Suchergebnisse

Introduction : shaping resource extraction -- A regional capital : Belo Horizonte -- A mining town constellation : María Elena -- Petrol encampments : Judibana and El Tablazo -- A new industrial frontier : Ciudad Guayana -- Pioneering modernity : Vila Piloto -- Epilogue : the legacy of resource extraction urbanism and the future of the South American hinterland

The extraction of natural resources in Peru has led to an impressive economic expansion, but the country has also had more than its share of protests against resource extraction. The conventional wisdom on mobilizations against extraction emphasizes their geographical dispersion throughout the country, the presence of weak protest movement organizations, and, ultimately, their minimal influence on national outcomes. Drawing on data from fieldwork and interviews, I identify the types of mobilizations that are more likely to lead to organized and sustained challenges against resource extraction. Following contributions on the political consequences of movements, I explain the conditions associated with positive movement outcomes as well as the types of collective goods produced by these mobilizations. Insofar as the extraction of natural resources is pivotal to a country's political economy, the political consequences of protests over extraction in Peru have important ramifications for similar resource-based growth policies elsewhere in the developing world.

This article introduces a Special Section on time and temporality in natural resource extraction. The Special Section illuminates the importance of both resource temporalities and temporal strategies around resource extraction, including nostalgia and identity, political strategies to delay projects, and contested attempts at predicting and managing the future. In addressing these themes, contributors highlight divergent spatio-temporalities and memories of extractive landscapes, local people's anticipation of future effects from mining, and governmental and corporate practices to speed up project implementation. We suggest that various temporal aspects – such as history, memory, velocity, delay, and epistemologies of time – play a central role in how struggles and controversies over extractive development manifest in particular places. We also offer additional avenues for research on contested understandings of time and temporality in political ecology.Keywords: natural resources, extractive industry, temporality, political ecology

This article introduces a Special Section on time and temporality in natural resource extraction. The Special Section illuminates the importance of both resource temporalities and temporal strategies around resource extraction, including nostalgia and identity, political strategies to delay projects, and contested attempts at predicting and managing the future. In addressing these themes, contributors highlight divergent spatio-temporalities and memories of extractive landscapes, local people's anticipation of future effects from mining, and governmental and corporate practices to speed up project implementation. We suggest that various temporal aspects – such as history, memory, velocity, delay, and epistemologies of time – play a central role in how struggles and controversies over extractive development manifest in particular places. We also offer additional avenues for research on contested understandings of time and temporality in political ecology.Keywords: natural resources, extractive industry, temporality, political ecology

In an extractive economy with territorially uneven costs and benefits, who should decide the fate of oil and mining projects: directly affected minorities or national citizenries? I reframe this question empirically: How are the collective identities and interests attached to various scales of democracy politically constructed in the increasingly frequent conflicts over resource extraction in Latin America, and what can we learn from these conflicts about broader dynamics of democratic contestation? To answer this question, I propose the concept of scaling democracy: the agonistic processes by which the scales of democratic decision-making and the democratic people are contested, established, and transformed. The concept of scaling democracy draws our attention to the ways in which the collective identities and interests attached to the various scales of democracy are constructed. These interest-articulations and collective identities are shaped by available institutional norms, organizational infrastructures, and social meanings. I draw on data from participant observation of a community mining consultation in Ecuador, and show that participatory institutions in the arena of resource extraction have fueled a contentious process of scaling democracy, with broader implications for the study of participatory democracy and scholarship on the relationship between resource-dependency and democracy.

"President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens' Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens' Revolution and other "Pink Tide" governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era."--Publisher description.

The goal of this article is to demonstrate that environmental sociologists cannot fully explain the relationship between humans and the natural world without theorizing a link between natural resource extraction, armed violence, and environmental degradation. The authors begin by arguing that armed violence is one of several overlapping mechanisms that provide powerful actors with the means to (a) prevail over others in conflicts over natural resources and (b) ensure that natural resources critical to industrial production and state power continue to be extracted and sold in sufficient quantities to promote capital accumulation, state power, and ecological unequal exchange. The authors then identify 10 minerals that are critical to the functioning of the U.S. economy and/or military and demonstrate that the extraction of these minerals often involves the use of armed violence. They further demonstrate that armed violence is associated with the activities of the world's three largest mining companies, with African mines that receive World Bank funding, and with petroleum and rainforest timber extraction. The authors conclude that the natural resource base on which industrial societies stand is constructed in large part through the use and threatened use of armed violence. As a result, armed violence plays a critical role in fostering environmental degradation and ecological unequal exchange.

The government contracts with a foreign firm to extract a natural resource that requires an upfront investment and which faces price uncertainty. In states where profits are high, there is a likelihood of expropriation, which generates a social cost that increases with the expropriated value. In this environment, the planner's optimal contract avoids states with high probability of expropriation. The contract can be implemented via a competitive auction with reasonable informational requirements. The bidding variable is a cap on the present value of discounted revenues, and the firm with the lowest bid wins the contract. The basic framework is extended to incorporate government subsidies, unenforceable investment effort and political moral hazard, and the general thrust of the results described above is preserved.

"Extraction/Exclusion makes visible the political and practical exclusions shaped by resource extraction. Drawing on scholarship from across the social sciences, the volume portrays how inclusionary language and practices often result in further exclusions, concealing unchanged systems of domination and dispossession"--

International audience ; How will countries harvesting mobile natural resources react to the possibility of regime shift? We address the non-cooperative exploitation of a migratory renewable resource in the presence of possible regime shift that affects its movement. Motivated by the anticipated effects of climate change, we model a regime shift that will alter the spatial movement patterns of the resource at some point in the future. We develop a stochastic spatial bioeconomic model to address the effects of this class of regime shift on non-cooperative harvest decisions made by decentralized owners such as countries exploiting a migratory fish or other natural resource stock. We find that the threat of a future shift modies the standard golden rule and may induce more aggressive harvest everywhere, irrespective of whether the owner will be advantaged or disadvantaged by the shift. We also identify conditions under which the threat of regime shift induces owners to reduce harvest rates in advance of the shift. Our analysis suggests that different property rights structures (single ownership vs common property) or heterogeneous growth can give rise to previously unexplored incentives and can even reverse conventional wisdom about how countries will react to the prospect of future environmental change

International audience ; How will countries harvesting mobile natural resources react to the possibility of regime shift? We address the non-cooperative exploitation of a migratory renewable resource in the presence of possible regime shift that affects its movement. Motivated by the anticipated effects of climate change, we model a regime shift that will alter the spatial movement patterns of the resource at some point in the future. We develop a stochastic spatial bioeconomic model to address the effects of this class of regime shift on non-cooperative harvest decisions made by decentralized owners such as countries exploiting a migratory fish or other natural resource stock. We find that the threat of a future shift modies the standard golden rule and may induce more aggressive harvest everywhere, irrespective of whether the owner will be advantaged or disadvantaged by the shift. We also identify conditions under which the threat of regime shift induces owners to reduce harvest rates in advance of the shift. Our analysis suggests that different property rights structures (single ownership vs common property) or heterogeneous growth can give rise to previously unexplored incentives and can even reverse conventional wisdom about how countries will react to the prospect of future environmental change