New mechanisms of participation in extractive governance: between technologies of governance and resistance work

Abstract

In this special issue, the focus is on the dynamics and use of participatory mechanisms related to the rapid expansion of the extractive industries worldwide and the ways it increasingly affects sensitive natural environments populated by indigenous and other marginalised populations. We offer an empirically grounded and theoretically innovative comparative analysis of practices that aim to enhance participation, negotiation and influence as a response to the expansion of extractive industries. On the one hand, we question the assumption often presented in scholarly debates that participatory processes will contribute to making environmental governance not only more legitimate and effective, but will also lead to the empowerment of marginalised social groups. On the other, we draw on our empirical studies and insights to indicate ways local groups and their allies try to gain ownership and influence decision-making through a range of related participatory mechanisms, ranging from state-led or corporation-led processes like prior consultation and FPIC, compensation practices, participatory planning exercises and the participation in environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to community-led consultations, or community-based or controlled FPIC and impact assessment processes and struggles for community-based governance of natural resource uses.

Keywords:

• Participation and power
• resistance and activism
• resources
• governance

Introduction

The rapid expansion of the extractive industries worldwide increasingly affects sensitive natural environments populated by indigenous and other marginalised populations. Natural resource extraction has led to human rights violations, environmental damages and bitter conflicts between local communities, state institutions and corporations. Struggles over decision-making, development paths, benefits and society–nature relations have been particularly salient in the Global South.¹

In order to reduce the negative impacts and consequences of extraction projects – or, according to a more critical view, to make these industries appear more legitimate – actors of global governance such as the United Nations, the World Bank and many transnational extraction corporations have adopted norms for fostering the participation of affected people in environmental decision-making. The right to prior consultation and to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) concerning measures affecting indigenous peoples is a crucial component of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007. Rodríguez-Garavito² argues that ‘FPIC’s rise and impact in regulations and disputes about indigenous rights have been so profound that instead of merely constituting a legal figure, it entails a new approach to ethnic rights and multiculturalism, with its own language and rules’. Other participatory instruments that are not limited to indigenous people are participation processes in environmental licencing procedures, participatory zoning and related territorial planning, and community-led or municipality-led consultation processes. Already in 1992, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development stated in its principle 10 that ‘environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level’.

In the scholarly debate, it is often suggested that participatory processes will contribute to making environmental governance not only more legitimate and effective, but will also lead to the empowerment of marginalised social groups. Critical study of deliberative and formal participatory processes related to environmental and resource governance reveals, however, that such processes often establish narrow frames for public participation, either by drawing boundaries that separate technical knowledge from political questions by focusing mainly on procedural aspects and contractual obligations, or by reinforcing hegemonic understandings of development and of local people’s relationships to their environment. Many empirical studies show that formal participatory processes in practice often are empty bureaucratic procedures aiming to depoliticize extractive activities, defuse tensions, and enrol community members in state projects of resource extraction.³ Participatory processes are, however, not necessarily contributing to tame dissent. In many cases, new types of conflicts arise, which are often related to what constitute legitimate forms of information, knowledge, impacts and levels of compensation. Local populations affected by resource extraction have often contested top-down events by re-politicising and redefining them.

As we will discuss in depth in this volume, local groups and their allies have in many cases tried to gain ownership and to use state-led or corporation-led processes like prior consultation and FPIC, compensation practices, participatory planning exercises and the participation in environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and environmental and social impact assessments (ESIAs)⁴ or advancing their own aims and interests. In many cases, affected populations have initiated participatory processes ‘from below’, for instance in the form of anti-extraction community-led consultations, or community-based or controlled FPIC and impact assessment processes. Yet in some cases local participation entails (violent) struggles for community-based governance of natural resource uses and traditions.

This volume offers an empirically grounded and theoretically innovative comparative analysis of practices that aim to enhance participation, negotiation and influence as a response to the expansion of extractive industries. We cover a broad range of participatory instruments, which are often interlinked. This means that local populations in many cases use different instruments consecutively or parallel, and sometimes with different aims. Community-led consultations against extraction projects have often been the result of flawed formal participatory processes; the production of alternative knowledge has been a response to corporate-dominated environmental licencing processes, and the claim for meaningful participation in territorial planning a reaction to prior consultation practices characterised by narrow project-specific logics.

