Search

• Existing definitions limit extractivism's analytical and political potential. • These inadequately address the Honduran economy and social movement demands. • A definition must enrich debates and enable binding policy, e.g. bans of extractivism. • Energy generation, undertheorized in extractivism literature, provides key lessons. • Colonialist logics and practices of resource extraction constitute extractivism. Over the last decade, "extractivism" has become one of the most prominent issues in Latin American politics and beyond. Social movements have positioned themselves against, and alternative to, extractivism, and scholars from multiple disciplines have analyzed it. Part of a broader research agenda focused on how alternatives to extractivism emerge and grow, this article grapples with the basic questions: what is "extractivism" and for what is this term useful? Existing definitions and studies of extractivism are found to be in tension with experiences of activist research conducted with anti- and post-extractivist movements in Honduras. The article proposes a revised definition and defends it through theoretical and macro-economically based critiques, as well as a case study. The review challenges three prevalent conceptions of extractivism: as a particular type of extraction, as a development model, and as anything deemed "extractive". Suggesting that entire countries or the entire world circulate around extractivism, the latter two definitions follow a trend termed extractocentrism. Meanwhile, the characteristics of Honduras's economy and the experiences of social movements in Honduras show all three definitions to be limited in political utility. A movement to declare municipalities free of extractivism demonstrates the challenges of extractivism's ambiguous and often totalizing definition. The revised definition emphasizes colonialism but not the north/south dualism, specifies activities but de-emphasizes export, and ends in alternatives rather than extractocentrism. Thus, this paper provides insights to reconceptualize one of the most significant terms used to describe the central issues in nature/society relationships in Latin America, and increasingly elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An economic rationale authorizes militarized conservation in Tanzania. • Those engaged in the illegal killing of wildlife are labeled economic saboteurs. • Various actors use economic threat discourses to justify militarized conservation. • Securing wildlife authorizes problematic partnerships with extractive industries. Having experienced significant declines in its wildlife populations, especially the elephant, Tanzania has embarked on a nation-wide anti-poaching program. These efforts are similar to those in regional countries and informed by security discourses that claim poaching is an issue of (inter)national security. However, far more widespread than the contemporary "poacher-as-terrorist" trope used to rationalize militarized conservation in other locations is Tanzania's categorization of the poacher as an "economic saboteur," who threatens the national economy. In this article, I show how this categorization is one aspect of a broader economic rationale directing the country's increasingly militarized anti-poaching response. Here, the logic is that wildlife is central to the tourism industry, and critical for the economy, and therefore must be secured from its poacher enemies. Highlighting various examples of this economic threat discourse, the article details how conservation organizations and governmental actors, aiming to "stop the slaughter" of Tanzania's elephant populations, utilize an economic rationality in their efforts to defend the value of wildlife to the Tanzanian economy. Premised on the desire to expand the economy, this economic rationale authorizes both the intensification of militarized conservation policy and practices and contradictory partnerships that arise within it, including with the extractive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mining companies restrict imaginable futures to those that favour them. • Restricting certain temporalities is part of mining enclosures in Colombia. • Varied practices and narratives are used to create temporal enclosures. • Temporal enclosure is the sites of activism and moral contention. The creation of spatial enclosures is a well-developed subject in the study of extractive industries. Less attention has been given to the control of time and the future within these socio-spatial contexts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we followed two controversial projects aimed at expanding the biggest open-pit coal mine in Colombia, both of which implied diverting watercourses to extract coal from beneath their riverbed. We describe corporate strategies that give rise to what we call temporal enclosures , the process by which mining companies aim to restrict imaginable outcomes to those that favour them, producing the sense of a manageable and inescapable future in which forthcoming activities are presented as both inevitable and desirable. The temporal enclosure is configured discursively in practices of building engineered landscapes, refashioning relations between the mine and the people, and intensifying the language and practices of nurturing and caring for humans and non-humans around the operation area. However, in the context of increasing pressure regarding the consequences of extractive industries, the dispute over alternative futures becomes a highly relevant political site. We argue that this temporal dimension is interlinked with spatial, political, and economic dynamics around extractive industries and that understanding how temporal enclosures are produced and resisted is essential for envisioning sustainable alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The mining sector holds strategic value to Guatemala's powerful elite. • Violence is part of securing control over the mining sector. • Anti-mining movements threaten the interests of the elite. • Changing elite dynamics sharpen competition over resources and the state apparatus. • Private security providers shape how means of force are used in mining conflicts. Guatemala is one of the most mining conflict prone countries in the world, with disproportionately high levels of violence accompanying the sector. Starting in the early 2000's, the rapid spread of mining projects throughout the country's rural areas engendered widespread popular opposition among affected communities. Anti-mining activism in turn elicited a reaction from the government and the mining sector that was overwhelmingly characterised by violence, repression and criminalisation, making Guatemala one of the most dangerous countries in the world per capita for environmental activists. Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2017, this article examines why mining – an industry of relatively limited economic importance in Guatemala - is accompanied by such high levels of violence and repression. We suggest that mining, rather than having a high economic value, holds strategic value to the country's powerful elite, and that violence is part of securing control over land more generally and operationalising the mining sector in particular. In recent years, Guatemala has witnessed the entrance of new transnational elites associated with multinational mining corporation. While these new elites control access to international markets and technology, they remain in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the old, local elites because the latter still exercise control over crucial political resources, networks of information and land. By forming alliances with and providing services to transnational mining corporations, a faction of the economic elite strengthens and secures its position as a powerful political actor and its access to profitable business, i.e., infrastructure development or selling energy to mining companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Coins the notion of "sedimented subjectivities" to grasp the layering of subject formation in time and space. • Shows how the concept of articulation helps analyze the role of socio-economic position and identities in subject formation. • Emphasizes the importance of "colonial residue" in contemporary subject formation. • Develops a decentred approach to interpellation that foregrounds its dispersed and heterogeneous nature. • Underscores the pertinence of a spatio-temporal perspective on subject formation. In this contribution, we examine how people living around industrial gold mining concessions in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) view themselves in relation to the extractive industries. We apply Hall's notion of articulation to grasp the layering of extractive subject formation in time and space, or what we call the "sedimentation of subjectivities". The lens of articulation allows for a better understanding of how people engage with the subject positions they are interpellated into. Specifically, it helps uncover how this engagement is imprinted by subjects' socio-economic position and historically shaped forms of social identification. The notion of sedimentation, in turn, enables us to trace how the crystallization of subjectivities in one particular conjuncture influences subsequent processes of subject formation – a dynamic with distinct spatial dimensions. People's sense of place, including how they relate to the soil and subsoil, is an important vector of these historical influences. In sum, the notion of sedimented subjectivities captures the spatio-temporal dimensions of subject formation over the longue durée. It therefore helps establish the enduring influence of "colonial residue" on contemporary subject formation. In addition, our approach sheds further light on the overall modest imprint of the governmental schemes of extractive corporations on extractive subject formation. We ascribe this to the heterogeneity and sedimentation of the elements that shape subject formation and the dispersed nature of processes of interpellation. These observations further underscore the pertinence of a spatio-temporal perspective on subject formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The actual extraction of natural resources is territorially tied to their geological occurrence. However, previous studies have shown that a direct strategic coupling with commodity source regions has become increasingly uncommon in the context of the contemporary organization of extractive industries. Instead, extractive Global Production Networks (GPNs) create an ‘intermediate’ step and bundle their activities in so called ‘gateway cities’ outside the resource periphery, from where they integrate the latter. Understanding the underlying rationales and the explicit functions that make these cities essential for the larger production network is crucial in order to understand the spatial configuration of the GPN and the (limited) opportunities for resource peripheries. This paper therefore explores the strategic coupling of two distinct gateway cities (Singapore, Jakarta) in the upstream oil and gas GPN. Based on 31 interviews the article highlights how varying state roles have shaped the spatial configuration of this particular GPN. While the Singaporean state contributed to ‘holding down’ the GPN by transforming its regional assets to the strategic needs of the industry, the ‘detour’ via Jakarta is a consequence of the regulator and producer role of the Indonesian state as well as the spatially unequally distributed institutional capacities across Indonesia. Both influences inhibit opportunities for economic development in commodity source regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the Navajo Green Jobs effort of 2009, an attempt to “transition” energy production from coal to wind and solar for the largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo Nation. Through ethnographic “revisits,” in 2008 and 2013, I argue that Navajo Green Jobs contained two problematic hybrid neoliberal assumptions about governance and development: (1) it decentered governing authority from the tribe to “the community” while undermining the legitimacy of the tribal government, and (2) it promoted private entrepreneurship over public investment as the