Post-What? Extractive Industries, Narratives of Development, and Socio-Environmental Disputes across the (Ostensibly Changing) Andean Region

Abstract

Lima, 2011: A colleague begins a postgraduate seminar on extractive industries by presenting students, drawn from across Latin America, with a series of quotations on the relationships between extraction, development strategy, and society. The quotations are unlabeled, though the students are told that they come from Latin American presidents and vice presidents, representing political positions ranging from the self-consciously neoliberal to the ostensibly post-neoliberal. The task was to assign the quotations to these politically very different leaders. The success rate was not high. The point, of course, was to suggest that extractive economies can do strange things to politics, reining in the possibilities of innovation even under progressive government.

Very many people in Latin America, Europe, and North America have helped make this chapter possible—though none are implicated in its argument. In particular we are grateful to Håvard Haarstad for his patience, and to the Ford Foundation and Economic and Social Research Council for financial support at different moments.