Denise Humphreys Bebbington

Post-what? Extractive industries, narratives of development and socio-environmental disputes across the (ostensibly changing) Andean region

Lima, 2011: A colleague begins a postgraduate seminar on extractive industries by presenting students, drawn from across Latin America, with a series of quotations on the relationships between extraction, development strategy, and society. The quotations are unlabeled, though the students are told that they come from Latin American presidents and vice presidents, representing political positions ranging from the self-consciously neoliberal to the ostensibly post-neoliberal. The task was to assign the quotations to these politically very different leaders. The success rate was not high. The point, of course, was to suggest that extractive economies can do strange things to politics, reining in the possibilities of innovation even under progressive government.

Extraction, Territory, and Inequalities: Gas in the Bolivian Chaco

Abstract Conflicts over extractive industry have emerged as one of the most visible and potentially explosive terrains forstruggles over distribution, territory, and inequality in the Andes. We explore these relationships in Bolivia, focusing on gas extraction in the Chaco region of the southeastern department of Tarija. We consider how the expansion of extractive industry intersects with territorializing projects of state, sub-national elites, and indigenous actors as well as with questions of inequality and inequity. We conclude that arguments over the territorial constitution of Bolivia are inevitably also arguments over gas and the contested concepts of equity underlying its governance.

Anatomy of a Regional Conflict Tarija and Resource Grievances in Morales’s Bolivia

In 2008, the Department of Tarija became the epicenter of national political struggles over political autonomy for lowland regions at odds with the Morales administration. In September, following a series of regional referenda on autonomy and a national recall election, citizen committees in Tarija mobilized urban-based sectors and organized a general strike against the central government. It is unhelpful to understand the strike as simply an act of political sabotage orchestrated by racist regional elites. The factors driving protest and interest in autonomy are varied and deeply related to patterns of hydrocarbons extraction in the department that have allowed for the mobilization of grievances and the cultivation of resource regionalism at departmental and intradepartmental scales. Alongside class and ethnicity, identities of place and region can be equally important in processes of mobilization, and the resonance of these spatialized identities is particularly important in resource-extraction peripheries.

Political Settlements and the Governance of Extractive Industry: A Comparative Analysis of the Longue Durée in Africa and Latin America

This paper synthesises findings from research in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru and Zambia to address the following three questions: 1) How does the nature of political settlements affect the governance of the mining and hydrocarbon sectors and the relationships between those sectors and patterns of social inclusion and exclusion? 2) How do the circulation of ideas and the materiality of the resources in question affect this relationship? 3) What is the role of transnational ideational, institutional and political economic factors in these relationships? These questions are approached by considering the relationships between political settlements and extractive industry since the late 19th century, with special emphasis on the last three decades. The paper concludes that the nature of settlements has had important implications for the relationships between resource-dependent economies and the nature and degree of social inclusion, but far less effect on productive structure, with no political settlement having particular success in fostering economic diversification or reducing the weight of resource rents within the national economy. The paper also concludes that the very nature of the extractive economy influences the dynamics of national political settlements for the following reasons. First, the potential rents that resource extraction makes possible, and the high cost of engaging in mining or hydrocarbon industries, create incentives for particular forms of political exclusion. Second, colonial and post-colonial histories of resource extraction give political valence to ideas that have helped mobilise actors in ways that change relations of power and institutional arrangements. Third, the materiality of subsoil resources has direct implications for subnational forms of holding power that can influence resource access and control. Finally, the global nature of mineral and hydrocarbon economies, combined with the materiality of resources, bring both transnational and local political actors into the constitution of national political settlements. This makes for a particularly complex politics of scale surrounding settlements in resource-dependent economies.