Ciencia Política

1. Introduction

The societal, political, ecological, and developmental implications of the twenty-first century commodity boom have been much debated, especially with reference to Latin America (Gudynas, 2009, 2015; Svampa, 2012; Lang and Mokrani, 2013; Veltmeyer, 2013; Burchardt and Dietz, 2014; Prada, 2014; Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014). This is hardly surprising, since the global boom of primary commodities has had a particular influence on development policies, growth rates, and the intensification of resource extraction for export purposes in the Latin American region. Similar implications of the resource boom can also be observed in other world regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia (Davenport, 2013; Hilson et al., 2013; Verbrugge et al. 2015). Between the years 2000 and 2010, national economies in Latin America grew at an average rate of five per cent per year. This wealth in raw materials became a key driver of growth and a central source of state revenue in the region. This was reflected in growing foreign exchange revenues, a mounting share of the primary sector in gross domestic product (GDP), and an acceleration of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the resource extraction and primary commodities sector, especially mining (CEPALSTAT, n.d.; Matthes, 2012; Bebbington and Bury, 2013). National governments, especially those with a left-liberal and further left orientation, were thereby granted new room for maneuver in social policies. Thus the distribution of additional revenues gained from the resource sector allowed poverty rates to be lowered and persistent social inequalities reduced (this was particularly the case in Venezuela).

But from 2011 on, and especially in the second half of 2014, the prices not only of oil but of all commodities, including minerals and agrarian export crops like soy, declined drastically. According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), while metal prices fell by 39% and cash crop prices by 29% between 2011 and May 2015, energy products like oil, natural gas, and coal went down by 52% in only seven months between July 2014 and January 2015 (ECLAC, 2015). The reasons for this latter dramatic price collapse are attributed to diminished demand, especially due to the slowing of the Chinese economy, increased production, related most importantly to the irruption of the US into the oil and gas market through fracking, but also speculative factors due to the increasing financialization of commodities. Although the impact of this crisis on each national economy has varied, it can be said that it led to economic deceleration in the whole Latin American region and in some cases even to recession. Governments have tried to limit these effects by increasing tax revenues, fostering the expansion of the extractive frontier, and increasing the absolute export volumes of commodities (ECLAC, 2015; Svampa, 2016).

Much has been said, debated, and written in relation to neo-extractivism in Latin America. So why another article on the topic? Starting from the existing academic and political debates on the issue, the purpose of our paper is twofold. First, by applying insights from regulation theory, we aim to develop a theoretically founded understanding of neo-extractivism by characterizing it as a development model. By development model, we understand a more or less territorially defined unit, within which a determined set of cultural and social practices and mental schemes become (at least partially) hegemonic and translate into an institutionalized compromise on the national or sub-national scale. Thus a development model is the complementary combination of a more or less stable regime of accumulation, an industrial/development paradigm, and a mode of regulation that underpins the former two institutionally. Furthermore, this conducive combination can be seen as the unexpected result of mass social struggles and movements (Aglietta, 1979; Boyer, 1990; Atzmüller et al., 2013).

Second, we aim to evaluate the current political-institutional, territorial, and socio-ecological dynamics and contradictions of neo-extractivism in Latin America, not only at the national or sub-national scale, i.e. within the boundaries of the nation state, but in the context of dynamic global capitalist development. This argument is related to the first in the sense that neo-extractivism as a development model needs to be placed in its global context. Our line of argument is not world market deterministic; in other words, we do not assume that neo-extractivism as a development model is merely an expression of international economic and political conditions. Rather, we address the interdependencies between changing conditions of capitalist accumulation in times of crisis on a global scale and through processes of socio-political and socio-ecological restructuring at national and local scales.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we review the scholarly and political debate concerning neo-extractivism in and related to Latin America and present key figures who point to a trend towards the consolidation of neo-extractivism in the region.

In section 3, we present the theoretical framework of the analysis, which is based on insights from regulation theory. In sections 4 and 5,we examine various historical phases of extractivism in Latin America. The historical analysis reveals the particular temporal-spatial interdependencies with respect to political-institutional configurations, social relations of power, and societal-nature relations. Moreover, it helps to historically situate neo-extractivism in the current phase of globalizing capitalism. In section 6, we focus on important political consequences and recent institutional changes, in particular the new constitutions in the Andean countries and the weakening of the state apparatuses concerned with environmental issues. In the final part, on the basis of selected indicators and structural socio-political changes, we show that the global crisis aside, neo-extractivism has become a consolidating development model in some Latin American countries, even if differences between countries and sub-regions need to be ascertained and taken into account.