We present cases from Latin America, Europe and Australia. Our studies focus on countries heavily dependent on natural resource extraction, and that have recognised indigenous, ethnic or traditional populations, and their participatory rights – albeit to differing extents. Existing forms of participatory mechanisms in these countries are of importance in the negotiations between the state, corporations and local populations and these provide us with rich material for analysis.

Previous research and our approach

Previous research about participatory instruments suggests that they very often establish a narrow framework of participation, curtailing these instruments’ empowering effects. A vast volume of literature has documented the deficiencies of prior consultation processes, such as their narrow project specific logic, the pro-extraction bias of the distributed information and the lack of ownership of these processes by local populations themselves.⁵ Scholars argue that FPIC in practice is often reduced to a system of legal procedures, which dilute and bracket substantial claims such as control over territories and self-determination, and which jeopardise the viability of livelihoods and alternative visions of development and well-being.⁶

Similarly, research on public participation in environmental impact assessments has shown that these processes have usually been ‘invited spaces’,⁷ wherein local actors have little leeway to do anything but legitimise decisions which have already been taken. Other authors examine how these instruments establish the validity of some forms of authority and knowledge over others, limiting the political possibilities of local spokespersons. These instruments, even when successfully including affected populations, tend to narrowly define the spatial, social and temporal effects of extraction.⁸ Minimising the expected socio-environmental impacts has also to do with the fact that corporations finance these studies.⁹ Scientific technical knowledge, local experiential knowledge and ‘corporate science’¹⁰ often compete with each other.¹¹ EIAs create a discourse of accountability parallel to a discourse of science-based management of risk. Hence, many local populations affected by extraction projects have contested the EIAs of planned projects and/or produced alternative knowledge and data to countervail pro-extraction impact assessment studies.

With regard to participatory zoning and related territorial planning, several researchers have addressed the ways in which the application of participatory geographical information systems affects the empowerment of disadvantaged groups. While some claim that the use of a supposedly objective, scientific language and technical tools of decision-makers could contribute to advancing the demands of disadvantaged communities,¹² others remain more sceptical given the cost and difficulty of using the data and the often limited and ineffective forms of community participation.¹³

The articles in this volume are in line with the normative understanding of various researchers that effective participation should be a tool for empowering disadvantaged groups and should thereby contribute to emancipatory transformation.¹⁴ We therefore aim to distance ourselves from the narrow focus on participatory development which pervades mainstream development thinking and research, and which assumes participation to be merely a technical exercise that leaves the core assumptions of development untouched. Instead, we share a political sense of agency; in other words, we focus not only on the local level but also on wider institutional and structural contexts, and on power relations that enable or limit emancipatory participation,¹⁵ potentially including alternative development paths. By taking this analytical stance, we extend the existing literature concerning the ‘anti-politics of public participation’¹⁶ and local contestations thereof, by shedding light on the agency and the diverse initiatives of local populations to shape decisions over resource extraction according to their own aims, projects and life plans. Such initiatives often lead to new conflicts related to what constitutes legitimate forms of risk and impact assessment, levels of compensation, control over resource management and/or alternative development paths.

Consequently, the main questions guiding all contributions to this volume are:

What are the alternative and emergent uses of participatory instruments that allow culturally diverse groups and local populations to articulate their interests regarding extractive projects and that influence their outcomes? 

To what extent does the use of participatory instruments enable these groups to gain control over their territories and lands, or over vital resources, and to make their livelihoods and priorities viable?

To answer these questions, the articles focus on differing cases of interaction and contestation between the state and extraction corporations on one hand, and local indigenous and non-indigenous populations on the other. We recognise that these groups of actors do not constitute monolithic entities. The authors’ in-depth knowledge of each of the cases included in this volume, coupled with their use of ethnographic and other qualitative methods, reveals the ways in which divergent and heterogeneous state formations, corporate bodies and local populations have shaped participatory processes and their impacts. Such empirically grounded, differentiated insights into local perspectives and agency contribute to new understanding of the potential and limitations of current diverse forms of participation, which are embedded in concrete social and cultural contexts.

