Painful Extraction - Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, 264 p.)

In this book, political scientist Thea Riofrancos traces the emergence and implications of two distinct models of resource governance in early twenty-first-century Ecuador. The first, labeled “radical resource nationalism,” calls for “popular control” over nonrenewable resources and their exploitation by means of expropriation, nationalization, worker control, and/or “local management by the indigenous peoples” who live nearby [14]. The second, labeled “anti-extractivism,” rejects resource exploitation outright and “envisions a post-extractive society” [3] of indeterminate structure. These are both contrasted with a third model, “neoliberalism,” which is “marked by privatization and deregulation” in an effort to court foreign investment [8]. Riofrancos is, in effect, telling the story of a shift from neoliberalism in the late 20th century to resource nationalism in the early 21rst century to a halting and divisive anti-extractivism today, albeit not in any linear or uniform sense. It’s worth bearing in mind, in this context, that the book’s subtitle is a bit premature: Oil is still Ecuador’s leading export, both legal and illegal mining are growing rapidly, and minerals are arguably poised to overtake oil by the end of the decade. ¹

The story plays out against the backdrop of a regional commodity boom, induced in part by Chinese demand for natural resources, and the so-called Pink Tide, when left-leaning governments assumed power not only in Ecuador but in much of South America and put an end to years of neoliberal rule. In fact, the underpinnings of resource nationalism are relatively straightforward: When politicians who are already hostile toward both private property and foreign capital assume power in the name of poor constituents in unequal societies, why shouldn’t they expropriate, nationalize, and/or push back against foreign investors? Who would expect them to do otherwise, especially in the middle of a commodity boom that gives them unprecedented access to resource rents? Some might expect them to put the rents to good use, addressing poverty, ignorance, illness, and the like. Others might expect them to line their own pockets in cynical acts of corruption. But few would expect them to stand idly by while the neoliberal model marches on.

The real puzzle, therefore, is not the emergence of resource nationalism under radical President Rafael Correa, who assumed power with the support of a broadly popular coalition in 2007, but the emergence of anti-extractivism almost immediately afterward, especially insofar as the opponents of extraction included “social movement activists and critical intellectuals” [15] who’d previously supported both the new president and his commitment to resource nationalism. Why and to what ends did they defect?

Riofrancos lays out the question in the introduction and addresses it over the course of the next six chapters with an array of archival, interview, and ethnographic data. Chapter 1 offers a historical overview that traces the deep roots of the two models of resource governance back into the middle of the 20th century, when indigenous and peasant communities in Ecuador began to mobilize against unequal land tenure in the Andean highlands, and agricultural colonization and hydrocarbon development in the Amazon [32]. It goes on to address the complicated identities of these distinct—Andean and Amazonian—and internally heterogeneous groups; the formation of a national indigenous federation that drew from both constituencies in the 1980s; and the persistent tensions between the resource nationalists who dominated the left, and wanted to expropriate foreign oil companies and use their resources “to meet social needs,” and a “proto-anti-extractivist” minority, particularly in the Amazon, that by the turn of the 21rst century, had identified extraction itself “as a threat to their territorial integrity, self-determination, and natural environment” [39]. And, finally, it identifies the recent growth of interest in Ecuador’s mineral resources, which had historically taken a backseat to oil and gas, as a turning point in the contest between the two models [51–52].

Chapter 2 digs deeper into the recent conflict by highlighting not only the internecine struggle between resource nationalists and anti-extractivists in civil society but the growth of a parallel conflict within the Correa administration itself. Whereas the president and his inner circle were uncompromising in their commitment to large-scale mining, and knew they’d have to court foreign capital to get the unfamiliar industry off the ground, midlevel bureaucrats “tasked with longer-term planning and the management of socio-environmental conflict” [63] were at least partly sympathetic to anti-extractivism, which Correa and his allies viewed as an irrational deterrent to foreign investment and by extension a betrayal of socialist principles. “The apotheosis of this rejection of anti-extractivism,” according to Riofrancos, “was the argument that opposition to oil and mineral extraction is a tactic of imperial powers acting under the guise of environmentalism” [71].

