underground political ecologies

Geoforum xxx (2012) xxx–xxx

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Geoforum

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Underground political ecologies: The second Annual Lecture of the Culturaland Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers q

Anthony Bebbington ⇑Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, 950, Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 24 May 2012Available online xxxx

Keywords:Extractive industriesPost-neoliberalismEl SalvadorAndes-AmazonSocio-environmental conflictState and social movements

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. Ahttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.05.011

q Editor’s note: this article is a full written version ofthe Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group ofGeographers (AAG), which was given by the author at2011. It has been subject to review prior to publicatio⇑ Tel.: +1 508 7937370; fax: +1 508 7938881.

E-mail address: [email protected] I am very grateful to the Cultural and Political Ec

then President Peter Walker for the invitation to preparfor the prodding to turn it into text. Thanks also to Gaviand his comments on an earlier draft, as well as to JoMcCarthy, Denise Humphreys Bebbington and two anoncommenting, challenging and encouraging.

Please cite this article in press as: Bebbington, AGroup of the Association of American Geograph

a b s t r a c t

Based on the 2011 Annual Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group Lecture, this paper makes thecase for a political ecology of the subsoil. Arguing that subsoil resources have received comparatively lit-tle attention within the wider corpus of political ecological writing, the paper explores several ways inwhich the extraction of mineral and hydrocarbon resources is constitutive of, and constituted by, widercapitalist political, economic and institutional arrangements. Drawing on material from El Salvador andthe Andean countries, the paper explores the contemporary governance of extractive industries, andpoints to significant convergence among the approaches taken by neoliberal and ostensibly post-neolib-eral regimes alike. The intersections between the extractive economy, livelihoods and patterns of socialprotest are also explored. Through these examples, the paper also highlights the ways in which ‘‘activistpolitical ecologists’’ play important roles in counter-movements seeking to re-govern the extractive econ-omy. These countermovements are found in both civil society and different parts of the state. Such activ-ist political ecologists are central to the broader enterprise of an ‘‘underground political ecology’’ and areoften vital to the success of scholarly interventions in such political ecologies.

� 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction striking similarities to the strategies of far more conservative re-

My primary concern in this paper is to discuss themes for apolitical ecology of the subsoil.1 I will argue that the subsoil is a sig-nificant topic for the broader enterprise of political ecology, even ifacademic political ecology came to extractive industry relatively latein the game – certainly later than did networks of activist politicalecologists. Through a discussion of contemporary patterns in thepolitics and governance of extractive industry in Latin America, I willalso claim that a political ecology of the subsoil raises issues ofimportance that go well beyond the specifics of oil, gas or mineralextraction. This Latin American discussion will serve as an argumentwithin an argument, in that it is both a discussion of contemporaryprocesses in the region as well as a means of illustrating the broaderrelevance of the subsoil for political ecology. I will suggest that theways in which ‘‘post-neoliberal’’ regimes govern the subsoil show

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the second Annual Lecture ofthe Association of American

the AAG Meeting in Seattle inn.

ology Specialty Group and itse this plenary lecture and thenn Bridge for his understandingdy Emel, Jim Murphy, Jamesymous reviewers for reading,

. Underground political ecologieers. Geoforum (2012), http://d

gimes, and in that regard appear considerably less ‘‘progressive’’than their ‘‘post-neoliberal’’ or ‘‘socialist’’ labels might imply, evenif in other regards they constitute alternative modes of governingextraction. This, in turn, points to important ways in which resourceextraction becomes causally implicated in the relationships betweenpolity, economy, nature and society. At the same time, the LatinAmerican discussion reveals myriad ways in which activist politicalecologists seek to re-govern the extractive economy, pointing totheir own significance in any broader political ecological enterprise.

I am not claiming that the subsoil should be the, or even a, primaryconcern of political ecologists (although it will be for a subset ofthem). I do, however, want to draw attention to the relative invisibil-ity of minerals, oil and gas in the canons of political ecology, reflecton reasons for this invisibility, and suggest that there are importantpolitical, methodological and conceptual issues surrounding thesubsoil that have wider resonance within our field. I will also arguethat closer interactions with activist political ecologists operatingin various institutional domains would help keep academic enquirycurrent and could also contribute to strategic thinking in the world ofactivism. It is on this point that I begin the paper.

2. The underground surfaces

Beyond the academic world, there also exist political ecologistswho operate in other institutional realms that can remain easilyhidden from view in academic work. Who and where are these

s: The second Annual Lecture of the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialtyx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.05.011

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2 A. Bebbington / Geoforum xxx (2012) xxx–xxx

political ecologists, specifically those concerned with the subsoil?The list is a long one, and includes activist-thinkers associated withnetworks that course through organizations such as Mining Watch,Oil Watch, Global Greengrants Fund, Friends of the Earth Interna-tional, Oxfam America/International, the Latin American Observa-tory for Mining Conflicts and, of course, a range of peasant andindigenous organizations as well as (somewhat more recently) hu-man rights and environmental justice organizations. Albeit less fre-quently, these ‘‘underground political ecologists’’ are also to befound in parts of the State, and rather more often in progressivereligious networks (e.g. the Jesuits). These political ecologists act,advocate, and organize, generate agendas for alternative politicalecological futures, and produce knowledge on ways in which theenvironment is politicized. This knowledge is of everyday engage-ment and struggle as well as a formalized knowledge captured inwritings, theses and non-English language publications.2

The last decade or so of my own work has been a process ofbecoming progressively more deeply embedded in such overlappingnetworks, primarily in and related to Latin America. Many parts ofthese networks are relatively unaware of each other, but as far as Ican tell they share a great deal as regards their commitments. Flowsof ideas, knowledge, claims, images and people connect them inways that suggest some sort of decentralized collectivity that shareselements and principles of a political and human project combiningcritique, resistance and a search for alternative ways of governingthe subsoil. So, while not constituting an identifiable, namable, uni-tary whole, the many people and organizations of whom I am think-ing do exist as a loosely networked3 collectivity that has a broadlyshared political ecological project.

Networks such as these have long made my work possible – butthey have also steered it, sometimes by design, sometimes by de-fault. Some of this steering has taken unexpected paths, one of whichtook me to the topic of this paper. From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, people with whom I had long collaborated began to feel theeffects of the rapid and aggressive expansion of extractive industriesin Latin America (Bebbington, 2012, 2007; Bebbington and Bury,2013; de Echave et al., 2009; de Echave, 2008; Acosta et al., 2009;Scurrah, 2009).4,5 These colleagues, and others within their networks,began to persuade me of the importance of turning our attention to themining, oil and gas sectors (collectively the ‘‘extractive industries’’) asa problem that was urgent not only in social and environmental terms,but also analytically, lying as it did at the core of the relationship be-tween development and democracy in the region.6

While this change began to appear in writings (largely in Span-ish) from the early 2000s, canonical texts in Anglophone politicalecology largely ‘‘missed the revolution’’ (to play off Orin Starn’sterm: Starn, 1991). The topic of extractive industry is essentially

2 In Latin America, the work of Eduardo Gudynas, Alberto Acosta and Marco Aranaimmediately comes to mind in this regard (Gudynas, 2010; Alayza and Gudynas,2011; Acosta, 2009; Acosta et al., 2009; Arana, 2004, 2002).

