Extractivism of the poor: Natural resource commodification and its discontents

Orihuela, José Carlos; Cavero, Carlos Pérez; Contreras, Cesar

doi:10.1016/j.exis.2021.100986

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Argentine provinces offer an excellent setting for exploring modes of extraction. The broad range of various extraction outcomes across lithium-mining projects, which includes uncontested and peacefully negotiated cases as well as conflictual ones, makes it easier to get beyond the one-sided focus on social conflict seen in much previous research on mining in South America (Orihuela et al 2022;Walter and Wagner 2021). Argentine provincial governments are constitutionally mandated to administer mineral wealth and authorized to levy royalties, and they enjoy discretion both in regulating mining and using the revenues it generates.…”

Section: Case Selection and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modes of Extraction in Latin America’s Lithium Triangle: Explaining Negotiated, Unnegotiated, and Aborted Mining Projects

González¹,

Snyder²

2022

Lat Am Polit Soc

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Mitigating climate change requires a global transition from fossil fuels to a “green economy” driven by renewable energies. This shift has fostered massive investments in mining resources, notably lithium in South America, needed to store renewable energies. These mining ventures often produce harmful externalities where lithium is located. In Argentina, a major producer, striking variation has occurred in the fortunes of lithium-mining projects. In some instances, mining companies offered concessions that mitigated environmental damage and improved local socioeconomic conditions. In others, companies made minimal concessions, and in a third set they halted projects in response to local resistance. Why do mining ventures result alternatively in negotiated, unnegotiated, or aborted extraction? The article proposes a new typology of modes of extraction together with a multilevel explanatory framework that centers on the strengths and strategies of transnational mining companies, subnational governments, and local communities in setting the terms for extracting lithium.

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Section: Case Selection and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modes of Extraction in Latin America’s Lithium Triangle: Explaining Negotiated, Unnegotiated, and Aborted Mining Projects

González¹,

Snyder²

2022

Lat Am Polit Soc

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“…Peru’s environmental agencies Organismo de Evaluación y Fiscalización Ambiental (Environmental Evaluation and Enforcement Agency/OEFA) and Fiscalías Especializadas en Materia Ambiental (Specialised Prosecutors in Environmental Matters/FEMA) are under-resourced and exist in a political context where neoliberal values and private interests continue to guide institutional practices despite shifting political pressures both inside and outside of government (Gonzalez, 2019; Orihuela et al., 2021; Paredes and Figueroa, 2021; Vergara and Encinas, 2016). For Indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples, this can lead to inequalities of access to support, reliance on NGOs (Gonzalez, 2019), and delayed and inconsistent responses from national agencies (Orihuela et al., 2021). As Steffen Dalsgaard (2013) argues, the state is not only reproduced spatially, materially, and institutionally over time ; it is also constituted by the temporal practices of state agents and authorities, and the conditions and durations of their attention and responses.…”

Section: Alert and Delaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

Lewis Hood,

Gabrys

2024

Environ Plan D

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Forests are zones of multiple temporalities. They keep time and are constituted through time-keeping practices. Digital technologies of environmental monitoring and management increasingly organise forest temporalities. This article considers how emerging techno-temporalities measure, pace, and transform forest worlds while reproducing and reconfiguring longer durations of colonial and capitalist technologies. We draw together scholarship on political forests, digital media temporalities, and anti-colonial and Indigenous thinking to analyse the politics of time that materialise through digital technologies and shape what forest pasts, presents, and futures are senseable and possible. In particular, we trace the socio-technical production of the ‘real-time’ as a temporal register of experiencing, knowing, and governing forest environments. Analysing a real-time deforestation alert system in the Amazon, we consider how these temporalities valorise immediate, continuous forest data that can be mobilised for understanding and protecting forests, while simultaneously glossing over durational colonial and capitalist framings of forests that rely on dispossession, extraction, and enclosure. The second half of the article turns to Indigenous futurisms and artistic and socio-political uses of digital platforms that rework forest temporalities. By analysing these multiple and sometimes contradictory temporalities, we suggest that these practices and interventions can challenge dominant timelines and their inequities through pluralistic and redistributive configurations of temporality, land, and data sovereignty.

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“…This neglect of firm responses can no longer be justified, in light of both recent theorizing that shows mine-community relations to be more varied in nature and outcome than the emblematic cases would suggest (Perla 2014; Paredes 2022) and empirical evidence from larger- N studies that negotiated continuity is, in fact, the dominant tendency in the sector (Haslam and Ary Tanimoune 2016; Akchurin 2020; Orihuela et al 2022; Jaskoski 2022). In this context, we need to consider that firm responses could be part of the explanation for the failure of social mobilization and the absence of regulatory intervention in the resource sector.…”

Section: Firms At the Center Of The Politics Of Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Protestors with “all or nothing” motivations (Arellano-Yanguas 2011), and more recently identified in the literature as environmental justice movements (Scheidel et al 2020) that call for a rejection of “extractivism,” simply cannot be accommodated by the company (Mena and Waeger 2014). However, it is also important to recognize that many mining disputes have a distributional logic that makes negotiation about mitigation, compensation, and benefits possible (Perla 2014; Amengual 2018; Betchum 2018; Orihuela et al 2022; Paredes 2022).…”

Section: The Corporate Translation Of Activist Demandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also aims to identify the conditions that make corporate responses to protest more and less effective. More generally, it offers an explanation for the observation by quantitative researchers that frequently, mining projects neither generate much social conflict nor attract the regulatory attention of the state (Haslam and Ary Tanimoune 2016; Akchurin 2020; Orihuela et al 2022).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Lost in Corporate Translation: How Firms Mediate Between Social Mobilization and Regulatory Intervention in the Extractive Sector

Haslam¹,

Godfrid²

2023

Lat Am Polit Soc

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Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

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Extractivism of the poor: Natural resource commodification and its discontents

Cited by 11 publications

References 45 publications

Modes of Extraction in Latin America’s Lithium Triangle: Explaining Negotiated, Unnegotiated, and Aborted Mining Projects

Modes of Extraction in Latin America’s Lithium Triangle: Explaining Negotiated, Unnegotiated, and Aborted Mining Projects

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

Lost in Corporate Translation: How Firms Mediate Between Social Mobilization and Regulatory Intervention in the Extractive Sector

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