ABSTRACT
This chapter starts out by examining Ecuador’s oil history, combining the dependency and the curse of plenty perspectives, as they comprise important aspects of how actors and stakeholders frame the outcome of nearly 50 years of petroleum production and export. Petroleum’s materiality is significant as it defines the outcome of several socioenvironmental associations. Focus is placed, therefore, on how the Amazon crude is ordered through three partially overlapping modes: Developmentalism, destruction, and violation of rights. Key socioenvironmental conflicts of the Ecuadorian Amazon are presented by focusing on territorial disputes as the outcome of spatial dynamics rooted in the underground petroleum reservoirs. Since the notion of territory is central to many of these conflicts, the analysis addresses different ways of conceiving and experiencing territory and, more specifically, it examines how these conceptions not only collide but also become important elements of negotiation and resistance, especially in the case of indigenous peoples. The final section of the chapter looks into the inscription of Nature in the Ecuador Constitution (2008) and the legal implications of granting Nature her own rights.