The contributions in this volume

The contributions in this volume put into conversation distinctive yet interrelated perspectives on the generative uses, and limitations, of instruments of participation. Some of the articles approach local populations’ use of these instruments as contestations of formal procedures and processes, and attempt to dispute constrained or invited spaces. Schilling-Vacaflor’s article, ‘Who controls the territory and the resources? Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) as a contested human rights practice in Bolivia’, illustrates the proactive role that Bolivia’s Guaraní people have assumed to appropriate themselves of prior consultation processes, in order to use them for furthering their own aims. In the process of doing so, the Guaraní have lobbied for the recognition of FPIC within the state’s domestic legislation. They have also tried to shape consultation processes by gaining ownership of these processes, by challenging the distributed information, by trying to modify hydrocarbon activities, by using consultation processes to negotiate compensation payments and by establishing indigenous socio-environmental monitoring systems. The article clearly evinces that the Guaraní initiatives for shaping consultation processes have followed their aim of gaining an influential say over hydrocarbon projects affecting them. In addition, their engagement in prior consultation has been just one aspect of a multi-faceted struggle for territory, autonomy and self-determination.

‘Weaving hope in ancestral black and indigenous territories in Colombia: the reach and limitations of free, prior, and informed consultation and consent’ by Machado, López-Matta, Campo, Escobar and Weitzner analyses the potentials and limitations of a process of prior consultation and FPIC for the environmental management plan of a large hydroelectric dam in Afro-descendant and indigenous ancestral territories in the Northern Cauca region of Colombia. As the authors discuss, the consulted population’s intentions to retool FPIC instruments according to their own understandings, interests and cosmovisions, take place in a ‘social minefield’. Here, Afro-descendant law (El derecho propio), with its claims for self-determination and the right to autonomous development or Buen Vivir, challenges the dominant vision of development. But it is also restricted by other powerful legal practices, such as state law, schemes related to corporate social responsibility, international and national rights frameworks and ‘raw law’. The latter refers to rules and sanctions of outlawed armed actors operating in the social minefield. A main observation, with regard to the outcome of the process, is that the extent to which a process of this kind can facilitate genuine intercultural negotiations depends on the strength of community political organising. At the same time, participation in the process in itself generates a political organisational potential that strengthens the participants’ strategic capacity and collective identification around an alternative development future.

In these two case studies, the authors identify an emancipatory potential in relation to FPIC processes, which at the same time might be severely reduced and even totally curtailed in the affected population’s negotiations with state institutions and extractive and energy companies. Other authors in this volume highlight the inherent ambiguity of participatory instruments. They conceptualise these instruments as tools of involvement and resistance work, as much as they are technologies of governance. Critical of the assumptions of deliberative democracy analysis that assumes that populations value active citizenship through the acceptance and use of participatory instruments, several authors in this issue explore how people use ‘technologies of invited participation’ in pragmatic and strategic ways. Participation can generate transformative action, questioning for instance the current conditions of extraction. Nevertheless, since participatory technologies are used by the authorities to control and regulate civic behaviour, these may also lead to the re-establishment of cultural, racial and social hegemonies, marginalising other ways of life. In ‘Claiming prior consultation, monitoring environmental impact: counterwork by the use of formal instruments of governance in Ecuador’s emerging mining sector’, Leifsen, Sánchez-Vázquez and Reyes explore the affected population’s pragmatic and political uses of formal instruments of participation, such as prior consultation and the monitoring of environmental impacts, in relation to a large-scale mining project in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon. Re-politicisation of formal practice takes place, in this case, in a context of controlled and prescribed civic participation. One of the tendencies of this kind of participatory governance is for state authorities to not comply with their own norms and regulations. This kind of state non-compliance enables an emancipatory potential which, together with other resistance strategies, envisions possibilities for change and an alternative development. Such envisioning takes place in a situation of substantial socio-environmental transformation which threatens to make a rural lifeway impossible in a foreseeable future.