3 They are networked in diverse ways, both historical and contemporary. Inaddition to existing within intersecting flows of money and information (flows thathinge around donors, media, blogs, listserves, workshops and conferences), manypeople involved in these networks share educational and political party experiences.

4 Factors driving this expansion include increasing global demand (related, interalia, to the growth of Brazil, China, Russia and India), related price increases,technological changes allowing the development of otherwise inaccessible deposits,policy reforms facilitating investment, and the emergence of new global companies,also linked to the BRICs, as well as South Korea, Vietnam, etc. (Bridge, 2004;Bebbington and Bury, 2013).

5 Change was also stirring in Africa. Beyond the already documented, and longer standingNigerian case (Watts, 2004, 2001), mining and hydrocarbon codes and/or investmentproposals were changing elsewhere (Campbell, 2003; Hilson and Potter, 2005).

6 Two people in particular were important in this regard, and I owe them immensedebts: Martin Scurrah, at that time Regional Director for Oxfam America’s SouthAmerica program; and Denise Humphreys (later Bebbington) who, as Representativefor Peru at the Inter-American Foundation insisted back in 1994 that mining was goingto be the issue that would transform Perú. How right she was (de Echave et al., 2008).

Please cite this article in press as: Bebbington, A. Underground political ecologieGroup of the Association of American Geographers. Geoforum (2012), http://d

absent from the classic overviews of political ecology (Robbins,2004; Neumann, 2005; Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003; Forsyth,2003; Peet and Watts, 1996), although Neumann (2005) doestouch on it through a discussion of environmental security, andsecond and spin-off editions do begin to address the topic (Peetand Watts, 2004; Peet et al., 2010; Robbins, 2012). And if extractiveindustry had been deemed generally uninteresting, hardrock min-ing was even less sexy than oil and gas. Thus, while to expressinterest in mining 10 years ago in Peru could easily draw you intointense and difficult political ecological debate, the same expres-sion at a meeting of the Association of American Geographers inthe mid-2000s would have invoked a polite smile at best. StuartKirsch (pers. com.) has made a very similar observation regardinghis experiences among anthropologists, even though early classicsin social and cultural anthropology had addressed mining (Nash,1979; Taussig, 1980) and there has been a healthy group workingon mining in Australasia (Kirsch, 2006, 1993; Coumans, 2011; Bal-lard and Banks, 2003; Filer, 1991) and on oil elsewhere (e.g. Saw-yer, 2004). In Geography, somewhat less was going onnotwithstanding the early initiatives of some scholars.7

This has changed dramatically over the last 5 years. In 2007 youwould have been hard pressed to find more than a session or twoaddressing extractive industry at the annual conference of theAssociation of American Geographers. By 2012, however, therewere whole sequences of sessions on mineral and hydrocarbonextraction – one with five back-to-back sessions – as well as anumber of individual panels dedicated to the topic. This surge ofinterest is impressive, yet it remains the case that this particularcapitalist train has left the station and political ecologists aresomewhat scampering to catch up.8 Most of those doing the chasingare in the emerging and exciting younger cohorts of our field and forthe most part their writings have grown directly from their doctoralprojects (Himley, 2012; Bury; 2004, 2005; Valdivia, 2008; Horowitz,2010; Huber, 2009; Emel and Huber, 2008; Moore and Velásquez,2013; Tschakert, 2009; Hilson, 2010, 2009; Maconachie and Hilson,2011; Maconachie, 2011; Zalik, 2009; Kaup, 2008; Hindery, 2004;Hinojosa, 2011; Haarstad, 2012; Damonte, 2007; Humphreys Bebb-ington and Bebbington, 2010; Budds, 2010; Szablowski, 2007,2002; Bridge and Frederiksen, 2012; Li, 2009).

This flurry of work is immensely welcome because minerals andhydrocarbons matter in myriad ways. They are constitutive of thefunctioning of capitalism (Huber, 2009) and when they are en-rolled into social life, a wide range of political imaginaries and rela-tionships are reworked (Watts, 2004; Perreault, 2008, 2013).Perhaps in part because of such effects, control over and use ofthe subsoil can be deeply conflictive and easily become a particularsite of a sort of Polanyian double movement ‘‘where attempts toexpand the reach and depth of capitalist commodification aremet by vocal (even violent) forms of resistance’’ (Castree, 2007,p. 27). The sector is also implicated in processes of climate change(especially for the cases of hydrocarbon extraction and cementproduction) along with other critical environmental hazards ofour times. Extractive industry is embedded in a series of globaland life cycles that are of critical significance to planetary well-being. The carbon cycle is perhaps the most obvious of these, withall its complications and constructions (Bridge, 2010; Bridge and LeBillon, 2012; Mannion, 2006), but mineral and hydrological cyclesare also critical (Budds and Hinojosa, 2012). Indeed, in environ-

7 These would include Auty (1993, 2001), Howitt (2001), Emel (Emel, 2002), Angel(Emel et al., 1995), Bury (2002), Bradshaw (1998), Bridge (2000), Le Billon (2001) andWatts (2001).

8 Other literatures are perhaps less far behind – in particular those economists andpolitical scientists debating extraction, the resource curse and conflict (e.g. MichaelRoss, Paul Collier, Joseph Stiglitz and others), and those activist researchers trying tomonitor this most recent round of expansion of extractive industry.



9 The FMLN (the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) fought as a largelyCuban inspired guerrilla movement during the civil war of the 1980s, and followingpeace accords converted to a political party that bridged social democratic and moreradical wings within the Front.

10 Without wishing to belabor the point, he and a number of other advisors who hadmigrated into the Ministry from the worlds of NGOs and party based work are thesorts of activist political ecologist referred to in the introduction.

11 These movement organizations included NGOs such as CEICOM and ADES, theWorking Group (‘‘Mesa’’) Against Mining in El Salvador, and Radio Victoria. For adoctoral thesis on these movements see Cartagena, 2009.

A. Bebbington / Geoforum xxx (2012) xxx–xxx 3

ments where water resources are becoming increasingly stressed,the emergence of extraction (itself very water hungry) intensifiessuch pressures significantly. Meanwhile, extraction has been iden-tified by activist literature as another factor in land grabs acrossthe world (Sibaud, 2012).

