Environmental governance has emerged as both a key organizing concept and priority arena of research for nature-society geographers. This article offers a critical review of the burgeoning geographical literature on environmental governance, emphasizing how geographers have employed the concept to analyze how neoliberal globalization has entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of the organizational and institutional arrangements through which society-environment relations are governed. I begin by tracing the diverse bodies of scholarship and theoretical perspectives -including political ecology and institutional theories of political economy -that have shaped how geographers have approached environmental governance. I then examine three themes central to work on the 'neoliberalization' of environmental governance: privatization and enclosure, the rescaling of governance, and the role of oppositional social movements. Finally, I propose that future research place more emphasis on documenting and analyzing the practices of neoliberal environmental governance through ethnographic methods.

This paper examines the new forms of regulation and resistance accompanying the expanding extractive frontier in Andean Peru. It does so through an analysis of a process of community mobilization at the Pierina gold mine in the region of Ancash that was aimed at transforming the conditions under which area residents labored at the mine. The article documents the complex ways in which the emergence of neoliberalized forms of resource governance has affected the terrain of mining‐related sociopolitical struggle at Pierina, both allowing the mining firm to consolidate authority in the arena of mine–community relations, while also establishing certain conditions for residents to pursue their interests collectively. An analysis of the Pierina case suggests that efforts to forge more just and equitable political economies of mineral development must not only challenge the neoliberalization of resource governance, but also confront the underlying socio‐ecological contradictions of contemporary capitalist resource development.

In this article we analyse and theorise how power is exercised and subjectivities reworked to achieve and maintain socio‐political order in areas of large‐scale international extractive investment. Through a critical review of recent literature on the political ecologies of the international mining and hydrocarbon industries, we explore the strategies that firms and their allies deploy to secure and preserve the transformed relations of land and resource access upon which accumulation relies. Inspired by the work of John Allen we analyse these strategies with attention to the modalities and techniques of power used, highlighting the diverse ways socio‐political stability is pursued despite the industry’s destabilising effects. What emerges is that, contrasting the sector’s reputation for coercion and domination, transformed regimes of access to land and resources at the extractive frontier are to a significant degree achieved and stabilised through what Allen calls the “quieter registers” of power. Attention to the varied and overlapping ways extractive firms and their allies exercise power to secure and maintain access to land and resources highlights limitations to David Harvey’s influential accumulation by dispossession framework for understanding how extractive capital circulates into “new ground.” It also directs attention to processes of subject formation at the extractive frontier, and to how industry expansion may be facilitated through the production of particular kinds of subjects. To illustrate this, we outline three interrelated ways subjectivities are reworked through peoples’ encounters with the logics, materiality, and power of contemporary extractive industry. We suggest that those living in the shadow of large international extractive operations become extractive subjects.

In Peru the recent growth of the mining economy has generated conflicts that often revolve around the environmental impacts of extraction. This paper examines a regulatory mechanism that has emerged as a response to these conflicts: participatory environmental monitoring. Focusing on a monitoring committee in the region of Ancash, I assess the committee's efforts to generate shared understandings about mining's environmental impacts, while also analyzing the consequences of the committee's work for the claimsmaking efforts of affected populations. I find that, while the work of the committee has not led to a cohesive environmental knowledge community, it has shaped the dynamics of mining-related struggle. Through its privileging of an expert framework for knowing and judging water quality, the committee has helped to demarcate the boundaries of credible environmental knowledge in ways that tend to constrain the capacity of area residents to hold the mining firm accountable for observed impacts on downstream water resources. My analysis points to the ongoing need to examine the uneven social effects that may fiow from the privileging of particular knowledge systems and administrative rationalities within resource governance frameworks.