Resource Radicals

"RESOURCE RADICALS explores the politics of extraction, energy, and infrastructure in order to understand how resource dependency becomes a dilemma for leftist governments and social movements alike. Thea Riofrancos offers an ethnographic account of extraction politics in Ecuador, where grassroots activists engaged with a leftist government under President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) to shape the political and economic consequences of resource extraction. She draws a distinction between two leftist positions on extraction: radical resource nationalism, which demands collective ownership of oil and minerals, and anti-extractivism, which rejects extraction entirely. For Riofrancos, Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of decolonial and indigenous activism make this country a particularly interesting case for understanding the state's role in development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism. RESOURCE RADICALS demonstrates that the Ecuadorian left's shift from calls to nationalize resources to a radical anti-extractivist politics provides a new model for grassroots responses to environmental crisis. The initial chapters provide a genealogy of the critical discourse of extractivismo. Riofrancos demonstrates that, in the second half of the 20th century, the Ecuadorian left faced a political re-alignment on the issue of extraction: activists who once fought for the nationalization of natural resources began to oppose all extraction. This shift left President Correa in conflict with the social movements that had initially supported his political project-and, in response, he claimed that opposition to oil and mineral extraction was a tactic of imperial powers acting under the guise of environmentalism. In the next chapter, Riofrancos shows how the 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution, which was the first constitution in the world to recognize Nature as a subject of rights, became simultaneously a product of popular struggle and a legal resource in the reassertion of state control over the national territory. The constitution granted communities the collective right to be consulted prior to extractive projects. When public officials did not sufficiently enforce this right, as Riofrancos demonstrates in the next chapter, two community water systems in the southern highlands set out to do so themselves in October 2011, prior to the development of a large-scale mine nearby. Finally, Riofrancos considers how the Correa government attempted to de-politicize mining by framing it as a technical issue rather than a political issue, which divided technocratic bureaucrats from anti-extractivist colleagues. RESOURCE RADICALS will be of interest to scholars working in Latin American studies, political science, political theory, anthropology, and environmental studies, as well as to those interested in activism and radical politics"--