The political ecology of extraction is also bound up with thenature and possibilities of democracy, and more generally withthe forms taken by state-society relationships and their particularintersections with the economy. Some renderings of these relation-ships – as in some of the resource curse literature for instance – areparticularly cataclysmic, with resource extraction being associatedwith authoritarianism, kleptocracy, violence and war. While thereare evident examples of such pathologies, focusing on them is notthe route I take here. I do, though, want to explore how resourceextraction becomes embedded in relationships between economyand polity in ways that structure the scope for alternatives at bothsubnational and national scales.

Following this opening argument about the increasing visibilityof extraction within political ecology, the remainder of the paper isorganized in three main sections. First I draw on work in which wehave been involved over recent years in South and Central Americato reflect on the ways in which the current expansion of natural re-source extraction is being governed by self-styled post-neoliberaland more moderately social democratic governments of the region(ranging from Bolivia to El Salvador). As we and other colleagueshave commented (Bebbington, 2009; Bebbington and HumphreysBebbington, 2011; Gudynas, 2010), these resource governance pat-terns afford much insight into the actual practices and politics ofthese governments, into their political and economic viability,and into the extent to which they might constitute alternativesin any meaningful sense – qualifying, perhaps, some of the moreoptimistic readings of these new regimes (Escobar, 2010). The pur-pose of discussing these regimes’ approaches to extraction is topoint to some of the macro-political economy questions that apolitical ecology of the subsoil might consider. The following sec-tion shifts scales and explores ways in which this ‘‘new extraction’’is being experienced and contested. Again this is a summary dis-cussion, but my goal is to draw attention to the various ways inwhich extraction intersects with existing territorial dynamics, live-lihoods and sociologies of risk and uncertainty, and to exploreways in which these different types of intersection might be re-lated to the forms that conflict, mobilization and contestation havetaken (Bebbington et al., 2008).

While there is not the space to make it explicit, the work I re-port has been conducted in collaboration and communication witha range of actors who have been involved in such contestationwhile operating from diverse institutional positions (both outsideand within the state, and occasionally within companies). Thereis no question that our work would not have been possible – orat least would not have taken the form it took – without these col-laborations. The concluding section therefore brings the paper backto the theme of embedded political ecologies of extraction, return-ing to issues raised in the opening paragraphs.

3. Governing Latin America’s new extraction

Among the most striking features of post-1990 investment inextractive industry have been the speed with which it has occurredand the facility with which it has occupied new physical and socio-political spaces. This has been a remarkably aggressive process ofcommodification. We have documented this scale and speed else-where (Bebbington, 2012; Bebbington and Bury, 2013) so here Iwant to focus instead on two other themes: the ways in which thisexpansion has caught activists and academics by surprise; and theways in which it has elicited a range of counter-movements someof which offer the prospect of democratizing alternatives while


others have proven to be less inspiring (in ways, I suggest, thatqualify the ‘‘progressive’’ credentials of the post-neoliberal experi-ment in the region). To do this I will first discuss experiences inCentral America, and then in the Andean region.

3.1. Central American challenges

Between 2005 and 2007, we were involved in a project with theFord Foundation and eight Central American and Mexican nongov-ernmental centres doing research on environment and develop-ment. As part of this project, researchers from these centrescame to the University of Manchester for a series of seminarsand discussions with faculty and other guests. The issue of extrac-tive industries was raised at various times over the month. In hisseminar, Gavin Bridge told the participants that from his own workhe had the sense that Central America and Mexico were going tosee significant investments in extractive industry – especially min-ing – and that this coming wave of investment perhaps ought toshape these centres’ research and advocacy agendas. Once again,the topic of mining was greeted with a polite, incredulous smile.All were convinced that extractive industry investment was at besta minor issue compared with those of agriculture, social forestry orecosystem services on which most of these organizations worked.The researchers from El Salvador were particularly adamant thatthis topic was largely irrelevant for their country.

By 2011 at least four of these centres were dealing with mining,as both a political and an analytical problem. This was particularlyso in El Salvador. In the six short years since 2005 – when the Sal-vadoran researchers felt that mining was largely irrelevant to theissues their NGO should work on – an FMLN government had beenelected9 and the then Director of these researchers’ NGO had beenappointed Minister of Environment.10 One of the most difficult is-sues in his portfolio was to collaborate with the Ministry of Economyand Commerce in a process that had to culminate in a new nationalpolicy on mining in a context in which a number of social move-ments and movement organizations were demanding an outrightban on mining while parts of the business elite wanted to growthe sector.11 If by the time of the FMLN’s election in 2008 miningwas a critical political issue, how was it that just a few years earlierthe researchers had deemed it unimportant?

Since policy reforms in the mid-1990s, mineral companies hadbegun to conduct geological exploration in El Salvador, operatingunder the radar of most of organized civil society and academia.By 2005, however, the activities of several companies were begin-ning to generate serious social conflict, but until that point, criticalresearchers had scarcely picked up on these changes. By 2008 theconflict had become so serious that even the pro-business govern-ment ARENA had put a de facto moratorium on mining activity.When the FMLN government came to power they inherited thismoratorium, along with much pressure from movements to convertit into law. However, the FMLN also inherited the fall-out of the mor-atorium. By 2009 two mining companies whose projects had beenput on hold were using the provisions of the US-Central AmericanFree Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) to sue the government of El Sal-vador for recovery of all their expenditure to date, for future lostprofits and for losses due to falls in their share value (as well as



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the costs of taking legal action). While one of these cases wasdropped in 2011 the other is still being considered by the Interna-tional Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).12

The FMLN government – with its political ecologist Minister ofEnvironment – is, then, caught between two pressures. Socialmovement organizations, along with parliamentarians and basesof the FMLN, are not happy that an ostensibly left of center govern-ment would not ban hard rock mining once and for all. They arepressuring the government to follow through on what they viewas electoral promises to ban mining. Yet at the same time the gov-ernment feels the pressure of fiscal imperative. On the one hand,some officials wonder whether mining might generate tax and roy-alty revenue for government programmes, while on the other handthese and others worry that ICSID will find against the governmentand impose fines on the scale of a hundred or more millions of dol-lars – and that this would open the door to a slew of legal suitsfrom other companies, especially if the Moratorium were con-verted into law. The government’s response was to buy time andconduct a Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) of the miningsector, with a view to crafting a policy on the basis of that SEA –the calculation being that if the results of the SEA were to recom-mend a policy restricting mining, then this technical justificationwould offer more legal protection against future lawsuits fromother companies with concessions and exploration projects.13

However this process turns out, it represents a challenge toboth Salvadoran sovereignty and the strength of its democracy. Ifthe government responds to movement pressures, it risks havingsovereign decisions undermined by ICSID and ending up with apublic budget seriously compromised by the resulting fines. Con-versely if it lifts the moratorium on mining as a way of avoidingthese fines, it will be viewed as having capitulated to internationalcapital and dismissed the concerns of the social movement organi-zations and grassroots groups within the FMLN that constitute animportant political base for the government. In either case the out-come will threaten the legitimacy of the FMLN government as wellas of the electoral process in securing institutional and policychange in the face of transnational challenges to sovereignty.