2. ‘Classical’ extractivism and neo-extractivism in Latin America – debate and evidence

The terms extractivism and neo-extractivism are closely linked to the critique of the resurgence of a capitalist-dominated economic and growth model oriented toward the extraction and export of raw materials, one that has been pursued in many Latin American countries since the turn of the millennium. Authors like Eduardo Gudynas, Alberto Acosta, and Maristella Svampa use the concept of extractivism to refer to the predominance of economic activities that are primarily based on resource extraction and nature valorization without distributive politics, while the term neo-extractivism is linked to those national governments that use the surplus revenue from extractive activities to fight poverty and enhance the material well-being of the masses (Gudynas, 2009; Svampa, 2012; Acosta, 2013).

3. Theorizing extractivism as a development model using regulation theory

As we argued above, we see a certain conceptual and theoretical weakness in putting the neo-extractivist economic model into a broader context. This weakness is also reflected in critical accounts from the region itself. Machado Aráoz states that understanding extractivism mainly as a national development strategy lacks consistency because “it focuses on the social formations where these activities are carried out, omitting and disregarding the world system, the rules governing the rate and rhythm of extraction, the uses of these resources and the technology applied” (Machado Aráoz, 2015, p. 4, as cited in Martín, 2016). Along the same lines, Moreno (2015) questions a state-centered perspective on extractivism, which ignores the real dynamics of a globalized world increasingly dominated by China’s resource hunger. She therefore argues that extractive activities are neither disconnected from industrial production processes and technological innovations, nor are the latter disconnected from the availability of natural resources (Martín, 2016). Taking these critiques as a starting point, we propose to understand neo-extractivism as a development model, referring here to insights from regulation theory. This approach claims that historically speaking, contradictory capitalist relations –including societal-nature relations have taken very different forms due to technological, socio-economic, cultural, and political developments, and the contingent results of social struggles. These manifold relations can be temporarily stabilized, and will thus create the societal context for a relatively permanent process of capital accumulation. Such a temporal stabilization is called a ‘mode of development’, referring to a particular articulation of a regime of accumulation, mode of regulation, and technological paradigm (Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1988; Boyer, 1990; Hirsch, 1997; Alnasseri et al., 2001; Becker, 2002; Jessop and Sum, 2006; Atzmüller et al., 2013). We use the terms ‘development model’ and ‘mode of development’ interchangeably.

The analytical point of departure of regulation theory is as follows. As we have often seen throughout history and as we currently experience, capital accumulation can also take place under unstable conditions and in periods of crisis. However, socio-economic structures and processes work better when certain regularities exist; concerning social structures like class or gender, compromises and consent can be better achieved under more or less stable conditions. The reproduction of society as a whole is continually manifested through the actions of individuals who pursue entirely different strategies and have very different allocative and authoritative resources available to them. For this reason, the reproduction of society remains a precarious process, although the ability to plan and handle dynamics may develop through the temporarily firm establishment of social relations.

Marxist theory focuses at the abstract level on the capitalist mode of production, and at the concrete level on social formations (usually national societies). The invention of regulation theory was intended to introduce a middle range level of abstraction in order to identify different, more or less stable, phases across different formations since the emergence of capitalism: i.e. modes of development such as Fordism. The concept of mode of development considers more –and historically concrete elements such as mass production and mass consumption than the more abstract term mode of production.

Macro-economic coherence –a functioning regime of accumulation that in peripheral countries is always highly dependent on the concrete forms of world market integration, is institutionally embedded through a mode of regulation. This encompasses “the totality of institutional forms, networks, and explicit or implicit norms assuring the compatibility of behaviors within the framework of a regime of accumulation in conformity with the state of social relations and hence with their conflictual character” (Lipietz, 1988, p. 24). This stabilization occurs via broadly shared societal values and the temporary institutionalization of societal relations in the form of modes of regulation. Boyer (1990, pp. 42ff.) describes the characteristics of modes of regulation: they secure the reproduction of fundamental societal relationships across all concrete manifestations of institutional forms; they ‘steer’ the reproduction of the particular regime of accumulation; and finally, they guarantee the dynamic compatibility of a wide range of decentralized decision- making processes by individuals or institutions without having to take the logic of the entire system into account. The relative permanence of societal relations means not only the reinforcement of institutions but also the stabilization of the expectations and life practices of individuals, as well as of collective actors such as trade unions. In this sense, a functioning development model tends to be abler to create socio- economic and political hegemony in the sense of Antonio Gramsci, i.e. to elucidate the complex mechanisms of “the agreement of associated societal wills” (Gramsci, 1991, pp. 1536ff.). Hegemony in this sense refers to domination-shaped consent based on the material core, i.e. a more or less functioning capitalist political economy, and the ability and willingness of the dominating classes to compromise.

