Governance in the Extractive Industries

Power, Cultural Politics and Regulation

Lori Leonard, Siba N. Grovogui, Lori Leonard, Siba N. Grovogui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351850537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Industrielle Gewinnung natürlicher Ressourcen

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

Chaptersexamine efforts to govern extractive activities across multiple political scales, throughintermediaries, instruments, technologies, discourses, and infrastructures. The contributionsanalysehow 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.

Part I

Legal, socio-political and institutional contexts of extraction

1 Tendencies in tension

Resource governance and social contradictions in contemporary Bolivia

Tom Perreault

Bolivia has undergone profound and far-reaching political, social, and economic transformation in recent years. A paragon of Washington Consensus-inspired neoliberalism in the 1980s and ‘90s, the country experienced the convulsive effects of widespread social protest and political upheaval in the early years of the twenty-first century, much of it centered on questions of resource governance (Perreault 2006). Beginning with the Cochabamba “water war” in 2000, an array of social movements led by the country’s largest labor and peasant unions (the Bolivian Worker’s Central (COB) and the Unified Syndical Union of Rural Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), respectively), together with irrigators’ federations, urban neighborhood associations, and indigenous organizations, Bolivia’s rural and urban poor masses rejected the neoliberalization of urban water services and natural gas, and demanded—not for the first time—that Bolivia’s natural resources be used to benefit the Bolivian people, rather than foreign interests and national elites. Social movements overthrew the ruling oligarchy, forcing the resignation of neoliberal presidents in 2003 and again in 2005, clearing the way for the election in December 2005 of Evo Morales and his Movement to Socialism party.

Morales honed his political skill as the leader of the country’s largest coca-growers’ union (and retains this post today, as president of the Republic). He is also Bolivia’s first president of indigenous descent—in a country with an indigenous majority. This story is by now well known (see, for example, Dunkerly 2007; Farthing and Kohl 2014; Gutierrez Aguilar 2014; Kaup 2013; Kohl and Farthing 2006; Postero 2007; Webber 2011). My concern here is with the legacy of these social and political transformations. In particular, I examine certain contradictory tendencies that have emerged in the governance of resource extraction (and in particular, in the governance of mining) in the decade since Morales’s election. In doing so, I examine recent legislation that has bearing on mining, including the 2014 mining law (Ley de Minería y Metalurgia); the 2010 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra); the 2012 Law of Mother Earth and Integrated Development for Living Well (Ley de Madre Tierra y Desarrollo Integral para Vivir Bien); and the 2013 Prior, Free and Informed Consultation Bill (Anteproyecto de Ley de Consulta Previa, Libre e Informada), which is currently being considered by Congress. My examination takes the form of a textual analysis of these laws, together with a political economic analysis of the context in which the laws are written and enacted. I undertake this examination fully aware of its limitations, and the fact that this approach tells us very little about the day-to-day lived experience of people in zones of extraction. Detailed ethnographic investigation of this sort is beyond the scope of the present chapter, but see Perreault (2013a, 2015, 2017, forthcoming), and Marston and Perreault 2017). The aim of the current chapter is to provide insight into the interplay of intellectual currents that inform legal frameworks.

The contradictions within and between these laws are apparent: the new mining law, arguably the most far-reaching and influential of the four, expands the mining sector, while favoring the interests of mining cooperatives and transnational firms, and weakening the ability of rural communities to safeguard their lands and waters. This law, written in large part by mining cooperatives and their allies, is widely seen as a boon to the mining sector and as weakening the rights of affected communities and others to contest mining activities. By contrast, the Law of Prior Consultation would establish the right of local communities to greater participation in decision-making regarding extractive activities, in accordance with international norms, thus potentially serving as a check on extractive interests. Of a rather different character is the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which draws on indigenous ideas of “living well” (vivir bien or buen vivir in Spanish, sumak kawsay in Quechua, suma qamaña in Aymara) to establish a normative philosophical basis for national development “in harmony and equilibrium with Mother Earth” (Art. 2). Observers within and beyond Bolivia have noted the obvious contradictions between the Bolivian government’s ongoing intensification of resource extraction and its professed commitment to living harmoniously with Mother Earth. Read dialectically, however, it is apparent that the contradictory tendencies in these laws emerge from historically sedimented interests of particular social groups. These laws, then, may be read as legislative attempts to reconcile fundamental tensions within Bolivian society and political economy. In what follows, I examine these tensions and what they mean for the governance of mining in Bolivia. The next section examines three fundamental concepts at the heart of what Bolivians refer to as the “process of change” (proceso de cambio): neo-extractivism, post-neoliberalism, and sumak kawsay/vivir bien. This is followed by an overview of Bolivia’s mining sector, and its political economic importance, both historically and in the current moment. The chapter then analyzes several pieces of legislation, recently passed or under consideration, and their relationship to the mining economy. The chapter ends by considering this legislation in the broader context of political economic and cultural political forces at play in the central Andean region.

