Mineral extraction deeply affects marginalized populations in many parts of the Global South. It shapes domains of enormous relevance to contemporary societies, such as resource management, climate change, and inequality. Two recent and novel contributions endeavor to explain when and how affected communities mobilize for and against extraction.
In The Roots of Engagement: Understanding Opposition and Support for Resource Extraction, Moisés Arce, Michael Hendricks, and Marc Polizzi explore a compelling puzzle. Academic and journalistic accounts often focus on public, highly visible acts of resistance to extractive projects. Although this resistance may constitute the modal response, some individuals on “extractive frontiers” support extraction (p. 7), particularly because of its redistributive potential (e.g., increased local development and employment opportunities). Often, these perspectives do not arise in public discourse because they are not expressed through public demonstrations (p. 14). The authors undertake an ambitious project: to theorize and empirically analyze support for extraction.
Arce, Hendricks, and Polizzi provide a novel and complex—yet parsimonious—argument: participation in community organizations (social engagement) generally increases opposition to extraction through three key mechanisms. These organizations provide both information for members to understand the threat from mining and resources to organize resistance to it; they increase members’ sense of efficacy, empowering them to challenge the actors who engage in resource extraction; and they build connections among members, establishing a community worldview that emphasizes nonmaterial concerns around identity, territory, and culture.
Although the book’s argument provides a clearly articulated theory of opposition to extraction, it seems to implicitly assume that individuals who do not oppose extraction support it. The authors suggest that those who are not socially engaged will be more likely to “accept the discourse from outside sources…[that] mining will bring employment opportunities or development to the area” (p. 22). However, the counterfactual outcomes to opposition likely include both support and relative indifference. Readers might have benefited from a more explicit engagement with how the theory would disentangle support, opposition, and indifference. For example, under what conditions might social engagement—particularly with certain organizations—lead to support for extraction?
A strength of the book lies in its convincing and skillful evaluation of the argument in three empirical cases—Nicaragua, Peru, and South Africa—with a chapter devoted to extraction sites in each. In the Tambo Valley of Peru, producer associations and irrigation boards have organized agricultural interests to oppose the Tía María open-pit copper mine, whereas in Nicaragua’s Rancho Grande, church leaders have assumed a primary role in organizing opposition to mining. In contrast to the previous two cases, an open-pit coal mine in Fuleni, South Africa, faced relatively less opposition. The authors argue that communities in Fuleni are more geographically dispersed and have weaker local organizations than those found in Tambo Valley and Rancho Grande. Traditional leaders in Fuleni also have been co-opted often by mining companies. Together, these factors reduce preventive mobilization against mining and increase “redistributive claims related to employment opportunities or local development” (p. 95).
The case studies are complemented and enhanced by surveys conducted at each field site. I found the quantitative findings and discussion summarized in table 6.6 particularly interesting; the mechanisms appear to operate as the authors predict in Tambo Valley and Rancho Grande. Fuleni is somewhat more complicated: two of the three mechanisms—information/resources and community worldview—are operative, but there is no evidence of greater social engagement.
For the main findings presented in chapter 6, the analysis could have engaged more deeply with the potential endogeneity of social engagement. The authors assert that participation in local community organizations is “an exogenous factor that can be observed and quantified” (p. 100). Yet, individuals could join local community organizations for observed and unobserved reasons that are also related to their attitudes toward extraction. Opposition to mining could be a motivator for joining an environmental organization, for example. Engaging with these ideas—for example, in the discussion of the selection of controls for the regression model—would have made the quantitative findings even more powerful.
Like The Roots of Engagement, Maiah Jaskoski’s The Politics of Extraction: Territorial Rights, Participatory Institutions, and Conflict in Latin America examines grassroots reactions to resource extraction. Specifically, the author explores variation in how groups engage with participatory institutions, such as prior consultation and environmental impact studies.