Gramsci’s concept is useful because it aims precisely to detect the universalized (not homogenized) socio-economic, political, and ideational patterns and mechanisms of domination. This brings us to an important point that needs to be considered in a global perspective on the (neo) extractivist development model, namely that the capitalist regulation of societal-nature relations does not mean the abolition of tendentially destructive forms of the appropriation of nature; nevertheless, the destruction of nature will not necessarily become an urgent problem for overall capitalist development, since dangerous negative impacts can be spatially externalized and temporarily postponed. We can observe this quite clearly in Latin America and at an international scale.

Finally, a strength of regulation theory is its perspective on deeply embedded structural features, their variation throughout history, and their inter-linkages with accumulation strategies and manifold other social actions. Therefore, methodologically, regulation theory looks both at different phases of capitalist development with particular features, but also at continuities with previous phases, i.e. it attempts to highlight the continuities and discontinuities, moments of – spatially highly uneven stabilization and crises.

4. Extractivism in Latin America’s history

The history of Latin America is inseparably linked to raw-materials extraction. At each point in history, the historically specific forms of nature appropriation were constitutive for the modes of socio-economic reproduction and power relations. In Latin America, various historical phases of extractivism can be identified, based on specific world-market structures, supporting political economic and power relations, specific development conceptions and effects on social inclusion and exclusion as well as specific discursive rationalities. In the following we distinguish four historical phases: colonial extractivism, the extractivism of the liberal capitalism of the 19th century, peripheral-Fordist extractivism, and the current phase of neo-extractivism. The latter will be addressed in section 4.

5. Neo-extractivism in the age ofa global ‘commodity consensus’

The current neo-extractivist development model is, similar to the peripheral- Fordist phase, one of catch-up development with a supposedly “strong state” which assumes both the role both of an entrepreneur and of a mediator and also guarantees the basic conditions for raw-material extraction and profit accumulation. Simultaneously, it differs from the previous phases of capitalist development essentially due to the changed altered world economic and political position of natural resources and their appropriation by society, shifting roles of the state, specific world market constellations, new technologies, and capital valorization strategies (Albritton et al., 2001; Robinson, 2004). Nevertheless, associated national and international policies, cultural norms, and dispositifs for action are also changing. For the analysis of the influencing factors of neo-extractivism, two phases can be distinguished at the general level. First is an initial phase, which roughly covers the period from 1970 to 2000, during which extractivism/neo-extractivism was to a certain extent prepared as an option. The second ensuing phase coincided with the turn of the millennium and is still ongoing.

6. Socio-political and structural resonances

One of the most important changes in some Latin American countries has been the contested formulation and acceptance of new constitutions (e.g. in Ecuador and Bolivia) that have stipulated not only wide ranging political and social rights and the rights of nature, but also the recognition of cultural difference and the rights of territorial self-definition and autonomy. However, the last few years have proved how difficult, ambivalent, and disputed their implementation under neo-extractivism is (Vega, 2012; Ávila Santamaría, 2014; Castro Patiño, 2014). The political presence of indigenous organizations rose the controversial issue of neo-extractivist societal-nature relations, while these countries’ constitutions stipulate such principles as ‘living well’ (buen vivir or vivir bien), which precisely do not imply an extractivist relationship with nature.

At the same time, the neo-extractivist phase brought about important processes of state modernization throughout the continent, which also included the creation of legal frameworks, new institutions, and mechanisms of democratic control around extractivism (RLIE, 2016). The majority of Latin American countries, starting with Brazil in 1981, saw the creation of high level environmental authorities (ministries in most cases) and environmental protection laws; followed, from 2002 on, by laws on transparency and access to public information around extractive activities. Nevertheless, these regulations were always contested and only partly implemented. While information on the volume and value of extraction –which demonstrates a government’s success has been made publicly accessible, in many countries information on the conditions of contracts and concessions is only partial or is difficult to find. The same limitations apply to data on the exact destiny of the revenues collected.

From 2012 on, a severe setback regarding environmental regulation, control, transparency, and democratic, decentralized decision-making can be observed. As a response to the decline of commodity prices, countries are now engaging in a competition for foreign investment at almost any cost and under any conditions. In particular, the stipulation for free and informed prior consent around extractive activities, grounded in the ILO Convention 169 and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples –although ratified (in Bolivia 2007 and Ecuador 2012) and written into law in some countries (in Peru 2012, according to RLIE, 2016) was weakened or neutralized even before implementation. In Bolivia, Presidential Decree 2195 (2014) has practically undone the constitutionally avowed self-determination rights of indigenous peoples, and Decree 2366 (2015) allows hydrocarbon exploration in protected areas.

