International workshop: Natural Resources Economy in South America: Extraction, Sustainability and Citizenship

On July 8th and 9th, York’s Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) hosted a 2-day workshop at the York Medical Society entitled the Natural Resources Economy in South America: Extraction, Sustainability and Citizenship. Led by Jean Grugel, Alejandro Peña, and María Eugenia Giraudo, the workshop draws directly from a GCRF-funded project in collaboration with the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Buenos Aires, Argentina) on resource extraction in Argentina. The event follows up on the first workshop, which took place in Buenos Aires in March this year.

The event brought together academics and experts from both national and international research institutions and civil society partners, all connected through their research and interests in natural resource extraction in Latin America. While the presentations and discussions covered a vast swath of countries and topics – including questions of production, citizenship, urban spaces, sustainability, and the SDGs – underlying the debates and conversations held throughout both days was a discussion of what development entails for Latin America, and how interdisciplinary approaches are key in understanding the overlapping challenges in sustainability, governance, and citizenship that an intensive exploitation of natural resources brings. 

Daniel Blanco, Executive Director of Wetlands International Argentina, introduced the work of his organisation and the relevance of the ecosystem on which they focus: wetlands, where water meets land, including mangroves, peatlands, and marshes. Wetland systems are deeply interconnected, and one of the recently launched programmes of Wetlands International – called ‘Corredor Azul’ – focuses on the wetland system found across the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, its heart being the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers. Several factors are driving the erosion and degradation of these systems. On the one hand, soybean production poses a serious threat, as the use of fire to incorporate new land and intensive agriculture that utilises agrochemicals both produce soil erosion and affect the health of the wetlands. On the other hand, lithium is a growing concern for wetland systems. While there is no lithium production in the proximities of the Paraná-Paraguay rivers, the growing extraction of lithium in the North of Argentina, and the water-pumping process that it entails, impacts the underground water and wetlands systems. Daniel raised questions and challenges in terms of regional and global environmental governance that are needed to protect these and other environments that provide key ecosystem services.

In terms of regimes of global governance, the workshop also addressed issues related to the SDGs and how they interact with natural resource extraction in Latin America. Karen Siegel, from the University of Glasgow, presented a paper developed with Mairon Bastos Lima on the implementation of the SDGs in South America, with a focus on agriculture and land use in Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Karen highlighted the emergence of narratives of ‘sustainable intensification’ and ‘green commodities’ in these countries that seek to make sustainability compatible with intensive agriculture by claiming, for example, that soybean can be produced sustainably. These narratives raise questions about the meaning of the SDGs in terms of widening inclusion and potential for change. Jessica Hope, from the University of Bristol, explored the implementation of the SDGs in Bolivia to highlight how the UN goals are facilitating the appropriation of language of radical difference to support extractive development. Her analysis delves into how the understanding of nature by indigenous populations and the articulation of this knowledge – what Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena refer to as the ‘pluriverse’  is amalgamated within the SDGs framework to facilitate extractivism and make the SDGs more inaccessible.

Indigenous populations are one of the most affected groups by natural resource exploitation and extractivism. Marginalised and invisibilized, these groups have increasingly been displaced from territories that are considered key in mineral and agricultural exploitation. Matthias vom Hau, from IBEI (Institut Barcelona Estudis Internacinals), presented an analysis of conflicts and indigenous land claims in Argentina. In this country, in order to address a growing number of evictions of indigenous communities, the government passed a law mandating a survey of indigenous land claims in 2006. In his study, Matthias focused on the variation found across provincial states in Argentina, and found that there are different pathways for the implementation of this survey, which is used as a tool of state formation, but also as a legitimising mechanism for expanding and making clear the extractive frontier. Philipp Horn, from the University of Sheffield, also focused on indigenous populations but this time within urban spaces in Bolivia and Ecuador, challenging the idea that indigenous populations are only linked to the rural sphere, and that in fact these groups have always been present in the city. Recent expansion of extractive activities and the infrastructure projects these activities promote have motivated further displacement of indigenous people into cities, with new urban dynamics of political practices emerging as a result.

These political practices, and the increasing role of corporations in the organisation of the geographies of extractivism, raise questions about how citizenship for indigenous populations is re-defined in a more inclusive or exclusive way. Penelope Anthias (University of Durham) presented research on this issue, arguing that there are different modes of ‘hydrocarbon citizenship’ emerging in the Bolivian Chaco, whereby historical grievances and struggles for greater autonomy by the local populations are confronted with alliances by the governing party, corporations, and regional elites – redefining in the process what is understood by the ‘plurinational state’ under President Evo Morales. Murat Arsel (ISS – International Institute for Social Sciences) presented work on introducing the use of technology – specifically the use of drones – as tools for indigenous oversight of the work of oil corporations in the Ecuadorian Amazon. He posed questions on the forms that ‘digital democracy’ can take and the potential for redefining legal frameworks for environmental protection.