‘Between oil contamination and consultation: constrained spaces of influence in Northern Peruvian Amazonia’ by Guzmán-Gallegos examines the interconnections established between assessments of contamination, consultation and compensation negotiations in the northern Peruvian Amazon. Conceiving these instruments as political technologies, the author analyses how local communities and their organisations in Peru were able to document oil contamination, to influence the approval of environmental standards, and to question current extractive practice. State recognition of extensive oil related contamination within Peru’s oldest oil field led to compensation negotiations. As previous work has suggested, compensation is often used by the authorities or corporations to thwart social mobilisation. Compensation is however also enshrined as a right of affected populations in national and international legislation, making compensation even more ambiguous. Guzmán-Gallegos argues in this article that the interconnections that both local actors and state institutions establish between contamination, consultation and compensation, rest on establishing equivalences and commensurabilities. Establishing equivalences and commensurabilities can allow people’s experience with oil contamination to be taken into consideration, but this may also result in the marginalisation and eventual invisibility of existing and appreciated alternative ways of life.

This volume also includes several case studies where affected populations have initiated participatory processes. In ‘A vote to derail extraction: popular consultation and resource sovereignty in Tolima, Colombia’, McNeish analyses how civil society organisations who were opposed to a large-scale mining project in the district of Tolima, Colombia, employed popular consultation (referenda) and in that way set a precedent for democratic participation in the country. Popular consultations are a legal mechanism used by local communities such as peasant and ethnically mixed communities, who are unable to claim indigenous people’s right to FPIC. In Latin America, there has been a recent wave of popular consultations aimed at challenging the authority of the national government, and formulating, in political terms, what McNeish calls ‘resource sovereignties’. In terms of democratising effects, the article shows that the referenda have contributed to national-level debate regarding the regulation of extractive industries, as well as inspiring mobilisation processes in other parts of Latin America. The article consists of a detailed empirical analysis of how state institutions intervene in defence of different societal interests, illustrating in this way the existing tensions in the Colombian state.

Also focusing on tensions within the state, ‘The struggles surrounding economic and ecological zoning in Peru’, the article by Gustafsson analyses the influence of marginalised communities in territorial planning processes in a context of large-scale mining in the Peruvian Andes. Territorial planning is a technical, political and participatory process undertaken to determine the suitability of areas within a region for different economic activities and conservation. In contexts where the central government has sovereign control over sub-surface resources, territorial planning represents a potentially powerful tool for promoting regional interests. The article offers new understanding of the possibilities and limitations of these processes in the context of extractive industries. It shows how until 2012 there was some space for regional governments to appropriate these technical instruments and employ them in an alternative way to increase their influence over natural resources. Although in recent years the increased administrative control by the central government has reduced the autonomy of regional governments in the implementation of territorial planning in Peru, the creation of a regional system of territorial information generate debates about local and regional priorities. These debates enable subnational governments to take a more active part in critically evaluating the costs and benefits of extractive activities.

Two other contributions to this volume discuss the constraints and possibilities of community-based or controlled EIAs.¹⁷ In their article, ‘The politics of planning: assessing the impacts of mining on Saami lands’, Lawrence and Larsen examine a community-based impact assessment (CBIA) undertaken by a Swedish Sami community together with the authors. In a similar way to many of the Latin American cases analysed in this volume, the protection of indigenous rights in Sweden is weak. The authors show how conventional impact assessments are often carried out in invited spaces heavily shaped by corporate interests. In this context of structural injustices, the CBIA constitutes an opportunity for community members to show how they perceive the future impact of a mining project. In this regard, the authors argue that the CBIA could be seen as an ‘experiment in resistance’. The article addresses important issues related to controversies regarding what constitutes legitimate forms of knowledge and relevant facts in different forms of impact assessments. The authors conclude that the CBIA contributes to opening up a limited space that, at best, allows for ‘constrained manoeuvrings’.