In very many respects, these experiences reflect and constitutepractical nature-society problems that are being worked throughby activists and thinkers who are themselves political ecologistswho move between engagement with conceptual discussions andthe challenges of political practice and policy formulation. They re-veal how the actual or imagined extraction of the subsoil can elicitrapid political economy changes in which extractive industries be-come part of everyday policy and political dilemmas for a range ofactors (see Warnaars, 2013). These experiences also constitute astark example of how both domestic and international academicand research communities were caught completely off-guard byan on-going political ecological change.14 And finally they reveal

12 The case that was rejected was being brought by the US company CommerceGroup; the case that is still active is being brought by Pacific Rim, a Canadiancompany that has used a US registration of its company in order to sue under theinvestment protection provisions of CAFTA. On June 1st, 2012 ICSID determined thatPacific Rim could not proceed with its claim under CAFTA-DR provisions. However, italso determined that the company could do so under El Salvador’s Foreign InvestmentLaw.

13 For reasons of transparency I note that I have been involved in this process asChair of a Technical Committee of four members that monitored the SEA and reporteddirectly to the Minister of Economy and Minister of Environment.

14 Of course, it is legitimate to ask whether this should be viewed as a problem.Were academics to respond too quickly with new ‘‘theory’’ to explain thesephenomena, such rapidly elaborated theory might simply be ‘‘bad’’ theory, inade-quately crafted, tested or shown to be fit-for-purpose. So perhaps the academicresponse should be slow and deliberate rather than fleet-footed. This, however, stillraises the question of who ‘‘ought’’ to be ahead of the curve and operating in fast-response mode, and what forms the relationships between theory and these ‘‘fastresponders’’ might take. Thanks to Jim Murphy for raising this point.


some of the ways in which expansion of extractive industry can havesignificant consequences for state formation and democraticconsolidation.

It is this third theme that I wish to address in the followingsection – namely the nature of the relationships between theextractive economy and political regimes, and the extent towhich the extractive economy is managed differently underthose regimes that consider themselves well to the left of theirpredecessors (El Salvador’s FMLN government being one such re-gime). As I discuss this question, I will refer to these regimes as‘‘post-neoliberal’’ and ‘‘21st century post-socialist.’’ In using suchterms I am simply deploying labels that a number of these gov-ernments have applied to themselves – I am not claiming thatthe likes of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador,or even Brazil should necessarily be understood as post-neolib-eral. Indeed, that is the question. Are there ways in which theseregimes are different from their more conservative peers such asPeru, Colombia, Panama and Guatemala? Do the ways in whichthey govern extractive industries throw light on this similarity/difference? And might extractive industry dynamics be part ofthe explanation of any patterns of convergence and divergenceamong regimes?

3.2. South American convergences

One of the striking features of the extractive boom in SouthAmerica has been the convergence among evidently neoliberal re-gimes (Peru at least to 2011; Colombia) and assertively post-neo-liberal ones (Bolivia, Ecuador) in how they approach theexpansion of extractive industry and the governance of the con-flicts with which it has been associated. The following are unattrib-uted quotations from actual and former Presidents and SeniorMinisters, and the challenge to the reader is to associate each quo-tation with one of these four regimes.15

1. ‘‘The ecologists are extortionists. It is not the communities thatare protesting, just a small group of terrorists. People from theAmazon support us. It’s romantic environmentalists and thoseinfantile leftists who want to destabilize government.’’

2. ‘‘Enough is enough. These peoples are not monarchy, they arenot first-class citizens. Who are [a small number of] nativesto tell [many millions of citizens] that you have no right tocome here? This is a grave error, and whoever thinks thisway wants to lead us to irrationality and a retrogradeprimitivism’’.

3. ‘‘The environmental licence and consultation and participationhave come to constitute an obstacle’’ [to investment inextraction].

4. ‘‘The great balance that we are seeking . . . is how to maximizeincome for the State and at the same time guarantee that thecountry has confidence in these investments’’.

Quotations such as these point to a convergence across the re-gion in which central government offices promote resource extrac-tion as a means of generating revenue to be used for policies ofsocial and infrastructural investment. At the same time, these gov-ernments have sought to ‘‘manage’’ obstacles to the expansion ofsuch investment – be this through clawing back on rights of priorconsultation or reining in environmental monitoring. As part of

15 Some of the quotations have been slightly edited in order to removeidentifiers. These edits are marked by square parentheses. The speakers are, inorder: Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador (Correa, 2007); Alan García, thenPresident of Peru (Peru.com, 2009); Carlos Villegas, head of Bolivia’s statehydrocarbons company, YPFB (La Razón, 2010); Alvaro Uribe, ex-President ofColombia (RPP, 2011).



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this policy, governments ranging from Morales’ ‘‘government ofsocial movements’’ through to the Uribe government and itsquestionable human rights record, have all vilified activists, socialmovements and nongovernmental organizations that question thewisdom of such policies and doubt the positive developmentaleffects of promoting the extractive sector. These policy styleshave been centralizing and have prioritized national politicalprojects over concerns of subnational governments and efforts onthe parts of indigenous groups to extend territorial claims andautonomies. To go back to the earlier question about possibleconsequences for state formation and democratic consolidation,it may well be that the last few years of extractive industry expan-sion in the region have favored more populist than participatoryforms of democracy, and an effort to recentralize state authorityfollowing several years of experimentation with decentralizedpowers.

The risk of pointing to these convergences through such a trun-cated discussion is that the argument may convey a form of re-source based determinism in which economies of extraction arecast as driving political formations and modes of governing. Thisis not my intent. Nor is the idea to argue that natural resources pol-icy is the same across these four countries. In particular, Ecuadorand Bolivia have shown far more commitment to state ownershipand resource nationalism (though there is also state ownership inthe hydrocarbons sectors in Colombia and Peru). However, thereare convergences in government responses to protest and to hu-man and indigenous rights in areas where extraction occurs, aswell as in the broader calculations being made regarding the rela-tionships between extraction and the macro-economy. In thissense, I suggest that these experiences highlight the value of ana-lyzing the co-production of ‘‘the economic,’’ ‘‘the political’’ and‘‘the ecological’’ at national and cross-national comparative scalesas well as at the more localized scales to which political ecologyhas generally paid more attention. Such regime level work is ana-lytically important in and of itself, but it is also critical for any at-tempt to think through alternatives. As my colleague, CarlosMonge of Revenue Watch, Peru, argues, any effort that focuses onlocal alternatives but is unable to consider how to move to a na-tional post-extractive economy that is still able to generate thetypes of fiscal revenue offered by resource extraction, is dead inthe water.

This reference to Carlos Monge draws attention to a finalpoint. These processes are being lived and analyzed by activistpolitical ecologists – some in government, some in civil society– who are trying to work out how to respond to the rapidlyexpanding frontier of extractive industry investment. In the pro-cess, these ‘‘underground political ecologists’’ have formed a pro-gressively more networked collective of overlapping communitieswho are more or less working together to challenge contemporarymodes of resource governance in the region and to imagine otheroptions.

