Contesting extraction: State-making, democracy, and large scale mining in Ecuador

Resumen

In a historic shift, protest and policymaking in Ecuador now centers on the very desirability of resource extraction. Indigenous, environmental, and anti-mining and anti-oil organizations are in conflict with the state and corporations over what activists call "extractivism": the resource-dependent development model that has historically prevailed in Ecuador. This conflict has recast the terms of debate and policymaking with respect to constitutionalism, democracy, and state-formation. Across Latin America, the commodity boom and expanding extractive frontier have generated tensions between national administrations and local communities. But anti-extractive protest in Ecuador stands out in terms of scale, intensity, and political consequences. It illuminates the understudied political ideologies and alignments emerging in the wake of a more than two-decade long reorientation in the regional paradigms of development and democracy. My dissertation asks under what conditions — and with what consequences — resource extraction became the site of intense political conflict in Ecuador. Theoretically, it asks, how do political discourses become available, institutionalize, and advance — or undermine — political projects? Based on fourteenth months of ethnographic and archival research, I argue that the emergence and institutionalization of the discourse of "anti-extractivism" in Ecuador was the product of a critical juncture marked by the inauguration of leftist President Rafael Correa (2007-present), the rewriting of the Constitution (2007-2008), and the administration's promotion of large scale mining — a new extractive sector in an oil-dependent country. This juncture was the condition of possibility of a realignment that drove a wedge between a leftist president and his erstwhile social movement allies. Theoretically, I argue that discourses such as anti-extractivism are institutions: they enable and constrain political action, require mechanisms of reproduction to endure in time and proliferate across space, and transform due to endogenous processes and exogenous circumstances — often with unintended consequences. Understanding the conditions under which discourses institutionalize gives us insight into how and when political rhetoric shapes public policy and institutional design. Accordingly, my project reconsiders the importance of discourse in the study of politics, and contributes to scholarship on new regional patterns of state-formation, democratic governance, state-society relations, and the political economy of resource extraction.