Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: Neo-Extractivism, Resource Nationalism, and ‘New’ Geographies of Resource Governance and Development
Co-Organizers: Meredith DeBoom (University of Colorado-Boulder) and Emily Billo (Goucher College)
Sponsored by: Cultural and Political Ecology, Development Geographies, and Political Geography Specialty Groups
Deadline for Papers/Panel Proposals: October 13, 2017
Despite the political and economic challenges associated with commodity dependency, governments of many resource-rich states have placed a renewed emphasis on resource-based development over the past ten years. In countries such as Bolivia, South Africa, Ecuador, Namibia, Zambia, and Argentina, opposition and ruling political leaders have called for or implemented diverse reconfigurations of resource governance, resulting in new forms of “networked interactions of various state and non-state organizations and institutions operating at multiple sites and scales” (Himley, 2008: 435). These changes have often been accompanied by renewed rhetoric of national progress and resource nationalism, and also by political unrest rooted in environmental degradation, inequality, and violated property rights. This unrest has highlighted the injustices and violence often associated with state-led development and resource governance practices, including increased criminalization of environmental protests. Such developments at the “resource-state nexus” (Bridge, 2014) are of particular interest to geographers given the territorial fixity of resource deposits and the interconnections among land, resources, place-making, livelihoods, subject formation, and the state.
To date, however, research on the (re)turn to resource-based development has been hindered by regional and subfield-based research silos. These sessions aim to challenge this fragmentation by bringing Latin America-based studies of neo-extractivism (Gudynas, 2012; Burchardt and Dietz, 2014), resource-based struggles (Bebbington and Bury, 2013), and resource imaginaries (Coronil, 1997; Perreault and Valdivia, 2010) into conversation with research on petro-developmentalism (Ovadia, 2016), resource nationalism (Childs, 2015), and resource sovereignty in Africa (Emel et al., 2011), as well as research on resource governance in other regions.
Through a paper session and panel discussion, we aim to connect scholarship on resource governance across a variety of regions and subfields, including political ecology, political geography, economic geography, development geography, legal geographies, and resource geographies. Our goal is to better understand the commonalities and divergences across shifting resource governance regimes and their implications for development and social and environmental justice at multiple scales.
1) Paper session: we invite papers that engage with resource governance in and across a variety of contexts. Both empirical and theoretical proposals are welcome. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Continuities and divergences in resource governance under neoliberal and post-neoliberal/post-Washington Consensus extraction regimes
- Implications of new resource governance schemes for development challenges associated with commodity dependency (e.g., the resource curse)
- State-society relations and resource-based development
- Resource imaginaries, nationalism, place-making, and state-making
- Roles of foreign investment in domestic resource politics
- Resource extraction and the developmental or neo-developmental state
- Neo-extractivism and indigenous politics
- Scale in resource politics and associated scalar tensions
- Issues of enclosure, dispossession, property rights, and exclusion
- Criminalization of environmental protests
- Identity, subject formation, and social movements
- Sovereignty, territory, states, and extractive industries
- Methodological or fieldwork issues associated with researching resource governance
2) Roundtable/panel discussion: we invite expressions of interest by panelists who might speak to broader theoretical debates or to the practicalities of conducting research on resource governance.
Submissions:
Presenters interested in participating in the paper session are asked to submit a paper title and an abstract of no more than 250 words to the organizers by October 13, 2017.
Presenters interested in participating in the panel discussion are asked to submit a brief description of 100-200 words overviewing the topics and themes about which they would like to speak by October 13, 2017.
Please direct submissions and questions to Emily Billo (emily.billo@goucher.edu) and Meredith DeBoom (meredith.deboom@colorado.edu).
Relevant Literature
Bebbington, A. and J. Bury (Eds.). 2013. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bridge, G. 2014. Resource Geographies II: The Resource-State Nexus. Progress in Human Geography 38(1), 118-130.
Burchardt, H-J. and K. Dietz. 2014. (Neo-)extractivism: A New Challenge for Development Theory from Latin America. Third World Quarterly 35(3): 468-486.
Childs, J. 2016. Geography and Resource Nationalism: A Critical Review and Reframing. The Extractive Industries and Society 3: 539-546.
Childs, J. and J. Hearn. 2016. ‘New’ Nations: Resource-Based Development Imaginaries in Ghana and Ecuador. Third World Quarterly. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2016.1176859.
Coronil, F. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Emel, J., M. Huber, and M. Makene. 2011. Extracting Sovereignty: Capital, Territory, and Gold Mining in Tanzania. Political Geography 35: 35-51.
Gudynas, E. 2012. Estado Compensador y Nuevos Extractivismos: Las Ambivalencias del Progresismo Sudamericano. Nueva Sociedad 237: 128-146.
Himley, M. 2008. Geographies of Environmental Governance: The Nexus of Nature and Neoliberalism. Geography Compass 2: 433-451.
Ovadia, J.S. 2016. The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making Oil Work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea.
Perreault, T. and G. Valdivia. 2010. Hydrocarbons, Popular Protest and National Imaginaries: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Context. Geoforum 41(5): 689-699.
Rosales, A. 2013. Going Underground: The Political Economy of the ‘Left Turn’ in South America. Third World Quarterly 38(8): 1443-1457.
Veltmeyer, H. and J. Petras (Eds.) 2014. The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? Zed Books.