16 Personal communication from Jose de Echave.17 Concessions are artifacts of systems of resource tenure in the subsoil. In this

region, the subsoil is the property of the nation and held in trust by the state and thegovernment of the moment. In response to requests, the state allocates concessions toprivate actors and state enterprises, directly or through public auction. They aretypically allocated without any form of prior consultation with populations possess-ing the surface land rights or rights to resources lying above the subsoil.

18 This has become a particularly thorny issue for indigenous-state negotiations incountries that are signatories of the ILO Convention 169 on indigenous peoples, asthese governments are under obligation to carry out consultations with indigenouscommunities before approving projects or investments that will impact their legallyrecognized territories. Even in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia wheregovernments are ostensibly more sensitive to these issues, consultation processesare conducted only once concessions or contracts are awarded to companies.

4. Experiencing and contesting the new extraction

4.1. Experiencing extraction

The styles of governing extraction discussed above have deliv-ered much success on their own terms. Interest in explorationand investment has increased dramatically. Between 2002 and2009 in Colombia, the area granted to mining licenses increasedfrom 1.05 million ha to 4.77 million ha (Rudas, 2011). In Peru be-tween 2004 and 2008 the area of the Amazon basin under hydro-carbon concessions increased from 14% to 72% (Finer et al., 2008).By 2011 in Ecuador, everything was in place for the development ofthe country’s first ever large scale metal mine, and in Bolivia the


hydrocarbon exploration frontier had expanded into brand newregions.

In response to this expanding frontier – both of exploration con-cessions and full-blown operations – one area of work that has ta-ken off among NGOs and activist researchers seeking to monitorthis process has been the use of GIS and other visualization tech-niques as instruments of analysis and advocacy (cf. McCuskerand Weiner, 2003). In the Andean region alone, organizations suchas Cooperacción (Perú), the Instituto del Bien Común (Perú), AcciónEcológica (Ecuador) and Fundación Tierra (Bolivia) have all becomeactive users of GIS, and the approach has proven highly effectivein what one might call political ecological advocacy. Maps ofconcessions and mines have played an important role in conveyinga sense of what is going on, and in placing into public debate theissue of the need for more land use and environmental planningof extraction.

One contentious issue surrounding these maps is exactly whatthey mean. Critics of concession maps insist that they grossly exag-gerate the effects of extraction on the landscape, because – they ar-gue – only a very small proportion of areas granted as concessionsis ever converted into actual mines or wells. The then head of thegovernment service responsible for concessions in Peru went so faras to argue that not only was the NGO Cooperacción committingsuch acts of exaggeration, but that it was also inciting unrest inthe process because its maps shaded concessions red.16 Such accu-sations might be absurd – instances of the bizarre that provide formoments of incredulous humor in otherwise deadly serious circum-stances – but they do point to a real question: namely, how to inter-pret maps that show vast swathes of territory under concession formining and hydrocarbon exploration (Finer et al., 2008). The conclu-sion to which we have arrived – in conversation with colleagues inthe region – is that maps of areas that have been granted as conces-sions are above all maps of uncertainty, risk, anticipation and threat,both perceived and real. Concessions17 give their holders the right toexplore the subsoil within the boundaries of their concession,though they do not confer the right to use the surface (this has tobe acquired by the concession holder through market transactions,negotiation or compulsory purchase). Given that concessions are gi-ven without prior consultation with residents of the surface,18 it isoften the case that the first that residents know about a concessionaffecting the areas in which they live is when strangers appear, seek-ing to buy land, negotiate rights of way, or begin some basic explo-ration and survey activity. In this sense, the geography ofconcessions is also a geography of unexpected changes in land mar-kets and in the actors who move across and within particular spaces.

Beyond this – and largely as a result of advocacy, of conflictelsewhere over extraction and of networking among communityand nongovernmental organizations (underground political ecolo-gists again) – local populations have become increasingly aware ofthe sorts of landscape change, socio-cultural change, water re-source challenges, potential environmental damage and new eco-nomic opportunities that a mine or hydrocarbon field mightimply. Consequently, if the exploratory work that the concession



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allows culminates in a discovery of deposits, residents’ visions ofthe future change forever. The idea that extraction might be partof life to come becomes part of an imagination that cannot beerased.

In these different ways the concession maps new uncertaintiesabout the future – uncertainties about the possibilities of both dis-possession and opportunity. There are many legitimate reasons forthese concerns about possible dispossession. By way of example,consider the north Peruvian Region of Cajamarca, home to LatinAmerica’s largest goldmine operated by Minera Yanacocha (Bury,2004, 2005), and the site of a series of additional new and also verylarge mining projects. Among some, the sense of the dispossessionthat the Yanacocha mine effected is acute. Kamphuis (2012), for in-stance, has documented how the company acquired 609.44 ha ofland in 1993, paying landowners a total of $30,000 in return. Laterin 1993, Minera Yanacocha mortgaged the same land for $50 mil-lion, and then for a further $35 million in 1994. While the effects ofthe mine on water supply are disputed, it is the case that the townof Hualguayoc, to the north of the mine, has been without water fora year (though in this case, activists claim that this is as a result ofthe operations of a distinct mine owned by a different company). Inaddition to such dispossession of financial value and water is therisk of other forms of dispossession: of territorial control, of gover-nance powers for community organizations, of everyday peace andquiet, and of culturally significant landscapes as mountains areground down and new holes appear (Bridge, 2009).

On the other hand, there are also clear reasons to begin to imag-ine futures of economic bounty once deposits have been discov-ered. The economies of the city of Cajamarca and of somecommunities have been transformed and there are evidently manymore economic opportunities as a consequence of the mine’s pres-ence and the labor and services that it and its workers demand.Opportunities can also come in the form of new forms of patronageand donation. At another planned mine in the region, Anglo-Amer-ican’s Michiquillay project, the company has established a $200+million social fund for two (albeit large) communities. More gener-ally fiscal transfers to Cajamarca based on taxes on mining incomesustain the largest parts of municipal government budgets andmuch of the infrastructure investment of the regional government.Thus for some, the ‘‘uncertainty’’ generated by exploration is thatthis could mean significant economic development and povertyreduction, though on this the evidence is also mixed. While somestudies (Larde et al., 2008) and aggregate data from Bolivia andVenezuela suggest positive impacts on poverty, econometric anddescriptive analysis in Peru suggests that mining rents have hadlittle or no significant effect on welfare and poverty (Arellano-Yan-guas, 2012, 2011; de Echave and Torres, 2005).