Many national environmental institutions as well as control and sanction mechanisms against environmental destruction were reshaped and weakened, and in some cases disappeared altogether. At the same time, the political power of institutions linked to extractivism within the State apparatuses, in the form of ministries for mining, energy, or agriculture, was strengthened and some of them were associated to powerful ministries like those of finance, industry, or public works, thus providing the necessary infrastructure (Gudynas, 2014). In Venezuela, the Ministry of Environment was dismantled in early September 2014 and its functions subordinated to the Ministry of Habitat and Housing. In the same year, in Ecuador the Ministry of Environment was placed under the coordination of the Ministry of Strategic Sectors, which also coordinates the Ministries for Hydrocarbons and Energy. In Brazil, the Brazilian Institute for Environment has been divided into two institutions, while Uruguay’s president José Mujica has repeatedly asked to break up the country’s Ministry of Environment and Housing. In Colombia, bypassing the policies of the National Environmental Authority, Supreme Decree 041 (2014) introduced ‘express’ environmental licensing for mining activities, which allows corporations to present an environmental management plan and start working without waiting for the authorities’ approval (Gudynas, 2014; RLIE, 2016). In this context, the classification of land as ‘unused’ or ‘degraded’ represents a discursive construct and norm setting combined with the specific goal of valorization or appropriation; existing non-commercial uses are seldom if ever recognized. In this context, Sacher (2014) underlines the dynamic and so-cio-political dimension in the definition of territories that are declared suitable for raw material extraction. A case in point for the expansion of territories that are politically and socially defined as mineral deposits or oil fields is the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, which in August 2013 transitioned from a worldwide symbol of environmental and climate justice policies to simply an oil field to be exploited, when president Rafael Correa announced the end of the ‘leave the oil in the soil’ policy.

On the other hand, many countries experienced what could be called a partial reformulation of class compromises, the core of which is the use of high economic growth rates in the primary sector to greatly enhance the leeway of governments to distribute wealth. In many countries, the result was less an expansion of the industrial sector than an enhancement of raw material-based revenues, which enabled the implementation of assistentialist policies. In countries with center-left or leftist governments, this has brought millions of people out of hunger and has led to a relatively high degree of governmental legitimacy among poor people,⁴ as well as to a political discourse that is both national-populist and favorable to Latin American integration. Nevertheless, there is some debate regarding the durability and structural character of these changes. Some authors observe a significant increase in the continent’s middle class, up to a third of the overall population (Ferreira et al., 2013). Most clearly in Bolivia, the cooperative miners and the cocaleros, as well as other Aymara groups, have experienced important processes of social mobility and are now part of the new elites (PIEB, 2013).

Positions that tend more to emphasize the paradoxical character of current developments, while still taking note of the successes of the redistribution policies, point out their structural and strategic weaknesses. On the one hand, there has been no restructuring of the productive sector, while on the other, integration into and dependence on the world market are proceeding apace. Accordingly, there is growing criticism not only of the ecological effects of these policies, but also of the type of state distribution policy applied. The latter is criticized for not changing societal power relations, so that, for instance, there have been few initiatives toward land reform. In sum, this model makes no radical break, either with modernity’s ethos of progress and development or with traditional relationships of power and domination (Lavinas, 2013; Gudynas, 2015, 198ff.).

Aside from these facts, extractivist strategies involve considerable intra-societal conflicts, particularly in countries with new constitutions and formerly strong indigenous movements such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where governments and state apparatuses are in the throes of an enormous dilemma between the postulated decentralization and democratization on the one hand, and a potentially authoritarian development state that embodies the concept of raison d’état on the other (Eaton, 2013). The latter is realized within the state and society by means of a hierarchical, authoritarian, even militaristic dispositif according to which development is to be promoted and society defended against internal and external enemies:

Thus there exists a close connection between extractivism and the strengthening of centralism and authoritarian tendencies in the political realm. A state leadership with unlimited and uncontrolled access to a country’s most profitable resources can easily secure the continuation of its rule without bothering to deal with autonomous societal forces in an equal way, even if it is required to regularly subject itself to free elections. (Meschkat, 2013, our translation)

Academic and socio-political assessments of these developments diverge. Some take the position that a stronger state and the redistribution of income constitute the basis for a shift of power relations in society over the medium term, which will clearly favor the broad masses of the population and their organizations (García Linera, 2012, pp. 75-80). In contrast, recent critiques diagnose a significant concentration of power in the executive function and an erosion of the separation of powers, namely for Ecuador and Bolivia, as the executive power has gained control over the legislative, judicial and also electoral power. In both countries, the popular mass organizations whose struggles brought these progressive governments to power have been weakened significantly, and critics of the government in office are often prosecuted (Tapia, 2011; Basabe and Martínez, 2014). Gudynas (2014, pp. 150-151) also observes a loss of democratic mechanisms of deliberation or consultation and a tendency towards the exclusion of political minorities throughout the region (Prada, 2014).