A subtle but important move has thus taken place between the introduction and the end of Chapter 2: Notwithstanding his nationalist orientation and hostility toward foreign capital, Correa realizes that he can’t go it alone. If he wants to exploit Ecuador’s resources, given the lack of local knowledge and technology, he’ll have to collaborate with foreign investors; otherwise, the resources will stay in the ground and the rents will be foregone. Forced to choose between nationalism and redistribution, therefore, the new president chooses redistribution and, in so doing, makes real strides against poverty and inequality while simultaneously alienating, arresting, and repressing many of his erstwhile allies [70–73]. ² If I understand the story correctly, this sets the stage for an alliance of sorts between “true believers” in anti-extractivism, who are drawn largely from the indigenous and peasant communities that are bearing the bulk of the burden for the relentless pursuit of resource wealth, and “pragmatic converts” to their ideology, including nationalists in government, academia, and party politics who feel betrayed by Correa—in part, but not entirely, for his own pragmatic conversion toward collaboration with foreign mining and oil companies. ³

The next three chapters trace the evolution of anti-extractivism through three different conflicts: Chapter 3 addresses the debate over the constitutional right to “prior consultation (consulta previa), the collective right of communities to be consulted prior to extraction projects” [27], which was adopted in 1998 and fortified in the 2008 Constitution. Riofrancos not only describes the new Constitution as a “fundamentally ambivalent text” [96] but implies that its very ambivalence—or perhaps even “misreading” [79]—both allowed mutually antagonistic parties to accede to its formal ratification and ensured that they’d struggle over its meaning in the years ahead. Chapter 4 moves from the enactment of prior consultation to its enforcement—or nonenforcement as the case may be—by the Correa administration. When indigenous and rural communities invoked their rights to prior consultation, according to Riofrancos, Correa and his allies derided their votes as nonbinding, at best, or products of fraud and manipulation, at worst.

The question is not simply one of constitutional or legal interpretation, however, but of who should decide the fate of the deposits in the first place: their immediate neighbors, however defined, or the citizenry as a whole. While anti-extractivists tend to find “democratic justice in those most immediately affected deciding the fate of extractive projects” [116], Riofrancos continues, extractivists invoke the specter of tyranny of the minority [101] and portray Correa’s overwhelming electoral victories as a national mandate for further resource exploitation. And Chapter 5 discusses the invocation of information and ignorance by both parties to the conflict. Where Correa and his allies portray anti-extractivists as ill-informed dupes who just don’t know what’s good for them, anti-extractivists—including a growing number of dissident bureaucrats—bemoan the inaccessibility and inadequacy of official data, which they attribute in part to the fact that “the government relies on mining corporations for information on mineral reserves, information that anti-extractivists claim is systematically biased” [155].

Finally, the conclusion asks “what is to be done?,” albeit metaphorically rather than literally, and in so doing highlights the left’s dilemma not just in Ecuador but in extractive economies more generally. While Correa made great strides against poverty and inequality [170] over the course of three presidential terms (2007–2017), his extractivist program entailed severe repression, deepened the country’s dependence on natural resource extraction and exploitation, and proved unsustainable once the boom came to an end. At the same time, however, his opponents have trouble going beyond their critique to articulate, let alone pursue, a shared, positive vision of the post-extractive society. And the people of Ecuador, like so many others, thus seem doomed to choose between an unjust, unsustainable extractive economy and an unknown, unattainable alternative.

I have to admit that I found this book challenging. It is awash in detail, but it is also rather inductive, so I didn’t really understand the point of all the detail—proper names, events, anecdotes, quotations—until I finished the conclusion and went back and reread the introduction and parts of the interior chapters. In that sense, I think it could have used a more fully developed theoretical apparatus up front and more encompassing concepts to guide readers as they digest the text itself. We would like to know, for example, what the individuals and collectivities that drive the narrative represent other than simply resource nationalism and anti-extractivism, however valuable those concepts may be, and which specific hypotheses or interpretations are supported or gainsaid by their various actions, decisions, and stories. Otherwise, the actors in the drama are invoked by way of reference to the explanandum, rather than the explanans, rendering the story itself circular.