In his contribution regarding CBIAs, ‘Shaping projects, shaping impacts: community-controlled impact assessments and negotiated agreements’, O’Faircheallaigh describes how these participatory processes enable local populations to draft more realistic, comprehensive and context-sensitive EIA studies and to shape extraction projects. The author argues that a CBIA, in combination with negotiated, legally binding company–community agreements, can reconcile the interests¹⁸ of local communities and project developers. However, O’Faircheallaigh emphasises that the potential of CBIAs and negotiated agreements can only be unlocked where they constitute part of a wider strategy to achieve at least a degree of equality between communities, project proponents and state authorities. He suggests that strategies such as alliance-building, mobilizations and court actions often prove to be effective for tipping the power balance.

Finally, this volume includes one case study where local participation entails (violent) struggles for community-based resource governance. In her article, ‘“Nosotros Somos Estado”: contested legalities in decision-making about extractives affecting ancestral territories in Colombia’, Weitzner discusses two ethnographic cases: the Afro-descendants communities in the Cauca region and the Embera Chamí indigenous people in Caldas. She looks at these communities’ attempts to maintain control and to regulate small-scale goldmining, which has been part of their livelihoods, and to avoid the entrance of multinational corporates and outlawed actors into their territories. Weitzner forcefully argues that it is not solely the subversion and appropriation of state-designed participatory instruments that is being questioned. What is also at stake is the contestation of state law, and the possibilities available for Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples to enforce territorial control and their own laws as part of their right to self-determination and autonomy. The article argues that several legal systems are in dispute in Colombia: state law, ancestral law (both Afro-descendant and indigenous law) and ‘raw law’, which renders both state and ancestral law insufficient, and considerably constrains the agency of local actors.

The contributions to this volume illustrate the different ways in which affected people make political uses of participatory mechanisms, and make use of ‘invited’ and ‘claimed spaces’ in natural resource governance.¹⁹ With regard to invited and claimed spaces, our contributions show that the power dynamics of participatory processes differ widely. While communities can obtain some degree of influence through these encounters with powerful actors, the risk of co-optation and fragmentation is imminent. Local communities seek to employ participatory mechanisms in alternative ways, and in this manner to carve out autonomous spaces for challenging the control of corporations and/or central governments over natural resources. While these processes may not enable communities to stop resource extraction, by employing different instruments in innovative ways, communities are able to increase their leverage in future negotiations.

Analytical insights

Drawing on the solid disciplinary backgrounds and considerable field research experience of each of the contributors, this volume makes a clear critical and empirically led contribution to ongoing cross-disciplinary debates. In the following pages, we outline the main theoretical debates on the state, autonomy and self-determination, legal pluralism and competing forms of knowledge that we address through our empirical case studies.

While most of the articles describe and analyse participatory processes in local/subnational arenas, the authors assume that the central state plays a crucial role in extractive governance, remaining strong even in an age of globalisation. However, in contrast to the unitary approaches of the state which are common in scholarly debates about resource extraction, we share a disaggregated view of ‘the state’,²⁰ which allows us to scrutinise how different sectors and levels of the state intervene in the defence of various societal or corporate interests. In recent works, the weaknesses of state institutions in mediating between local communities and corporations has been emphasised, and it has been suggested that socio-environmental conflicts have to a large extent been resolved in the private arena rather than through state mediation and democratic procedures.²¹ It is possible that prior consultation and FPIC processes, participatory territorial planning and participation in EIAs constitute important advances in reinforcing the mediating role of the state. In the analysis of these mediating processes it is crucial, we argue, to focus on the links between state institutions and different societal groups.²² Several articles in this volume add insights to the literature on the state and different governance responses by providing for detailed empirical analysis of existing tensions between state institutions. Providing a more nuanced perspective on the state, Gustafsson and McNeish discuss how subnational governments can be important allies for civil society organisations in their efforts to implement participatory mechanisms in alternative ways to defend interests and rights.