Finally, it merits note that whatever the uncertainty about whatsort of development extraction might bring, one thing that is cer-tain is that at some point in the future the extractive economy willpass and the question of ‘‘what next?’’ will be palpable. This futuremay not be so far around the corner for some territories that havebeen caught up in post-1970s extraction and one already begins tosee some of these trying to recast their identities, engage compa-nies in drawn out legal battles, or simply begin to stagnate eco-nomically (for instance oil regions in NE Ecuador). Indeed, thisquestion of ‘‘post-extraction’’ is one that lies wide open in mostanalysis of the current boom and its effects.19 Yet in the end, it iscritical.

19 Of course, in some territories the period of ‘‘post’’-extraction may be consistentlydelayed as technological and consumption shifts construct new resources as objectsof extraction, or push the potential frontier of economically viable extraction bothfurther out and deeper down. There is, however, no guarantee that this will occur(thanks to an anonymous reader for this observation).


4.2. Countering extraction

All this uncertainty is an effect of sustained and massive ‘‘at-tempts to expand the reach and depth of capitalist commodifica-tion’’ (Castree, 2007, p. 27) and has been accompanied bywidespread conflict. The Social Conflicts unit of the Human RightsOmbudsman of Peru consistently reports that around 50% of Peru’sconflicts are socio-environmental in form and mostly related toextractive industries. Such conflicts range from those around ef-forts to establish new mines, wells or pipelines, to others relatedto the on-going operations of extractive enterprises, and yet othersover the management and use of tax and royalty revenue gener-ated by extraction.20 While the figures may not be quite as dramaticin other countries, the extractive sector has become characterized byincreasing conflictiveness in Bolivia (Humphreys Bebbington andBebbington, 2010; Perreault, 2008), Ecuador (Moore and Velásquez,2012, 2013: Acosta, 2009), El Salvador (Cartagena, 2009), Argentina(Svampa and Antonelli, 2009), Guatemala (Zarsky and Stanley,2011), Mexico (Garibay et al., 2011) and elsewhere. This conflicthas generated interesting and important research on the contentiouspolitics surrounding extraction. However, one lesson from our workhas been that not all counter-movements are contentious. That is, tofocus on subaltern and protest struggles offers only a partial view ofthe double movement that has been associated with the expansionof extraction. In the following paragraphs I outline different domainsin which such countermovement has become apparent to us. Thisdoes not mean that countermovements will be evident in these dif-ferent domains, but that they can be.

The most obvious domain of countermovement is, of course,that of contentious politics. Throughout South and Central Americathere is ample evidence of this sort of contention, typically involv-ing indigenous and campesino populations, though in some of themost significant cases, also involving urban and capitalist farmerpopulations concerned about water supply and contamination.21

Such movements appear to be especially concerned about disposses-sion (of land, water, territory, exchange value) and often make thecase that such dispossession is unacceptable. In an open complaintto the Morales government of Bolivia, the Council of Guaraní Cap-taincies of Tarija (Consejo de Capitanías Guaraníes de Tarija) refersto such loss of territory, autonomy and rights:

‘‘our territories are being permanently affected by naturalresource extraction activities and infrastructure construc-tion . . .No argument can justify government authorities or rep-resentatives of state or private companies simply ignoring allthe rights that have been gained by indigenous peoples and thatconstitute the essence of the process of change underway in ourcountry’’ (CCGT, 2010).

Concerns expressed by Afro-descendant movements in Colom-bia (Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN): Escobar, 2008), orthe indigenous and community based organizations AIDESEP andCONACAMI in Peru, for instance, are not dissimilar. While the nar-ratives of territorial autonomy, indigenous autochthony and ‘‘an-other development’’ of such groups should not automatically betaken at face value, and nor should their democratizing credentialsbe presumed (Watts and McCarthy, 1997), they remain nonethe-less movements that counter the degrees of commodification andtransformation embodied in the expansion of the extractiveeconomy.

20 See the website at: http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/conflictos-sociales/.21 Cases of these would include, for instance: the Quilish and Tambogrande conflicts

in Perú; the conflict in Las Cabañas in El Salvador; the Esquel conflict in Argentina;and various conflicts in Azuay, Ecuador, in particular that around the Quimsacochamine.


http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/conflictos-sociales/



Such subaltern underground political ecologists (and indeed,organizations such as the PCN sometimes invoke political ecol-ogy)22 have been perhaps the most studied by academic politicalecologists. However, counter-movements are also apparent in theState, in central government, in local government, in the judiciaryand in the press. In no instance are these dominant (there is a reasonthat they are counter) but they do remind us of the possibility thatsuch processes can emerge from within institutions that can stilltoo easily be treated monolithically as embodiments of (neoliberal)hegemony. Let me note a few examples related to the state andthe judiciary.23

Within the ambit of the State, some Human Rights Ombuds-man’s offices have come to constitute one of the most significantinstitutional locations of counter-movement in Latin America.The Defensoría del Pueblo in Perú and the Procuradoría in El Salva-dor, for instance, have been especially assertive in addressing is-sues of dispossession that can occur with the expansion ofextractive industry – especially the dispossession of a range of con-stitutionally guaranteed civil, environmental and socio-economicrights. The Defensoría in Peru also played a critical role in movesto elaborate a Law of Prior Consultation for indigenous peoples(the law was finally passed in late 2011). Indeed, in many respectsthe Defensoría is viewed as an ally by activists even though it dil-igently retains its autonomy and so at times expresses views thatdiffer from those of movements (Bebbington et al., 2011; Pegram,2008).

Ombudsman’s offices are able to play this more assertive, coun-tering role because they are independent of the Executive Office,answering instead to Congress – a constitutional location thatgives them a degree of autonomy and an ability to propose (ifnot enforce) legal changes. That said, the Ombudsman has beenmore assertive in some countries than others, and in given coun-tries some subnational Ombudsmen’s offices have been moreassertive than others (as is apparent in Bolivia). These patternssuggest that other factors in addition to constitutional locationare also important. In the Peruvian case, for instance, both leader-ship and staffing have also been important in determining the ori-entation of the Defensoría del Pueblo – indeed the office hasattracted a new generation of lawyers with particular commit-ments to human rights and rule of law.

The scope for counter-movement within Ministries is consider-ably less than that within the Ombudsman’s offices. One testamentto this might be the relatively short political lives of those politicalecologists who have assumed Ministerial and Vice-Ministerialpositions – though as some of these very people would also note,lack of experience in public management and political maneuver-ing were also factors that complicated their tenure.24 However,the very fact that such actors assumed such positions in the firstplace itself reflects attempts to use government as a vehicle of coun-

22 This may be a consequence of their longstanding collaborations with ArturoEscobar and other scholars.

23 There is not space to discuss the press also, but it does merit a note. While acrossthe region the press has typically supported the expansion of extractive industry, notall formal media have been equally convinced. For instance, during 2007 reporting bythe national newspaper La República in Peru played an important role in raisingconcerns about the expansion of mining in the northern highlands. Of course, theboundaries between this press and other counter-movement processes are not clear-cut. It can be argued that the presence of certain players on the editorial board of thenewspaper helped create space for such reporting and that as such it is betterunderstood as constituting an outgrowth of other movement processes. However, Iprefer to note it as a different domain, if only to suggest the importance of attendingto it empirically.

