The Politics of Extraction: Territorial Rights, Participatory Institutions, and Confict in Latin America

In the face of new extraction, communities in Latin America’s hydrocarbon and mining regions use participatory institutions to challenge extraction. In some cases, communities act within the formal participatory spaces, while in others, they organize “around” or “in reaction to” the institutions, using participatory procedures as a focal point for the escalation of conflict. Communities select their strategies in response to the participatory challenges they confront. Those challenges are associated with contestation over the boundaries that determine access to the participatory institutions. Contestation over the line between subnational authority vis-à-vis central-state jurisdictions heightens communities’ challenge of initiating a participatory process. Disagreement over the territorial delineation of communities impacted by planned extraction creates the challenge of gaining inclusion in participatory events, for formally nonimpacted communities. Finally, disputes over the boundary that sets representatives of an affected community apart from the community at large intensify the community’s challenge of conveying a position on extraction. This analysis of thirty major extractive conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru in the 2000s and 2010s examines community uses of public hearings built into environmental licensing, state-led prior consultations with native communities, and local popular consultations, or referenda.