My distinction between “true believers” and “pragmatic converts” to anti-extractivism, drawn from Victoria Murillo’s work on public utility reform during the neoliberal era, offers an illustration of the sorts of midrange concepts I would find useful, albeit not necessarily one with which Riofrancos would agree. A map and glossary would also help, given the centrality of “geography” [24] to the narrative and the abundance of acronyms that appear throughout the text. And Riofrancos could have been more sensitive to readers who aren’t familiar with the Ecuadorian context; at times, it feels like she’s writing for an insider audience. To give just one example, there are a number of references to “the Montubian peoples” [see, e.g. : 94] with no explanation of their identity, history, or role in the story. I doubt nonexperts on Ecuador will be familiar with the Montubian peoples, a coastal mestizo group that gained official recognition by the Ecuadorian government in 2001, and it would have been easy enough to provide a definition or description, if they’re important to the story, or to delete these references, if they’re less central.

That said, however, the book is extremely thought-provoking. It raises absolutely fundamental issues about the relationships between sovereignty and sustainability, and identity and inequality, that speak to debates in political science, sociology, development studies, and not least of all ethics and political philosophy, and these issues will only grow more important and pressing in a warming world. So I’m glad that I read it. Here are the three broad issues that jumped out at me once I’d fully digested the book and that would, I believe, jump out at other sociologists.

Ethnic identity. Insofar as many of the individuals and groups in the book are not only identified as indigenous but seemingly motivated and connected by their indigenous identities, ethnicity looms large in the story. It’s also relevant to the distinction between “prior consultation for indigenous communities and environmental consultation for all communities” in the 2008 Constitution [86]; the “vote distribution rule” [124] in the prior consultation process; and Correa’s denunciation of “the rule of the few over the rule of the many” [128] when the consultations did not go his way. But ethnicity itself is never explicitly defined in an abstract manner in the book, or documented in Ecuador, and I thus found myself turning to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to get a quick-and-dirty estimate of the size of the country’s indigenous population, which is never provided in the text. It rose from about 3.3% of the total in LAPOP’s 2004 survey, the first one readily available, to 6.1% in 2016, when the book’s narrative more or less comes to an end, albeit not in a monotonic fashion. ⁴

This arguably speaks to the “evolving cultural and political salience of indigeneity” [119], to which Riofrancos alludes, but her allusion raises as many questions as answers. For instance, we know that ethnic identity is malleable, and to make that point, Riofrancos even discusses indigenous activist Carlos Pérez’s adoption of a Kichwa name. But to what extent and how is identity malleable in Ecuador? My understanding is that surnames and historical documents are among the factors used by the Ecuadorian government to assess legal identity. ⁵ But to what extent are those factors malleable, and what drives the broader “turn to indigeneity” [119] discussed in the text? Do threats to indigenous territory raise the salience of ethnic identity, in a sense animating grievance? I get that sense from a contemporaneous account of indigenous politics in Ecuador by Jeffery Paige, who says that for the Shuar of the Amazon, building a dam across a river would be “like driving a bulldozer through the Sistine Chapel.” ⁶ Do activists mobilize identity in an effort to take advantage of international legal norms and constitutional provisions designed to protect indigenous peoples, and in that sense exploit an opportunity? Andrés Bermúdez Liévano quotes the directors of indigenous groups to that effect when they allude to the protections afforded by norms and treaties and underscore the importance of self-identifying (autoidentificación) as indigenous. ⁷ Is it a combination of the two, and/or something else entirely ? ⁸ In addition to the literature on ethnicity, which is barely touched by Riofrancos, social movement theory could prove helpful here. ⁹

The other question that jumped out at me, once I opened the LAPOP Data Playground, was whether and to what degree environmental attitudes in Ecuador are associated with ethnicity. It would be grossly unfair to imply that Riofrancos is an essentialist who reduces environmental attitudes to ethnic identity, with an innately anti-extractivist indigenous population confronting an extractivist mestizo majority. On the contrary, she offers concrete examples of mestizo and indigenous politicians coming together to oppose extraction [see, e.g. : 53 and 84], and alludes to divisions within the indigenous population as well [47]. But she traces proto-anti-extractivism to “Amazonian communities in particular” [39] and implies that when they have embraced mining their support has been “partly constructed through the public investment funded by resource revenues” [135], and a careful reader could thus be forgiven for wondering whether she sees this dynamic—in which indigenous people have to be won over to the cause of extraction with the promise of material goodies—as exceptional.