24 Examples here would include Alberto Acosta, former Minister of Energy andMines in Ecuador, and Jose de Echave and Hugo Cabieses, both former Vice Ministersof Environment in Peru. Significantly these short lives occurred within governmentsdeclaring an intent to counter the excesses of neoliberalism (Correa’s government inEcuador, and Humala’s in Peru).


ter-movement. And in the occasional case, such efforts can becomemore long-lasting. The El Salvador experience that I referred to ear-lier is significant in this regard. Two and half years into the FMLNgovernment the team in the Ministry of Environment has beenremarkably stable, and continues to pursue a policy which seeks tostrengthen environmental regulation and link it to citizenship rights.In the specific case of extractive industries, the Ministry has consis-tently assumed a hard line (though the Ombudsman’s line is harderstill). It has been explicit in exploring the case for a national morato-rium on mining on the grounds that it might generate unacceptablelevels of environmental and social risk. In the process, members ofthe Ministry team have maintained relationships with certain socialmovement organizations in ways that are reminiscent of Fox’s(1996) arguments about the political construction of social capital,not least because many of these map back onto prior relationshipsfrom the NGO world and the civil war period. Of course, whetherall this will culminate in legislation for an actual moratorium onmining is another question and will depend on presidential andprime ministerial negotiations with business elites, as well as on cal-culations in the Ministry of Finance regarding tax revenue. However,for our purposes here, this momentum within the Ministry of Envi-ronment and the relationships on which it depends constitute anevident attempt to counter the potential commodification of El Sal-vador’s subsoil in ways that might produce significant new risks anduncertainties.

Similar initiatives occur in subnational government. Indeed, tothe extent that subnational governments can be more accessibleto civil society organizations through both electoral processesand professional appointments from the world of local NGOs, thensuch counter-initiatives tend to be more frequent at this level ofgovernment. These initiatives have included the strategic use of lo-cal planning ordinances, the creation of municipal conservationareas and the establishment of ecological-economic zoning andland use planning processes – all with a view to governing theexpansion of the extractive frontier so as to reduce adverse envi-ronmental and social impacts. While the power of such initiativesis constrained by the limited powers of subnational government,there are clear instances where this has also slowed down or re-regulated the expansion of the extractive frontier.25

A fourth domain of countermovement that merits far moreattention is that of the law and the legal profession. Notwithstand-ing a growing interest in law within political ecology (e.g. McCar-thy, 2007), there remains very much to be done on the roles thatnetworks of lawyers and legal practices have played both in fur-thering reform processes that have facilitated the expansion ofextractive industry and in countering these processes. The Consti-tutional Court of Colombia offers one of the more striking exam-ples of the role that the judiciary can play in counteringextraction. In a period of authoritarian neoliberalism under thePresidency of Alvaro Uribe (2002–2010), central government ac-tively promoted the large scale, extractive economy – particularlyof mining, hydrocarbons and oil palm. This followed reforms to themining code in 2001 that weakened the territorial rights of localpopulations, as well as the rights of artisanal miners. The followingperiod was one in which the area affected by mining licenses in-creased exponentially (see above) leading to overlaps betweenconcessions and other titles and rights in land. This process seemslikely to continue under the National Development Plan (2010–2014) of the current government. This plan identifies mining asthe main ‘‘locomotive’’ of Colombia’s economic growth (there are

25 Examples include: the withdrawal of a mining company from Tambogrande, Peru(Haarstad and Fløysand, 2007; de Echave et al., 2008); the slow down and redesign ofmining projects in the highlands of Piura (Bebbington et al., 2007; Bebbington, 2012);the moratorium on mining in Esquel, Argentina; and the use of referenda and otherinstruments to raise serious questions about the regulation of mining in Colombia.




five such locomotives in total), and projects that the sector will ac-count for 54% of all private investment and 41% of all public invest-ment over the period.

The irony (or contradiction) of Colombia is that all this has hap-pened at the same time as ‘‘Colombia boasts one of the most pro-gressive frameworks for ethnic rights protection in the world’’ (NSI,2011) enshrined in instruments such as the Political Constitutionof 1991, Ley 70 of 1993 (which recognizes the rights and ancestralterritories of Afrodescendent populations, along with their priorrights to consultation and to exploration and exploitation of min-eral resources on their territories) and Decree 1320 of 1998 whichestablishes regulations for prior consultation. Meanwhile a 2010Constitutional Court ruling (T-1045A) established a requirementfor free, prior and informed consent for mining projects on territo-ries of Afrodescendent populations, as well as for plans to protectthe basic rights of these populations in the event that projects pro-ceeded. Also in 2010, reforms to the mining code added high alti-tude grasslands (paramos) and RAMSAR sites as strategic areas tobe protected by the state against destruction by mining projects.

The far reaching – and in some cases constitutional – nature ofthese provisions means that they cannot simply be viewed as agreen-washing of national policy. Instead they seem to reflect thesorts of regulatory double movements that one might expect ifone accepts the Polanyian argument. Understanding their final ef-fects as well as how they take form within the relatively hiddenand opaque worlds of courts, lawyers’ networks and the judiciaryare wide open fields of enquiry.

4.3. Negotiating extraction

Of course, many encounters with extraction will not fall easilyinto those of opponents and proponents, of those who see risksand those who see opportunities. Many processes will likely in-volve the sorts of negotiated bricolage that have been so skillfullyrevealed by, for instance, earlier work on peasant politics and tech-nical knowledge (Batterbury, 2001; Long and Long, 1992). Onceagain there is not the space here to elaborate on this, except to notetwo examples of the sorts of process that might merit attention –one at the local scale, the other national.

At the local and subnational scale, it is already clear from expe-riences in North America and Australasia that some indigenous andlocal populations have concluded that engaging with extractiveindustry can serve as a means of furthering other projects – in par-ticular ones of local economic regeneration, the recovery of territo-rial control and the reconstitution of identities. One gets a similarsense in Latin America that some indigenous populations areengaging with extraction not only for the very pragmatic reasonof extracting benefits, but also in order to see how far the extrac-tive economy can be used as a means of consolidating territories.Given the sorts of Faustian pact that might be at play in such nego-tiations, as well as the huge asymmetries of power that are in-volved, the jury is still very much out on how far these might beviable strategies. Nonetheless, these experiences and correlates ofthem among other subnational populations and governments mer-it careful analysis. Such analysis will illuminate not only politicalstrategy but also the sorts of relationship between resource extrac-tion and political forms that might come to be.