In developing her theory, Jaskoski identifies three key challenges that shape participation. At the outset, uncertainty over the level of government responsible for extraction can create an “event initiation challenge.” In these cases, communities actively lobby within state institutions to demand a participatory event. Communities that are outside the formal impact area of an extractive project (“outsiders”) face an “inclusion challenge.” Jaskoski argues that when nonrigid boundaries delineate the areas affected by extraction, communities will be more likely to contest exclusion after the participatory process has occurred, whereas when clear boundaries exist, communities will more often take direct and immediate action during the participatory process (e.g., blocking extraction sites)—knowing that they will have no ability to defend themselves “after the prior consultation moment had passed” (p. 17). Those inside the extraction area (“insiders”) face an “articulation challenge,” or a decision whether to engage with the existing participatory processes or mobilize around those processes. Jaskoski theorizes that when elite community representatives have different interests from their members, the likely outcome is either contestation after the participation process has concluded or active participation within the system. The latter is more likely when public meetings are held and the former when only elite signatures are required to move forward. Finally, when elite community representatives are aligned with their members, communities refuse to participate in the participatory process as a delay tactic.
Jaskoski thus outlines and explains four primary strategies of community participation around extraction. Affected communities can work through participatory institutions; they can refuse participation in or interfere with these institutions; they can argue against the absence of formal processes or their exclusion from those processes after the fact; or they can physically block projects to demand participation. The definition of these outcomes, however, varies according to several conceptual dimensions that might be further clarified. The author notes that one form of participation is within participatory institutions, and the other three are around those institutions. Yet, the outcome seems to vary in other potentially relevant domains such as the timing of participation (pre-/post-participation event) and the goals of participation (to demand inclusion versus to stop the participatory event). The author has taken an important first step in conceptualizing variation in participation vis-à-vis extraction, and I hope in future work she will further develop her exciting typology.
Jaskoski undertakes an ambitious strategy of studying 30 extractive conflicts across Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. Much of this material is included in the book’s empirically rich part III. The first chapter in this section (chapter 4) analyzes the event initiation challenge in Colombia, where popular consultation and environmental impact study (EIA) hearings had to be made by request. Across six well-developed case studies, Jaskoski shows that communities in Colombia had only one choice: to participate in formal processes. Chapters 5 and 6 take on the more complex inclusion and articulation challenges.
It can be difficult to conduct medium-N analysis in a way that strikes the right balance between breadth and depth, but the author does so skillfully. Each case provides interesting detail and nuance to the overall argument. The tables included at the beginning of each chapter helpfully systematize the empirical material and serve as a reference in moments when—willfully and happily—my attention was captured by the details of the individual cases. I appreciated the inclusion of the outlier cases, but would have benefited from a more robust discussion of why—analytically and empirically—they were included.
Thinking systematically about different forms of participation around extraction marks an important contribution to existing work on resource conflict and social mobilization. In future extensions, the author might further develop the relationship among the three participatory challenges. In figure 1.1 and the theoretical and empirical discussions, Jaskoski seems to suggest that communities face only one challenge. However, if communities pass the event initiation challenge (i.e., they achieve a participatory process), they should then face an inclusion challenge or articulation challenge. This could lead to the layering of different participation strategies, the effects of which might be useful and interesting to explore further.
The books complement one another quite well, but a potential source of divergence also emerges. Arce, Hendricks, and Polizzi argue that social engagement increases opposition to extraction. However, I would expect such engagement to increase effective participation in the events (prior consultations, EIAs) analyzed by Jaskoski. If true, social engagement might increase support for extraction—because it generates redistributive benefits that can only be acquired through collective action. Future research might try to resolve these potentially opposing predictions.
Overall, the authors of these two books have undertaken an ambitious effort to understand how communities respond to extractive activities. Their work will advance scholarship on collective mobilization and extraction because they answer important questions and raise exciting new ones. Which strategies of participation are most effective in either curbing extraction or increasing its redistributive potential? Which forms of organizational mobilization—efficacy, community worldview, information, and resources—are most consequential in generating opposition to resource extraction? What is the role of elite messaging (e.g., misinformation) in generating public support for extraction? The exciting research that lies ahead will owe much to the novel work of Arce, Hendricks, Polizzi, and Jaskoski.