Antinomies of resource governance

During the past decade, the concept of environmental governance has emerged as a principal analytical lens through which social scientists have examined the political and economic coordination of socio-natural relations, particularly in the context of neoliberal capitalism (Bridge and Perreault 2009; Himley 2008; Lemos and Agrawal 2006). In a broad sense, environmental governance serves as an analytical frame to examine questions of rule and decision-making regarding nature and natural resources. In particular, critical studies in environmental governance focus on the shifting spatial scales and institutional arrangements of environmental management under neoliberalism. Within this perspective, authors have examined the governance of a range of resource sectors, including urban drinking water and sanitation (Bakker 2002, 2003; Jepson 2016; Mirosa and Harris 2012), mineral extraction (Bridge 2000; Himley 2013), forests (Prudham 2004), fisheries (Mansfield 2004; St. Martin 2005), peasant irrigation systems (Perreault 2005), and industrial agriculture (Hollander 2004). This work draws directly or indirectly on neo-Marxian approaches such as regulation theory to explain the organizational and institutional shifts associated with nature’s commodification, enclosure, privatization, and marketization (Bakker 2010; Bridge and Jonas 2002). Commonly described using the shorthand government to governance, this work describes the ways in which decision-making has been re-institutionalized, reorganized and rescaled under neoliberalism (for example through privatization of resource ownership or the establishment of public–private partnerships, market-based metrics for allocating resources, or various participatory mechanisms, each of which can operate across a variety of spatial scales) (Himley 2008). Of crucial importance here is the fact that, far from being rigid and durable socio-political configurations, the regulatory regimes that characterize modes of environmental governance arise out of social struggle and are thus contingent and unstable and must constantly be remade. In the mining sector especially, characterized as it is by dramatic boom-and-bust economic cycles and contentious labor relations, such regulatory regimes tend toward crisis and instability.

An environmental governance framework, most commonly associated with the analysis of nature’s neoliberalization (Bakker 2010) may seem an uncomfortable fit with the putatively “post-neoliberal” states of Andean South America. In the case of the left-leaning Bolivian government of Evo Morales, a governance lens can illuminate the disjunctures as well as the continuities with the former neoliberal regime, through a focus on state/non-state relations, the re-institutionalization of resource management, and the shifting scales of rule and decision-making. In contemporary Bolivia, the social, economic, and political arrangements through which minerals (and hydrocarbons, water, lithium and forests, for example) are governed have been re-institutionalized and rescaled in the move away from neoliberalism, just as they were reconfigured in the transition to neoliberalism during the 1980s and 1990s. This post-neoliberal institutional reconfiguration has not involved merely a return to the pre-neoliberal status quo ante, however. Rather, the governance of resource extraction has been re-centralized through the so-called renationalization of the state hydrocarbons firm YPFB and the partial revival of the state mining company COMIBOL, even as political administration has been further decentralized through the creation of various forms of territorial autonomy (Farthing and Kohl 2014). Moreover, and of vital importance in the case of Bolivia, the state acts through numerous non-state actors. In his analysis of the post-neoliberal Bolivian state, for instance, Gustafson (2010) highlights the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement to Socialism, MAS) government’s efforts to re-signify state sovereignty in coalition with social movement actors and the use of social movement-like tactics, including mass mobilization and spectacle. In this sense, the Bolivian state extends its power in diffuse fashion through its relations with particular social blocs, among them coca growers, campesino unions, and mining cooperatives.

Of central importance to my argument is the basic fact that the institutional arrangements of environmental governance are seldom invented out of whole cloth. Rather, such arrangements are constructed, often in piecemeal fashion, in the context of pre-existing social, economic, and environmental topographies and must account for racial, class, and regional animosities, ongoing patronage relations, institutional dysfunction, popular resistance, and any number of other obstacles. As legal frameworks, governance arrangements are most often constructed in evolutionary fashion, that is, building on the institutional tools, capacities, and tendencies already in place. Moreover, as is true of nearly all legislation, environmental governance frameworks are the result of social and political struggle, and reflect either compromise positions or the class (and/or racial, gendered, regional or other) interests of dominant social groups. In this sense, legislation associated with resource governance may be read backward, in order to tease out the conflicts and compromises that gave rise to particular institutional arrangements. This is my intent in examining recent Bolivian legislation. First, however, I consider three concepts that are fundamental to understanding the current social and political moment in Bolivia: neo-extractivism, post-neoliberalism, and sumak kawsay.