Nonetheless, in spite of the important current experiences in Latin America indicating that other paths toward development are possible, the alternatives to date have all remained within the extractivist corridor; i.e. they represent a form of capitalist modernization that is currently profiting from high world market prices, but which does not change the fundamental political, economic, and cultural structural patterns or the power relations that support them.

At the core of many current problems are the contradictions of the in-dustrial-fossilistic and capitalist mode of production. (Peripheral) Fordist forms of mass production and consumption, more or less functioning social compromises, and stable welfare institutions became and still are a strong and attractive orientation in societies of the global North as well as in the global South. In the current state of global economic crisis, Fordist patterns are prolonged and partially deepened through an intensification of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.

7. Conclusion

As we have shown, the characteristic elements of the neo-extractivist development model that have emerged since the 1970s, and especially after 2000, are as follows. First, changing world market constellations and growing geopolitical and geo-economic rivalries favor continued high demand for natural resources, which in most areas contributed to continued high world market prices until 2014. Second, the emergence and stabilization of resource extractivist practices were clearly dependent on specific state action based on institutional and judicial assurance and the securing of property and use rights; i.e. the granting of concessions or property titles to land and forest areas and the only partial implementation and subsequent undermining of environmental controls. Likewise it depended on the infrastructural enablement and authorization of raw material exploitation, extraction, and marketing in the form of roads, ports, and pipelines. Such practices were further supported by discourse, evident in the debate around the cultivation of raw materials for agro fuel production in so-called unused or degraded areas. In countries with center-left or leftist governments, state-organized distribution measures, from which not only the upper socio-economic strata but also the lower and especially the middle strata profit, have also contributed to social and political stability. Thus it has been possible, despite all the contradictions and conflicts, to create a legitimized base for extractivism, which formed the foundation for hegemonic social relations, the prosperity of which was based primarily on the extraction and sale of the products of nature on the world market. Third and finally, the specific dynamics of neo-extractivism have been marked by new societal disputes between the postulated processes of decentralization and democratization on the one hand, and the tendency toward authoritarian state policy patterns on the other. The conflicts here were not only about access to the products of nature as the material basis for societal production and reproduction or over the revenues obtained from extraction, but also about divergent concepts of prosperity, competing worldviews and interpretations of nature, political procedures and concepts of order, as well as a recognition of identity and territorial self-determination.

These disputes demonstrate that neo-extractivism is not only an economic/technical form of resource appropriation or a renaissance of the Latin American economic model, but rather should be seen as a central expression of political domination, in which the material, cultural, and socio-political dimensions and conflicts of a new development model coalesce. Furthermore, these disputes are interesting for the discussion of socio-ecological transformation (Brand, 2012; Brand and Wissen, in press), a debate that is currently witnessing dynamic development. The increasing recognition of ecological problems and the obvious need for fundamental transformation –which is stipulated in the constitutions of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela stand in contrast to the rather narrow political and societal corridors of action. Actors critical of extractivism in Latin America intend to promote a discourse and related practices that strengthen politics in the broadest sense, namely that of the conflictive and democratic making of society. The focus is thus not on policies alone, but also on the societal and political structures and the capitalist, patriarchal, and imperial logics upon which they are based.

An analysis of the neo-extractivist development model that we can currently see in Latin America provides an impetus for current development politics, and for the socio-political and socio-theoretical challenges that also affect social and political theory. The focus on the global context of the complex societal and social-ecological relations and their dominant development dynamics that we have proposed here might help to evaluate possible multi-dimensional transformative alternatives to extractivism. This includes, most importantly, necessary changes in international rules and regulations, but also in social and political institutions, socio-technical configurations, societal-nature relations, and prevailing symbolic orientations such as conceptions of progress, freedom, and growth (Brand and Wissen, in press). One final important point to make is that such social-ecological transformation would necessarily require addressing social practices in the capitalist centers, including countries such as China as a field of innovation, in order to overcome the social relations underlying the still predominant imperialist mode of living. One implication of this, for example, would be the need to de-naturalize access to cheap and unsustainably produced commodities and labor power.