The Politics of Extraction: Territorial Rights, Participatory Institutions, and Conflict in Latin America (Studies in Comparative Energy and Environmental Politics) - Softcover

Studies In Comparative Energy And Environmental Politics

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0197812546 ISBN 13: 9780197812549

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Mining and hydrocarbon production in Latin America is high-stakes for extractive firms, communities in resource-rich zones, and states. Amid global commodity price increases and liberal economic policies, the sectors have expanded dramatically in recent decades. This surge has made private investors and governments in the region ever more committed to extraction. It also has increased alarm within local communities, which have organized around the environmental, cultural, and social impacts of mining and hydrocarbons. Moreover, activists have mobilized to demand material benefits, in the forms of royalty distributions and direct company investment in local services and infrastructure. These conflicts take the form of legal battles, large-scale protests, and standoffs that pit communities against companies and the state, and consequently have suspended production, destabilized politics, and expended state security resources.

In The Politics of Extraction, Maiah Jaskoski looks at how mobilized communities in Latin America's hydrocarbon and mining regions use participatory institutions to challenge extraction. In some cases, communities act within formal participatory spaces, while in others, they organize "around" or "in reaction to" these institutions, using participatory procedures as focal points in the escalation of conflict. Based on analysis of thirty major extractive conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru in the 2000s and 2010s, Jaskoski examines community uses of public hearings built into environmental licensing, state-led prior consultation with native communities affected by large-scale development, and local popular consultations or referenda. She finds that communities select their strategies in response to the specific participatory challenges they confront: the trials of initiating participatory processes, gaining inclusion in participatory events, and, for communities with such access, expressing views about extraction at the participatory stage. Surprisingly, the communities least likely to channel their concerns through state institutions are the most unified and have the strongest guarantee of participation. Including a wealth of data and complex stories, Jaskoski provides the first systematic study of how participatory institutions either channel or exacerbate conflict over extraction.

About this title

About the Author

Maiah Jaskoski is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University. She specializes in environmental and indigenous politics, military roles, security privatization, and borders, in Latin America. She is the author of Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes and numerous academic journal articles. She also co-authored and co-edited American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197812546
• ISBN 13: 9780197812549
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296