I doubt it. I suspect she’d argue that mestizo or European support for extraction has been in part constructed with resource revenues as well, and I wouldn’t disagree. The “treadmill of production” is a powerful machine that’s been built, maintained, and supported by workers, including European and European-American workers, throughout its existence. ¹⁰ But upon finishing the book I couldn’t help but wonder whether there are meaningful ethnic differences in anti-extractivist attitudes in Ecuador, whatever their origins. We’re told that indigenous communities in the Amazon constituted “key architects of proto-anti-extractivism” [47] at the turn of the century. Is anti-extractivism more common among indigenous peoples today? While the LAPOP surveys don’t ask Ecuadorians about mining in particular, the 2016 round asked a representative sample of the population to decide whether the government should prioritize economic growth or environmental protection, with higher scores on a 100-point scale prioritizing growth and lower scores capturing more environmentalist attitudes. Attitudes toward environmental protection arguably resonate with anti-extractivism, but they’re not identical to it, and “indigenous” is admittedly a blunt category given the complexity of the Ecuadorian population. ¹¹ But for what it’s worth, the survey reveals no meaningful difference between mestizo (48.5) and indigenous (50.3) attitudes toward growth and the environment.

Education and generation

Ecuador has recently been deemed “free” by Freedom House, the partly US government–funded nonprofit known for its indicators of political and civil liberties, having consistently fallen below the required cutoff under both Correa and his handpicked successor, Lenín Moreno. ¹² Others are much less optimistic, and the government’s recent declaration of a state of exception in light of ongoing indigenous protest does little to inspire confidence. ¹³ But if Ecuador is to defend both democracy—by almost any metric—and the environment in the years ahead, environmental protection will require “broad public support ¹⁴” at a minimum, and the potential sources of that support merit inquiry.

A venerable body of literature expects support for both democracy and environmental protection to be stronger among better-educated members of younger generations. ¹⁵ But Riofrancos pays almost no attention to education or generation in her analysis; instead, she tends to identify her informants by way of reference to their jobs, party affiliations, and/or ethnicities, despite the fact that education and generation tend to anticipate—and perhaps even select for—job, party, and at least occasionally, in the context of an ethnic awakening, ethnicity, and that attitudes and behaviors are probably produced by the interaction or intersection of all these factors.

In keeping with the existing literature, moreover, the strongest correlates of environmentalist attitudes that I could find in LAPOP’s Ecuador data were age and education. While respondents younger than 36 prioritized environmental protection, on average, their older compatriots leaned toward growth in a monotonically increasing generational pattern—with the average senior citizen giving growth 63.4 on the survey’s 100-point scale. And education offered an even starker divide, with growth scoring 71 among primary-school completers, 55.6 among secondary-school graduates, and 42.7 among college graduates. ¹⁶

I’ve already explained why I think these differences matter prospectively. They arguably speak to the prospects for both democracy and environmental protection in Ecuador’s future. But I also think they matter retrospectively, and that most sociologists reading this book will wonder whether education and generation—or cohort, which I’m using more or less synonymously—played a part in the emergence of anti-extractivism in the first place. ¹⁷ After all, the anti-extractivist agenda has been developed and espoused by an alliance of activists and intellectuals, according to Riofrancos, but the intellectuals aren’t really defined or described in detail, and we’re thus left to wonder who they are and how they relate to the activists.

