market. On these grounds, the vectors of globalization, in the form of foreign investments, entered Romania effortlessly. There even were local communities where the arrival of foreign investors was expected like a second coming of Christ. This is the context in which a Canadian company set forth the mining project Rosia Montana Gold Corporation. The implementation of the project should have started in 2005. Nevertheless, the project has not been effectively launched yet. This situation is based on what we call Romanian glocalization, namely a specific confrontation between global and local on Romanian land. The global, in this confrontation, is not immediately and necessarily the winner. The local particularities provide a specific configuration to the global, and this is precisely the definition of glocalization. The present study uses a synthesis proceeding from a series of research developed by the author, under his direct coordination or through his substantial collaboration, in the impact area of the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation project. The present work focused on: 1) the psychosocial and residential impact of the RMGC project; 2) inhabitants' representations the projects impact; 3) subjective dimensions for the quality of life in the impact area of the project; 4) comparative representations of traditional and modern mining. The conclusion of this study is open to future research: at a local level, the effects of globalization are not nonlinear, but much more complex and at least bilinear, that is to say, from global to local (the efforts for the implementation of the RMGC project) and from local to global (the delay on the implementation process and the potential of a deeply localized implementation).