Fulfilling Promises of More Substantive Democracy? Post‐neoliberalism and Natural Resource Governance in South America

Abstract

Benefiting from the commodity boom, progressive governments across South America have sought to move away from the neoliberal policies adopted previously by strengthening the role of the state and using revenues from commodity exports to address social concerns. This approach, often called neo‐extractivism, has become the main development strategy over the past 15 years. Yet, the increasingly intensive and extensive natural resource exploitation underlying this development strategy has also led to multiple protests and contestations across South America. This article thus examines the relationship between neo‐extractivism as a development strategy and the quality of democracy under progressive governments in South America. On the one hand, neo‐extractivism has allowed states to become more inclusive by paying attention to social concerns which in turn has been an important element in the legitimacy of progressive governments. On the other hand, the reliance on neo‐extractivism as the main development strategy poses important constraints on the ability of post‐neoliberal states to build more substantive democracies which could take into account a variety of positions, give citizens a say in decisions directly affecting their livelihoods, and promote public debates on key questions confronting society.

Social Policy, Inequalities and the Battle of Rights in Latin America

“…In Bolivia, President Evo Morales has found it almost impossible to manage competing identity claims and land rights issues from increasingly vocal and organized indigenous groups. As a result, despite pioneering the most extensive legal recognition of cultural rights, Bolivia has in practice dragged its feet when it comes to granting autonomy to indigenous communities (Grugel and Fontana, ; Siegel, ).…”

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”? The conflict imperative and the slow fight against environmental injustice in northern Peruvian Amazon

“…The ultimate implication of this approach is to render conflicts apolitical by denying the potentially incompatibility of interests, e.g., based on different class positions, or incommensurability of value systems. Although this approach has limited use even within the confines of liberal democracies (Hirschman 1994), it is especially problematic in a setting such as the Peruvian Amazon where state capability is weak and corporate sway especially strong (Stetson 2012, Siegel 2016.…”

The extractive imperative in Latin America

“…Put together, these dynamics have created conditions in which extractive industries became hugely significant to the development aspirations of a number of Latin American countries. It is of course important to recognize that some of the same factors also enabled a set of contradictory impulsessuch as the search for a new development model through the concept of 'buen vivir' (good living), a move towards the recognition of the rights of nature, the drive of indigenous communities to have a more powerful say in the governance of not only their own territories but also the nation-states within which they are located -to emerge (Siegel, 2016). It is the contradictory nature of these two concomitant processes -rise of extractivism and the search for its alternatives -that account for the pronounced tensions seen in Latin America in recent years.…”