Through an analysis of archival data and findings from interviews with industry leaders, I explore the genesis, rise, and fall of the various Philippine mineral regimes of the twentieth century. Specifically, I examine the background of successive and overlapping colonial and neocolonial powers in three eras: late colonial (1901-1941), national developmental (1945-1964), and state authoritarianism . I also briefly examine the current neoliberal mineral regime (1986-present). I argue that, to date, capitalist enterprises and neocolonial powers have pursued two contradictory paths to extract precious (gold and silver) and base (chromite, iron, copper, nickel, magnesium, and ore) metals in the Philippines. On the one hand, mining companies appropriated expansive land, underpriced labor and inexpensive food to subsidize capital expenditure and mineral operations. The appropriation of basic inputsor what is referred to as "cheap natures" -allowed these companies to reduce their sunken investments and operational costs. But on the other hand, as the sector developed more, it became increasingly difficult to appropriate such "cheap natures." While initially profitable because of successful appropriation of "cheap natures," companies eventually experienced decreasing returns because of the problems this caused.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether Chinese capital can be described as developmental. While some argue that Chinese capital is simply a tool of the Chinese state to exploit the global South, others claim that Chinese capital opens new development opportunities. Rather than advancing a framework based upon either an exploitative or an egalitarian mode of development, this article argues that China's current crisis of overaccumulation has led to a so‐called Sino‐centric capital export regime, which sends out two types of capital to the global South. First, state‐backed capital imposes a development model by modifying ‘local orders’, attempting to make host states legible by creating maps of peoples and terrains that surround China. These maps aim to improve China's ability to manage inter‐state disputes. Second, flexible capital is interested in extricating itself from the conditions imposed on it in China. By moving into the global South, flexible capital breaks through the barriers placed by the Chinese state. As a by‐product of this quest for extrication, flexible capital can generate new venues of accumulation and novel ways of organizing production. This article demonstrates these two types of capital using examples from Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines — the Kaliwa Dam project and online gambling — drawing on original field research and a newly generated dataset.

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In the field of disaster studies, scholars have focused on the social construction of disasters in various historical periods, but they have not attended to the ways in which these social constructions were differentiated within the same period. During the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, two types of disaster discourses existed. In 'internal cases', where Spanish elites had to deal with one another over issues of distribution of power, decision making capacity, and the allocation of resources, there were multiple and competing constructions of disasters. Conversely, in 'external cases', where the Spanish elites had to deal mainly with the 'other' (Filipinos) over issues such as colonization and Christianization, there was a convergence in the constructions of disasters, which facilitated conquest and the consolidation of power for the Spanish Crown. The act of interpreting disaster was intimately tied with the legitimation and exercise of power. KeywordsHistorical disaster studies, environmental history, religion in Southeast Asia Specific geographic circumstances, particularly location, make the Philippines one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world. Those who live on the archipelago experience the constant threat of a wide variety of natural hazards, including earthquakes, typhoons, volcanic

Under what conditions do global regulatory norms become domesticated in highly contentious policy areas like oil, gas, and mining sectors? Departing from norm diffusion and environmental politics scholarship, the paper draws from the sociological literature on "coalition-building" to explain the partial, uneven adoption of global regulations aimed at setting standards for corporate behavior in the context of largescale mining. We process trace the variation in coalitional politics in the contemporary Philippine's mining regulatory framework through a within-case comparison of mining policies under Arroyo (2001-2010), Aquino (2010-2016), and Duterte (2016-present) governments. We argue that the successful inclusion of civil society and mining communities into policy-making processes can substantively contribute toward mining policies that are acceptable to those who face the socio-environmental consequences of resource exploitation. In contrast, highly narrow governing coalitions tend to fuel resistance and enhance political opposition vis-à-vis large-scale mineral extraction.