Tied to different perspectives on the state is the issue of autonomy and self-determination. The contributors to this volume address this particular issue in varying yet interrelated ways. One research orientation follows recent work on energy politics in Latin America, which focuses on the ways in which contests and claims of local populations in response to extractive processes often take the form of popular claims for sovereignty – as opposed to the state’s traditional ‘supreme’ control – over land and resources.²³ Studies of energy politics in the Scandinavian countries have analysed similar contestations of the meaning of sovereignty.²⁴ These are critical analyses of what state sovereignty is, and what the nature of sovereignty entails in general. Drawing on Blom Hansen and Stepputat’s²⁵ decentred notion of sovereignty and concern with ‘languages of stateness’, these critical studies²⁶ propose to employ the idea of ‘resource sovereignties’ to capture the assignment of value by social groups to the material and non-material attributes of nature and the environment. In this volume, McNeish proposes resource sovereignty as the analytical concept to explain participatory practices as popular consultation. Schilling-Vacaflor also draws on the same concept in her study of Guarani resistance work. From a related perspective, Gustafsson views the regional Peruvian government’s appropriation of technical planning instruments as attempts to establish a degree of autonomy over natural resource management.

Another research orientation related to the discussions concerning autonomy and self-determination is that of legal pluralism. Legal pluralism diversifies the field of law, making visible the co-existence of several legal frameworks and practices, which compete with and feed on each other. Several articles in this volume reveal important insights into the complexities related to the translation of international norms, concerning the right to prior consultation and FPIC, into domestic contexts. These insights add to previous literature from the field of legal anthropology about human rights practices.²⁷ In particular, contributions by Machado et al., Schilling-Vacaflor and Weitzner remind us of the political dimension of the interpretation of the rights which diverse groups possess regarding the extractive industries that affect them. It is the political dimension that determines ‘who has the right to exercise political control over people and resources […] and who can exploit them economically and profit from this exploitation’.²⁸

Legal pluralism allows us to explore the effects and legitimization of new forms of nation-state authority in the current global order.²⁹ Legal pluralism includes also what De Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito call ‘subaltern cosmopolitan legalities’,³⁰ referring to locally grounded forms of resistance and legal innovations brought about by excluded and marginalised populations. Within legal pluralism, non-hegemonic or non-Western constructions of rights and human dignity are given analytical weight. This allows us to explore alternative constructions of the relation between nature and society, not just in terms of resources. It also makes it possible to focus on the shifting interplay between different forms and scales of legality and illegality.³¹ Drawing on this approach, Weitzner’s article in this issue discusses precisely the spectrum of legalities existing in Colombia, whose constitution recognises the validity of customary law. Weitzner develops the concept of raw law as contributing to a focus on the violent realities in which resistance work and counter-hegemonic politics are embedded. Machado et al. draw on the same ideas about subaltern cosmopolitan legalities in their analysis of self-determination and collective wellbeing articulated in the interface between Afro-descendant law and state law.

Important insights from the legal plurality literature are also relevant for broader perspectives on plural knowledge production and knowledge politics. One of these insights, formulated by Rodriguez-Garavito,³² is that procedural formality can be viewed as a governance strategy employed to manage conflicts related to large-scale extractive interventions. This strategy renders other understandings of socio-environmental transformations related to extractive activity insignificant or even invisible. As Guzmán-Gallegos discusses in her article, part of this governance strategy is to make incommensurable entities commensurable through quantification procedures and the establishing of equivalences between a loss of livelihood possibilities and a material or monetary compensation.³³ The responses of affected populations to this kind of compensation dynamics, as well as to other mechanisms of governance, are, in the view of Guzmán-Gallegos and of several of the authors in this volume, approached through a focus on the unequal encounters between different forms of knowledge, such as scientific knowledge including corporate science,³⁴ technical knowledge, life-world knowledge and activist knowledge.

The contributions of O’Faircheallaigh and of Lawrence and Larsen reflect on the role of competing forms of knowledge regarding impacts of extracting projects through studies of EIAs based in or controlled by affected communities and community representatives. As parallel processes to EIAs controlled by state authorities, the CBIAs generate knowledge controversies. Through the processes of establishing community visions of mining impacts on indigenous lands, the question of what actually constitutes legitimate expert and non-expert knowledge comes to the fore. Leifsen et al. and Gustafsson approach this question from the other entry point where the affected population tap into the rationality of state-controlled instruments to politicise and hence exceed their original meaning. Based on another participatory process, Machado et al. indicate, in a similar way to Lawrence and Larsen, that controversies over how to understand an environmental management plan move beyond the issues of how to achieve social justice and sustainable development to also defend distinct ways of understanding and constituting relations between the social and the natural. What is at stake here is the control of territories to enable the continued flourishing of culturally distinct livelihoods, lifeways and cosmovisions.³⁵ As Guzmán-Gallegos emphasises, participation as a political technology might facilitate these struggles, but there is also a danger that it renders alternative forms invisible.

