ABSTRACT

Greater understanding of the forms and consequences of investment and disinvestment in the extractive industries is required as a result of capitalist expansion, recent declines in global commodity prices, and claims that extractive sector projects, especially in the global south, are poverty reduction projects. This book explores emergent forms of governance in mining and extractive industry projects around the world. 

Chapters examine efforts to govern extractive activities across multiple political scales, through intermediaries, instruments, technologies, discourses, and infrastructures. The contributions analyse how multiple micro-processes of rule reverberate through societies to shape the material conditions of everyday life but also politics, social relations, and subjectivities in extractive economies. Detailed case studies are included from Africa (Chad, Nigeria, Rwanda, and São Tomé and Príncipe), Latin America (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru), and the UN Climate Conference.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Governing in the extractive industries

part I|60 pages

Legal, socio-political and institutional contexts of extraction

chapter 1|22 pages

Tendencies in tension

Resource governance and social contradictions in contemporary Bolivia

chapter 2|18 pages

Mining, criminalization, and the right to protest

Everyday constructions of the post-neoliberal Ecuadorian state

chapter 3|18 pages

Preserving illusions

The rule of law and legitimacy under the Chad Pipeline Project

part II|72 pages

Contested imaginaries and claims to resources

chapter 4|18 pages

“We own this oil”

Artisanal refineries, extractive industries, and the politics of oil in Nigeria

chapter 5|20 pages

Converting threats to power

Methane extraction in Lake Kivu, Rwanda

chapter 6|32 pages

A politics of the public sphere

ENGOs and oil companies in the international climate negotiations, 1987–2001

part III|73 pages

Expertise and informational economies

chapter 7|27 pages

Preventing the resource curse

Ethnographic notes on an economic experiment 1

chapter 8|19 pages

Illness, compensation, and claims for justice

Lessons from the Choropampa mercury spill

chapter 9|18 pages

Wars of words

Experts, oil, and environmental governance in Chad

chapter 10|7 pages

Post-script

Mapping neo-extractive frontiers across Africa and Latin America