Consider, for example, Carlos Pérez, who is initially identified not as a lawyer but as an “active” member of the “indigenous movement” whose self-presentation had become “more explicitly indigenous over time” and who would eventually “change his name” to Yaku Sacha Pérez; the first name is a Kichwa term meaning “water of the mountain” [119]. We later learn that he’s a lawyer—almost incidentally, when Riofrancos meets him “in his law office” [126]—but not how or why he became a lawyer or whether or to what degree his legal credentials and training influence his activism or influence. Given his legal training, moreover, Pérez would seem to be an intellectual, but he’s never identified as such and we’re left to match the individual to the concepts and categories by ourselves.

Compare, by way of contrast, this book with the work of the sociologist Jeffery Paige, who in a series of systematic interviews with Ecuadorian indigenous leaders pays a good deal of attention to their intellectual and, to a lesser extent, generational backgrounds. He notes that “many of those interviewed held advanced degrees and were multilingual.” ¹⁸ In almost all cases he discusses their educational credentials and, less often, their birth years. He explicitly discusses their “ideological influences.” ¹⁹ And he notes that “in the Andes the intellectuals are followers, not leaders, of the indigenous peasantry or the intellectuals leading the great rebellions are indigenous peasants themselves.” ²⁰

How did this distinction come to pass in Ecuador? Like Riofrancos, Paige traces much of the answer to the 1964 formation of the Shuar Federation, which, on his account, became the model and basis for indigenous mobilization throughout the country, ²¹ and recognizes the role of Salesian Catholic missionaries in the process. Where Riofrancos makes a brief reference to Salesian “support” [35] for the Shuar, however, Paige goes into much greater detail: In effect, he portrays indigenous mobilization as an unintended byproduct of missionary boarding schools that were designed to draw the “younger generation” of Shuar out of their own culture and into “Catholic teaching and European culture,” but instead “created an alienated cadre of future leaders who had mastered the basic tools, including the Spanish language, to function in contemporary Hispanic society. All the initial indigenous leadership of the federation,” Paige concludes, “were graduates of mission schools.” ²²

My point is not to portray the two accounts as antagonistic, let alone to endorse Paige over Riofrancos in some imaginary dispute. On the contrary, their accounts strike me as compatible and perhaps even complementary. I’m simply trying to highlight the disciplinary differences between the two as I see them. Variables like education and generation—not to mention concepts like alienation and intellectual—loom larger in contemporary sociology than political science, and I’m not surprised that they’re more central to Paige than to Riofrancos, despite the fact that neither really invokes the language of “variables” or the standard methods of their respective disciplines. ²³ Our subjects aren’t the only ones who are subject to socialization; obviously, we are too. ²⁴

Institutions, interests, ideologies, and values

One of the most important questions raised by Riofrancos concerns who should decide whether and how resources are exploited and how they should do so. “In an extractive economy with territorially uneven costs and benefits,” she asks, “who should decide the fate of oil and mining projects?” [116] The answer speaks not only to contemporary Ecuadorian politics, important though they may be, but to a much broader issue in moral and political philosophy: Who are the people (demos) in a democracy [117]?

In the specific context examined by Riofrancos, however, there are really two distinct questions: At what scale should decision-making, or voting, take place? And how should people’s votes be aggregated, or weighted, once they’re cast? At the limit, of course, the answer to the scale question could render the aggregation question moot and vice versa: If only one voter is eligible to vote, after all, the aggregation scheme has no effect on the outcome of the election; and if one voter’s preferences are weighted sufficiently heavily, eligibility is beside the point. But neither extreme has been reached in the Ecuadorian context, and it’s therefore worth treating each question separately for now.

What are their respective answers? While Riofrancos holds that “the links between identities, interests, and democratic scale are not written in stone” [130], but are instead subject to active reconstruction and reinvention, she tends to align extractivists and anti-extractivists with competing answers to both questions. On the one hand, extractivists like Correa hold that the relevant democratic subject is the “national citizenry” [130]; their votes should be weighed equally (i.e., one person, one vote); and representative democracy fulfills both criteria and in so doing obviates the need for special decision-making procedures for natural resource governance. On the other hand, anti-extractivists hold that the relevant democratic subject is the resident of the “directly affected” community [129]; they’re typically indigenous; and decisions should thus be made according to their traditional practices. In the prior consultation she discusses most extensively, for instance, Riofranchos finds that votes are allocated in proportion to household water consumption since that’s the practice “in other realms of parish life, such as the communal labor practice called the minga” [124].