In terms of the methodology employed, all case studies presented in this volume of Third World Quarterly originate from dialogues with affected populations, namely with local communities, indigenous and Afro-descendant organisations, civil society movements and regional governments. Our studies are informed by the experiences, practices and visions of people relating to large-scale extractive interventions. Some of the articles also have a more specific collaborative research agenda, where knowledge production takes place in an extended research group consisting of academic scholars and representatives from the affected population, and where the objective of the study is defined by this collaboration. The articles of Machado et al. and Weitzner are clearly products of collaborations of this kind. These texts are written ‘from the epistemic space of communities and movements engaged in resistance against forms of capitalist globalisation and extractive operations’ (cf. Machado et al.) The article of Lawrence and Larsen has also a clear action research orientation. Central to their study is a reflection on how they as researchers were involved in the work with a CBIA, and in a fact-finding mission with competing claims to truth and knowledge, creating multiple ethical dilemmas.

Most of the articles presented here are also product of a specific research collaboration made possible through a project funded by the Norwegian Research Council named ‘Extracting Justice? Exploring the role of FPIC, Consultation and Compensation related to Socio-Environmental Conflicts in Latin America’. The research agenda of this project has served as a common platform for our different methodological and theoretical approaches, and for our studies of clearly distinct social, political and economic realities. What unites us is a genuine interest in critically assessing the current frameworks of extractive governance practices. Our studies demonstrate that in the global context of extractive industries realities are far from the ideal of justice. In spite of continuous efforts of culturally diverse populations, the possibilities for enhancing and allowing alternative lifeways and understandings are still few. The studies presented here provide insights that might be used by diverse actors, within, related to and outside academia to improve the processes, and change the conditions of the intervened fields of extractive industries and governance.

Notes on Contributors

Esben Leifsen is Associate Professor of International Development and Environmental Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), and teaches anthropology and politics of international development. He is the research coordinator of the project financed by the Norwegian Research Council named Extracting Justice? Exploring the role of Free, Prior and Informed consent, consultation and compensation related to socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America. Leifsen has published a series of articles and book chapters on social marginality in Latin America and is the co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on the Mirador mega-mining project: La Amazonía Minada: Minería a gran escala y conflictos en el Sur del Ecuador (Abya Yala/USFQ).

Maria-Therese Gustafsson is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden. Gustafsson holds a PhD from Stockholm University and her dissertation was awarded with the prize for the best dissertation at the Faculty of Social Science at Stockholm University in 2015. Prominent themes in her research are natural resource governance, political participation and climate change. Her publications include the research monograph, Corporate Power at the Margins of the State (forthcoming, Palgrave McMillan), and various articles in journals such as Latin American Research Review and Canadian Journal of Development Studies. She has also been one of the editors for an anthology published by CLACSO and of a method book on Political Ethnography published by the Swedish editorial Gleerups. She is currently working on a research project on territorial planning in Peru, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

María A. Guzmán-Gallegos is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. She has done extensive fieldwork in Amazonian Kichwa communities in Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia. Her research has focused on personhood and gender, on Amerindian conceptualizations of nature and society, interethnic relations, indigenous political organisation, indigenous movement and socio-environmental conflict related to extraction. Recent publications include ‘The governing of extraction, oil enclaves and indigenous responses in the Ecuadorian Amazon’ in H. Haarstad (ed.) New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance), ‘Amazonian Kichwa Leadership: The Circulation of Wealth and the Ambiguities of Mediation’ in F. Santos- Granero (ed.), Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-being in Indigenous Amazonia. Her current interests are on environmental governance, contamination and Amerindian conceptualizations of human and non-human bodies.