Tendencies in tension

Recent Bolivian legislation concerning environmental governance (either directly or indirectly), may productively be read through the conceptual lens of three political economic and cultural currents that shape public discourse and policy, and which reflect multiple, historically-rooted tensions, interests, and conflicts. These currents—neo-extractivism, post-neoliberalism and sumak kawsay (“living well”)—are not opposed to one another (e.g., renewed resource extraction is not necessarily contrary to the principles of “living well”), but nor can they be reduced to elements of a single social or political body of thought. They are not in contradiction, in a Marxian sense, but rather exist in tension with one another, and as such may be brought into alignment only through the political and cultural labors of politicians, intellectuals and occasionally social movements. Here, I briefly discuss neo-extractivism, post-neoliberalism and sumak kawsay, as the economic, political and cultural frame for my subsequent discussion of recent legislation in Bolivia.

Since the 1990s, countries throughout Latin America, and particularly in the Andean region, have experienced a boom in commodities production and export. Driven in large part by sustained and spectacular economic growth in China (and, to a lesser extent, India and Brazil), Andean states have dramatically increased the production of petroleum, natural gas, and minerals, as well as certain agricultural commodities such as soy and palm oil, all destined for international markets. While the extractive “super-cycle” appears to be drawing to a close, with economic slowdown in China and full-blown crisis in Brazil, it has profoundly shaped Andean societies and political economies since the 1990s. Commodity production of this sort is not new to Latin America, of course. Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors came in search of gold and silver, and turned coastal areas (particularly in northeast Brazil) into vast plantations for the production of commercial crops such as sugar cane and cacao. Mining, in particular, has been historically central to the economies and politics of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Since the outset of the twentieth century, however, the overall character of Andean mining has shifted in a variety of ways (Castillo 2013). During this period, mining has transformed from a labor-intensive to capital-intensive activity, with the shift to “mega-mining” favoring the dominance of transnational capital. In the 1980s and early ‘90s, roughly 12 percent of international mining investment flowed to Latin America, a figure that had increased to 33 percent by 2010 (Bebbington 2012; Bebbington and Bury 2013). Foreign participation in extractive industries in the Andean region was facilitated through the 1980s, ‘90s and early 2000s by a wave of neoliberal reforms designed to restructure property rights, taxes and royalty regimes (Himley 2010).

The recent intensification of resource extraction has been termed “neo-extractivism,” mainly by its critics, as a way to signal both continuity with, and a slight shift away from, the long histories of Andean mining. Writing at the height of the commodities boom, Eduardo Gudynas (2009; see also Bebbington 2009, 2012), characterized neo-extractivism as (1) the renewed intensification of resource extraction in the context of favorable global commodity markets, combined with (2) efforts by states to capture a greater share of the rents generated by resource extraction and export, and (3) the redistribution of those rents through various forms of state-led social programs. In Bolivia, despite nationalist rhetoric to the contrary, neither the mining nor hydrocarbons sectors were truly nationalized. Rather, the state has assumed a larger role in administering exploration and extraction, and has renegotiated concession and rent structures so as to capture a greater share of revenue (to a notably greater degree in the hydrocarbons sector than in mining). These rents are redistributed through a variety of targeted cash transfer schemes (bonos), to aid school age children (Bono Juancito Pinto), mothers of small children (Bono Juana Azurduy), and the elderly with minimal or no pensions (Renta Dignidad). As Gudynas (2009) notes, however, under “neo-extractivist” regimes, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile have only deepened their long-standing reliance on the export of raw materials. With the drop in oil prices and the recent slowdown of the Chinese and Brazilian economies, an intensified “neo-dependency” has emerged as the other face of neo-extractivism (Díaz Cuellar 2015; Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012).

In “pink tide” states such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where voters have decisively rejected the neoliberal establishment and have elected leftist governments, neo-extractivism is closely related to the politics of post-neoliberalism (Peck, Theodore and Brennner 2010). If neo-extractivism is, in the main, an economic project, then post-neoliberalism has a decidedly political bent. Self-acknowledged post-neoliberal governments set themselves up in contrast not just to the neoliberal policies of their predecessors, but in opposition to (neo)imperialism and the legacies of European and North American domination. I would argue, then, that, like post-colonialism, we may understand post-neoliberalism as simultaneously encompassing an historical moment (the period after neoliberalism), a political project (closely allied to anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements), and a form of social subjectivity (which entails socio-cultural and political-economic identities). In this sense, post-neoliberalism is less a stable condition, or “thing-in-itself...