Areas of conflict
Two areas of conflict underlie this programme: debates over the expansion of investment in extractive industries (mining, hydrocarbons) in rural areas; and debates over agricultural liberalization and its implications for small scale agriculture. Arguments over whether – and what sort of – free trade agreement will be signed between Peru, Ecuador and the USA hinge on how the agreements handle debates on the future of agriculture and rural economies, as well as investment conditions of direct relevance to extractive industries. The surge of conflict in areas affected by mining and hydrocarbons reflects the pre-eminence given to export oriented resource extraction over the last decade and a half of economic liberalization and the efforts of civil society groups and social movements to exercise some form of control over these activities and their impacts. These conflicts are as much struggles over whose rights and voices count most in political economic decision making as they are arguments over the effects of different types of development.
Not only will these debates weigh heavily in the future stability of these three countries, they also core theoretical questions about the relationships between civil society and political economy, about how to explain the different forms taken by neo-liberalization in different contexts (Peck, 2004), and about the nature of a critical development geography committed to exploring the conditions under which certain forms of (political, development) intervention can produce more human and inclusive political economies (c.f. Corbridge, 2002; Gwynne and Kay, 2004). This is the larger aim of this project – to develop conceptual frameworks for a development geography whose aim is to understand the conditions under which neo-liberal economies are reworked and alternative economies produced, to explore why this varies across space, and to ask these questions about core economic activities (as opposed to focusing on small scale, sui generis alternatives). By the same token, given that struggles over control of, access to and use of the environment lie at the core of the themes that will be addressed in this research, the programme will advance debates in political ecology regarding the role of social movements and civil society in fashioning the relations between environment and development and making possible more liberatory forms of political economy (Peet and Watts, 2004). The programme constitutes an explicit exploration of the conceptual interfaces between political ecology and development geography.
The context
After a short-lived period of optimism in the 1990s, concerns have returned that the Andean countries are "fragile," a potential faultline in Latin American and hemispheric politics. Whether such concerns verge on demagoguery, social conflicts have become increasingly polarized, recurrent and violent. While national conflicts – such as those overturning presidents in Bolivia and Ecuador – gain international attention, the background to them is a steadier stream of regionalized and sectoral conflicts whose continued irresolution fuels the bases of national conflict. At the heart of many of these regionalized conflicts appears to be – and this is a hypothesis underlying this programme – the confrontation between the economic dynamics of neo-liberalism and the political dynamics of a rural population that, however falteringly and unequally, seems determined to insist on a right to be heard and deepen its claims to citizenship to one that goes beyond voting and embraces people's ability to control the conditions of their everyday existence and defend livelihoods of their choice.
In rural and provincial areas, the dynamics of this neoliberalism threaten the viability of much small and medium farm agriculture. Meanwhile, capital investment in natural resource extraction has grown in all three countries (cf. Bridge, 2004). Maps of mineral and hydrocarbon concessions in Peru show immense areas potentially subject to the influences of such investments, with similar if less dramatic tendencies in Ecuador and Bolivia. This boom has been aided by mining and hydrocarbon law reforms in the 1990s making investment much more attractive and profitable. The efforts to establish transcontinental systems to supply California with natural gas, to develop east-west roads cutting across the continent, and develop a Latin American "energy ring" similarly "fuel" this investment.
These dynamics – and their legal and policy bases - challenge the ability of rural people to control patterns of change in their lived environments. During 2005, this motivated efforts of CONVEAGRO – a Peruvian national farmer organization – to influence negotiations through debate, lobby and direct pressure. In Ecuador the Mesa Agraria – a coalition of several rural organizations – has attempted the same.1 At a more mundane, but equally important level these debates on the viability of peasant agriculture inform (and profoundly challenge) a range of NGO and producer organization interventions that aim to find new ways of revitalizing the rural economy. Meanwhile conflicts over mining and resource extraction intensify in all countries, eliciting (albeit uneven) patterns of organized response and the militarization of some of these conflicts. These responses involve a range of social movement organizations (CONACAMI – the National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining, CONAIE – the Ecuadorian Confederation of Indigenous Nations), NGOs (Acción Ecológica, Grufides, Fobomade) and international networks.2 At the time of writing, these actors are meeting in Lima to debate mining issues, and mining is the first 2005 conference theme of the UK Peru Support Group.
How far such organized responses rework the conditions of agricultural liberalization and investment in extractive industries, and create vehicles through which these two economic sectors might be regulated in different ways will greatly influence how far these conflicts expand or not. They will also provide critical empirical evidence for understanding the extent to which, and the conditions under which civil society actors – organized citizens – are able to influence the working of the neoliberal economy: by re-regulating large scale extractive industry investments and the agrarian economy, by inducing new (less biased) forms of state intervention, or by developing viable alternatives for rural livelihoods in areas that have become increasingly stagnant under current policy conditions.
These questions are of wide significance. The demands to re-regulate extractive industries have underlain the World Bank's global Extractive Industries Review, Friends of the Earth's mining initiative and Oxfam's No Dirty Gold Campaign and initiatives on extractive industries; the debate on peasant viability under neo-liberalism motivates global initiatives such as Via Campesina.
But these processes also present exciting material for exploring core conceptual arguments – commitments for some scholars – in development geography and political ecology. Each field is characterized – in significant measure – by a certain normative commitment that civil society groups, above all social movements, might be able to carve out development alternatives and constitute the seeds of a fairer, more inclusive and empowering form of social change.3 Yet much of this work is case study based exploring apparent successes in quite localized circumstances (Bebbington, 2003) and often understating the fragility of social movements and organizations. Though qualitatively rich, this approach means that resulting theoretical claims are not well substantiated, and gives little sense of how exceptional or characteristic those case studies are of wider trends and relationships. Nor does it facilitate exploration of wider geographies: the relationships between processes in one locality and those occurring in others. While it may allow an exploration of relationships across scales – as in the work on "jumping scales" – it allows far less appreciation of how local processes relate to wider national processes. It is quite possible that this work overstates the likelihood that civil society initiatives can re-work economic processes and fails to capture many of the reasons why this re-working may happen in some locations but not in many others. Furthermore, if such work leads to conclusions that are overly localized in their significance, and excessively optimistic in their claims, then it also drives conceptual and theory building that is misperceived and – under growing pressure to be policy relevant – may lead to policy suggestions that are "programmed to fail" (c.f. Corbridge and Kumar, 2002).