At another scale the emerging movement in Latin Americaaround transitions beyond extraction also merits attention. Herethe narrative is at a wholly different scale, and the goal is to imag-ine and bring into being post-extractive economies that no longerdepend so heavily on bringing minerals and hydrocarbons to thesurface (Alayza and Gudynas, 2011). Once again, though, thesetransitions will also have to involve a carefully managed engage-ment with extraction – because the transition will not occur fromone day to the next and early phases of any transition will be based


on the extractive economy for reasons of fiscal revenue. In this areathe field is once again wide open, not only for studying the politicalprocesses around post-extraction but also for producing bodies ofanalysis and knowledge that can become part of these very sameprocesses, providing ingredients for the construction of imaginar-ies that stand some chance of not being ‘‘dead in the water.’’

5. Conclusions: underground, networked regional politicalecologies

The significance of the underground should not be underesti-mated – and arguably cannot be overestimated. This is not to arguethat the underground should be the only, or even the primary, to-pic of inquiry for political ecology. It is to suggest that it is a topicwhose importance has not been reflected in the balance of politicalecological writing to date. Control of the subsoil has been a vehiclefor the accrual of immense power, both domestically and interna-tionally. This power is most obviously embodied in those corpora-tions that dominate mineral and energy economies, but just asimportantly affects, and is constitutive of, many domains of trans-national, national and everyday political economic and social life.Perhaps this very omnipresence has made the centrality of the sub-soil too big to get a handle on, or too mundane to recognize. What-ever the case, its significance would seem not so dissimilar fromthat of food or forests, to which many more pages of political eco-logical treatise have been dedicated. I close this essay suggestingthat similar effort could very fruitfully be dedicated to the subsoil,both to analyze how it is used and brought into social life, and toexplore alternatives to the dominant ways in which it has beengoverned. Any such effort must also build off (and not merely rein-vent) insights that have already been garnered in other subfields aswell as in other disciplines beyond geography and anthropology(the two that I have cited most in this discussion).

If it is correct to suggest that there is significant convergenceamong post-neoliberal and neoliberal regimes in their commit-ment to expanding extractive industry and their willingness tocompromise territorial, rights based and environmental claims inthe process, then the implication is that, for all their resourcenationalism and invocations of state ownership, the approachesbeing pursued by governments in Bolivia or Ecuador (and certainlyby those of Peru or Colombia) fall far short of the principles under-lying the types of alternative invoked by authors such as Escobar(2008, 2010). Of course, much of the reason for this might be thatsuch post-neoliberal experiments are by definition pursued on aterrain that has already been deeply neoliberalized, and that thislimits governments’ room for manoeuvre (Kaup, 2010). To the ex-tent that prior dependence on extractive industry has path depen-dent effects on future options (Auty, 2001), such limits are all thegreater. Whatever the case, one implication is that the relation-ships between contemporary resource based models of economicand social development, state formation and forms of democracyis a topic that is still open for plenty of critical and creativeanalysis.

However, while the temptation might be to be pessimistic, thesorts of counter-movement that I have briefly outlined point to themany brave actors who are in the business of building elements ofalternative approaches to extraction that might leave more spacefor rights and environmental integrity – whether those elementsare a land use plan, a decision on Constitutional principles, or amoral sanctioning of a government department whose decisionshave contravened civil rights (Bebbington and Bury, 2009). Fur-thermore, they are doing so in ways that are more or less net-worked and, in a loose sense, collective. Put another way, theseprocesses of construction are a form of networked, undergroundregional political ecology of which academic political ecology is



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consciously or unconsciously a part (but just one part) (cf. Roche-leau and Roth, 2007; Birkenholtz, 2011).26 This way of viewing theembeddedness of academic political ecology might lead one totweak the notion of regional political ecology to refer not just tothe political ecology of regions (Walker, 2003; Black, 1990) but alsoto the conduct and pursuit of political ecologies within regions andthat might ultimately help constitute regions – a pursuit in whichacademic political ecologists are one among a number of players.

Such a framing can also help highlight other issues that mayhave relevance beyond any political ecology of the subsoil. First,for many academic political ecologists, being part of these politicalecologies within regions is a critical condition of possibility for ourown scholarly work. Embedding research might often be less of achoice than a necessity, and can become even more so for workon issues that are particularly contentious or opaque. Second,when the academic political ecologist is concerned with processesthat are unfolding on a massive and multi-locational scale (such asthe associated large-scale infrastructural transformation of LatinAmerica that has accompanied the rise of extraction), to get a han-dle on such processes makes a link to far wider networks essen-tial.27 Third, if the academic political ecologist is embedded withinsuch networks, collaborating with ‘‘underground’’ political ecolo-gists, the question of how to analyze these networks and how to talkabout the mutually constitutive nature of these networks and the re-searcher’s own work is not an easy one to answer (cf. Riles, 2001). Italso becomes challenging to think through how to conduct critiqueof processes of which one is a part, that involve colleagues and thatalso involve some degree of risk for those colleagues. Fourth, this risk– which in the case of work on extractives can range from personaland physical risk to legal risk of being sued by powerful interests –raises other challenges for the academic political ecologist. In partic-ular, how might such risk be interpreted and assumed, and in whatways can academic work either increase or divert risks borne byother ‘‘underground’’ political ecologists in those networks. Fifth, gi-ven that, at least for the case of extractive industries, these networkshave a relatively poor record of prediction and have sometimes beencaught flat-footed by developments within the industry (recall mySalvadoran colleagues), how far can the political ecologist engagein the business of prediction? While such prediction may not be ofthe econometric or modeling kind (though conceivably could be),is there scope for prediction based on operating within certain socialprocesses as a result of our research and our own professionallocation?

The theme of last year’s CAPE plenary paper (Blaikie, 2012) waswhether political ecology is/could be/should be ‘‘useful.’’ Whilethis is an important question, it is not the one that motivates meto raise the sorts of questions that I have just outlined. Instead Iwant to draw attention to the extent to which academic politicalecologists are always working through, and are always part of,broader political ecological networks that bind together activism,technocracy and scholarly endeavor. Recognizing and making thisexplicit (while also protecting identities) reveals the fuller scopeof the political ecological enterprise as an exercise in the co-pro-duction of different and ultimately counter-hegemonic socio-nat-ures: ‘‘alternatives’’. If contemporary capitalism is made possibleby the bundling of the subsoil with specific networks of power,knowledge and technology, then any alternative way of governingthe subsoil and its relationships to life above the surface, will be

26 Some authors make this embedding of their own work in these regional networksmore explicit than do others. Two colleagues who are especially explicit in this regardare Escobar, 2008; Kirsch, 2006.

27 This is a variant on the multi-sited ethnographies of world systems that variousscholars have called for – in this rendering, the individual academic political ecologistworks only at one or two of these sites, and collaborates with wider networks thatreach across many more sites and that are not confined only to scholars.


brought into being through different networks of power, knowl-edge and technology. That is the project of a political ecology ofthe underground and it is one whose challenge far exceeds the pos-sibilities of academic political ecologists working alone.

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