vehicle for energy transition. Ultimately, the Navajo Nation rejected Navajo Green Jobs and re-appropriated its temporal language in order to justify a reinvestment in coal in the form of a new energy company, NTEC. This article concludes that consideration of the spatial and social embedded nature of energy production is vital for understanding energy transitions today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, shifting strategies of capital accumulation have deepened the integration of land and associated primary commodities into circuits of investment. More than merely an economic revaluation of land, such integration involves an iterative rearrangement of the social and natural processes determining land’s material and symbolic qualities. Highlighting these shifts through a comparative study of investment processes for large-scale agricultural and extractive projects, we posit investment processes as assemblages proceeding in the context of different ontologies, valuations, and uses of land, which coalesce and compete with one other in complex ways, producing new spaces and subjectivities. Such assembling, we suggest, notably involves a discursive component involving the narration of the need for investment, an institutional component reforming regulatory arrangements, and an operational component enrolling labour, infrastructure, and ancillary resources associated with agricultural and extractive production. After examining each of these components in turn, we conclude with a discussion of tensions and contradictions inherent in ‘opening’ lands for investment and the business of harnessing agricultural and extractive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on extraction in the global margins has often emphasised the transformative effects that occur during the process of becoming a 'resource frontier'. However, much of this research often focuses on the spatial transformations, with the temporalities of the resource frontier often being relegated to the background. This article places the temporalities of resource frontiers at the forefront. It does so by exploring the onshore and offshore gas sector in Mtwara, Tanzania, specifically how the international commodity cycle and the lifecycle of natural gas wells changed Mtwara from an 'economic backwater' to a 'resource frontier', and how this reshaping of territory has altered perceptions of time. High global gas prices, combined with the most labour-intensive period of the gas well lifecycle, led to an anticipated resource boom for the region, with national and local elites changing their economic activity in preparation for this boom. Such anticipation was met with promises of increased employment and economic development, and initial changes aided the impression that such anticipation for the boom was justified. When the construction of wells and facilities was finished and global gas prices were falling, Mtwara as a 'resource frontier' was once again reshaped to one of a 'quasi frontier' – where the potential for extraction remains but lacks the correct market factors to fully create an economic 'boom' and become a 'resource frontier'. The result was that while a traditional 'resource boom', did not occur, the speculative effects of extractive investment ensured that both a boom, and a 'bust' occurred in the region, severely affecting short-, medium-, and long-term economic plans of local inhabitants and domestic investors alike, with many negative effects of the boom remaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article offers a critique of the social license concept, and of the debate surrounding it. In order to best understand what is meant by “social license”, one must look beyond its constituent terminology and instead examine the core drivers of contemporary mining practice. The working assumption inside the industry is that if disapproval becomes too intense there is a chance that members of the community will interrupt mining activities. This is what I refer to as ‘the fear of Mineras Interruptus’. If there is any meaning to attribute to the term ‘social license to operate’ – it is to be found in the fear of losing access – because other factors relating to social performance or benefits are considered peripheral. The author argues that the mining industry’s adoption and application of the concept should be viewed critically and not promoted on face value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Describe translocal mobilization against the proposed mining of Niyamgiri. [•] Use DeLanda’s assemblage theory to describe the translocal mobilization. [•] Discuss the emergence of Niyamgiri movement assemblage. [•] Discuss agency, maintenance and power relationships within the assemblage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on the 2011 Annual Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group Lecture, this paper makes the case for a political ecology of the subsoil. Arguing that subsoil resources have received comparatively little attention within the wider corpus of political ecological writing, the paper explores several ways in which the extraction of mineral and hydrocarbon resources is constitutive of, and constituted by, wider capitalist political, economic and institutional arrangements. Drawing on material from El Salvador and the Andean countries, the paper explores the contemporary governance of extractive industries, and points to significant convergence among the approaches taken by neoliberal and ostensibly post-neoliberal regimes alike. The intersections between the extractive economy, livelihoods and patterns of social protest are also explored. Through these examples, the paper also highlights the ways in which “activist political ecologists” play important roles in counter-movements seeking to re-govern the extractive economy. These countermovements are found in both civil society and different parts of the state. Such activist political ecologists are central to the broader enterprise of an “underground political ecology” and are often vital to the success of scholarly interventions in such political ecologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]