Table 1 distills different attitudes toward scale and aggregation (or weight) into four different ideal-typical decision-making schemes and alludes to their manifestation in the case observed by Riofrancos.

Table 1 Ideal-typical decision-making schemes

Extractivists advocated something like classical liberalism, with votes occurring at the scale of the nation-state and weighted equally in the course of aggregation. Anti-extractivists advocated community consultation by members of the regional water users’ association “according to the principle of one vote per water right, which usually was one per family but could be up to four” [124; see also : 117]. But Riofrancos doesn’t really explore distinct combinations of scale and aggregation that are at least possible in theory. Might extractivists opt for “decentralized democracy,” or decision-making at a lower scale, if the national winds were to shift against them? Might anti-extractivists advocate national decision-making if the winds were to shift in their favor? And might extractivists someday advocate and/or embrace “disparate democracy” marked by different weighting schemes as well?

These aren’t wholly inconceivable outcomes. Correa’s dismissal of anti-extractivism as “madness” [70] propagated by ill-informed dupes would seem a short step away from calls for “epistocracy,” or the allocation of votes in accordance with “knowledge” or “expertise,” that have gained ground in a period (and region) awash in populism. ²⁵ Latin American leaders have a long history of venue-shopping by level of government for the outcomes they prefer. ²⁶ And Yaku Pérez ran for President of Ecuador in 2021, after he’d changed his name from Carlos, and finished third in the first round of the country’s runoff electoral system. ²⁷ One can’t help but wonder whether he’d have pursued a national ban on extraction were he to have won, and whether extractivists would have continued to portray the national citizenry as the relevant democratic subject were he, or somebody else, to have done so, or whether they’d have developed a sudden taste for decentralization—like their predecessors at the dawn of the Pink Tide, who called “for autonomy at the local level in order to protect against advancing statist agendas.” ²⁸

The answers are unknowable at present, but the questions themselves are theoretically and ethically provocative. I suspect that many of the book’s readers will be sympathetic to the idea that those directly affected by extractive projects should have more say in their fates, for instance. But would they feel this way if those directly affected were well-off Europeans rather than impoverished members of indigenous communities? If the nonliberal voting rules that blocked the extractive projects opened the door to illiberal decision-making in other realms? ²⁹ If the projects weren’t unsustainable dams but sustainable wind farms that were nonetheless threatening to traditional livelihoods, environments, and cultures? If the directly affected decided that, for the right price, their votes could be bought? What, if anything, differentiates the anti-extractivists championed by Riofrancos from the “NIMBY” (not-in-my-backyard) movements that challenge “locally unwanted land uses,” to the disdain of self-identified “progressives” in the Global North ? ³⁰ And so on and so forth.

I don’t have answers to these questions, which are as much normative as empirical. But I’ve been asking myself about them since finishing the book, and barring something unforeseen, I’ll go on asking myself about them for a long time to come. By putting them on the table in such a rich, important, and misunderstood context, Riofrancos has done the scholarly and activist communities a genuine service. After all, the World Bank continues to bemoan the fact that Ecuador has been “relatively untapped by international mining companies,” and to portray the ongoing conflicts between indigenous communities and investors as products of “confusion” and a “lack of information” [60–63] rather than fundamental differences in interests, values, and priorities—a myth dispelled posthaste by Riofrancos in Chapter 5 and gainsaid by the positive association between education and environmentalist attitudes in the LAPOP data. ³¹ Opposition to extraction is real, multifaceted, and growing, and unless and until extractivists recognize that reality and temper their implacable demand for minerals and hydrocarbons, protest will escalate and they will be left with little alternative to the repression, violence, and conflict we see in Ecuador today. ³²