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This article systematically analyzes how the participatory institution “prior consultation” indirectly gave Colombian indigenous communities a voice in five major hydrocarbon and mining conflicts by creating opportunities to organize around the institution. Mobilized indigenous groups did not express their concerns about extraction within the prescribed prior consultation meetings. Instead, they refused to be consulted, they challenged the lack of, or their exclusion from, prior consultation, and they preemptively achieved environmental protections. Variation in tactics is explained by (1) the stage of the planned extraction, (2) whether the state initially determined that a community was affected by the extraction, and (3) the degree of unity among affected communities. The article further highlights the role of Colombia’s Constitutional Court in interpreting and weighing the rights that underlie prior consultation procedures.

AbstractThis article challenges two prominent explanations for military behavior: militaries, like other bureaucracies, will seek to maximize their budgets; and in the interest of maintaining professionalism, militaries will perform sovereignty missions—external defense and counterinsurgency—more intensively than policing functions. Running counter to these expectations, since 2000, Ecuador’s army has neglected its professional, lucrative mission of northern border defense, instead focusing on police work. The analysis applies organization theory to argue that the army’s minimal border defense efforts have been a way to maintain predictability for patrols on the ground, the part of the army that most directly performs the army’s core function of security. Specifically, the article traces how a contradiction has emerged in the army’s border mission. The contradiction has meant anything but predictability for the work of troops patrolling the border, compromising the mission.

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This chapter introduces varied ways that communities in hydrocarbon and mining zones have utilized participatory institutions in extractive conflict, and summarizes how the book draws on and contributes to the literatures on social conflict in extractive industries, theories of institutional change, and participatory institutions that incorporate civil society into local policymaking. The chapter also reviews the logic employed in the selection of thirty extractive conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru for the study, and introduces the book’s causal framework for understanding variation in community uses of participatory institutions. The argument centers on certain challenges to participation that communities in the conflicts faced: the trials of initiating participatory events, gaining inclusion in participatory processes, and, for included communities, expressing views about extraction at the participatory stage.