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor is a sociologist and anthropologist, and is currently a research fellow at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. Her main research deals with indigenous peoples, law and society, participation, resource governance and the Andean countries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Norwegian Research Council under the grant, ‘Extracting Justice? The role of FPIC and consultation and compensation related to socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America’.

Notes

1. Bebbington, “Extractive Industries, Socio-Environmental Conflicts”; Bebbington and Bury, Subterranean Struggles; Escobar, Territories of Difference; Rodríguez-Garavito, “Ethnicity.Gov”; McNeish and Logan, Flammable Societies; Haarstad, New Political Spaces.

2. Rodríguez-Garavito, “Ethnicity.Gov,” 268.

3. Perreault, “Performing Participation”; Li, “Documenting Accountability”; Zwarteveen and Boelens, “Defining, Researching and Struggling.”

4. Hereafter referred to as EIAs.

5. See Hipwell et al., Aboriginal Peoples and Mining in Canada; Szablowski, “Operationalizing Free, Prior, and Informed Consent?”; O’Faircheallaigh, “Aboriginal-Mining Company”; O’Faircheallaigh, “Extractive Industries and Indigenous Peoples”; Rodríguez-Garavito, “Ethnicity.Gov”; Humphreys Bebbington, “Consultation, Compensation and Conflict”; Pellegrini and Ribera Arismandi, “Consultation, Compensation and Extraction”; Flemmer and Schilling-Vacaflor, “Unfulfilled Promises.”

6. Rodríguez-Garavito, “Ethnicity.Gov”; Humphreys Bebbington, “Consultation, Compensation and Conflict”; Gudynas, Extractivismos.

7. Cornwall, “Spaces for Transformation?”

8. Hébert, “Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold.”

9. Devlin and Yap, ”Contentious Politics in Environmental Assessment”; Kirsch, Mining Capitalism; Li, Unearthing Conflict.

10. Kirsch, Mining Capitalism.

11. Li, “Documenting Accountability”; Zwarteveen and Boelens, “Defining, Researching and Struggling.”

12. Corbett and Keller, ”An Analytical Framework”; Bird, "The EAGLE Project.”

13. Dunn, “Participatory GIS.”

14. Cornwall and Brock, “What Do Buzzwords Do?”; Cornwall, The Participation Reader; Gaventa, “Finding the Spaces for Change”; Hickey and Giles, Participation; Hickey and Mohan, “Relocating Participation”; Williams, “Evaluating Participatory Development.”

15. De Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, “Law, Politics and the Subaltern.”

16. Masaki, “Rectifying the Anti-Politics.”

17. Here we will refer to both community-based impact assessment (CBIA) and community controlled impact assessment (CCIA) as CBIA.

18. O’Faircheallaigh uses the concept CCIA in his study.

19. Cornwall, “Spaces for Transformation?”

20. Migdal, State in Society; Sharma and Gupta, “Introduction.”

21. Bebbington, “Extractive Industries, Socio-Environmental Conflicts”; Cheshire, “A Corporate Responsibility?”; Rajak, “Uplift and Empower”; Gustafsson, “Private Conflict Regulation.”

22. Crabtree and Crabtree-Condor, “The Politics of Extractive Industries.”

23. McNeish et al., Contested Powers.

24. Lawrence, “Internal Colonisation and Indigenous Resource Sovereignty.”

25. Blom Hansen and Stepputat, “Sovereignty Revisited.”

26. McNeish and Logan, Flammable Societies; McNeish et al., Contested Powers.

27. Goodale and Merry, The Practice of Human Rights.

28. Benda-Beckmann, “Legal Pluralism and Social Justice.”

29. Wilson, Human Rights, Culture & Context.

30. Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, “Law, Politics and the Subaltern.”

31. Sieder and McNeish, Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities.

32. Rodríguez-Garavito, “Ethnicity.Gov.”

33. Li, Unearthing Conflict; Nelson, Who Counts?

34. Kirsch, Mining Capitalism.

35. Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and Stories”; Stengers, “The Cosmopolitica Proposal”; Escobar, “Beyond the Third World”; Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads”; Gudynas, Extractivismos; De La Cadena, Earth Beings.