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"Natural resource extraction has fueled protest movements in Latin America and existing research has drawn considerable scholarly attention to the politics of antimarket contention at the national level, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. Despite its residents reporting the third-highest level of protest participation in the region, Peru has been largely ignored in these discussions. In this groundbreaking study, Moisés Arce exposes a longstanding climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action. Through empirical analysis of protest events over thirty-one years, extensive personal interviews with policymakers and societal actors, and individual case studies of major protest episodes, Arce follows the ebb and flow of Peruvian protests over time and space to show the territorial unevenness of democracy, resource extraction, and antimarket contentions. Employing political process theory, Arce builds an interactive framework that views the moderating role of democracy, the quality of institutional representation as embodied in political parties, and most critically, the level of political party competition as determinants in the variation of protest and subsequent government response. Overall, he finds that both the fluidity and fragmentation of political parties at the subnational level impair the mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness often attributed to party competition. Thus, as political fragmentation increases, political opportunities expand, and contention rises. These dynamics in turn shape the long-term development of the state. Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru will inform students and scholars of globalization, market transitions, political science, contentious politics and Latin America generally, as a comparative analysis relating natural resource extraction to democratic processes both regionally and internationally"--

Consider a lobby group of exhaustible-resource suppliers, which bargains with the government over the extraction of an exhaustible resource and over contribution payments. We characterize the path of contributions and the resulting extraction path, taking into account how the environmental damage of resource usage and the demand elasticity change optimal extraction. A high marginal environmental flow damage reduces the government s preferred speed of extraction, a low price elasticity of resource demand reduces that of the lobby. Moreover, the lobby s preferred total extraction exceeds that of the government whenever environmental stock damages exist. Contribution payments are usually positive and declining, along with the conflict of interest between the government and the lobby. In some cases, they may be increasing for while, possibly from a negative level, but they eventually decline and vanish in the long run.

This paper analyzes resource partnerships and their influence on the environmental quality in a resource-rich country by introducing incomplete contracts, imperfect property rights protection, and a lack of valuation for the environment by the government in the South. Employing numerical simulations, I determine the equilibrium extraction rate, the applied extraction technology, and the environmental quality in dependence of the state of democracy in the resource-rich country. In contrast to what one might expect, under certain circumstances it can be environmentally beneficial to have incomplete contracts that induce the utilization of a suboptimal technology for resource extraction. Further, reducing the holdup problem by shifting bargaining power to the North, is only desirable if the environmental quality increases with a better extraction technology.

We analyze resource extraction in a political economy setting by introducing a political leader who optimizes both his own and the society's welfare function. We find that accounting for the private utility of a political elite, its higher discount rate and a different time horizon generally speeds up extraction. The higher than optimal resource extraction is not only relevant in welfare terms, but also regarding possible consequences with respect to climate change. The effect of higher extraction caused by a political leader directly accroaching resources does not hold in a decentralized private ownership economy where the government strives to raise revenues through taxation. We endogenize the political economy framework and show that the politician's discount factor is higher than the social discount factor due to the probability of losing power. The weight that the political leader attaches to social welfare is determined by the way the probability of staying in power depends on the welfare of the society.