To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
I have always been fascinated by the place of mining in capitalist development. Growing up West Australian in the 2000s, I witnessed first-hand the incredible wealth generated next to the inequality, violence and environmental devastation of the last mining boom. I soon came to understand that studying mining sharpens our focus on a bigger tension at the heart of global capitalism – the ever-present tension between modernisation and destruction mediated by social conflict and resistance.
Supporters and detractors of mining both recognise the rapid economic, social and political change that mining brings can completely transform societies. If this is true in Australia, it is certainly so in Indonesia, where the research for my new book Undermining Resistance: The governance of participation by multinational mining corporations took place.
My research for the book was motivated by a simple question: How can people affected by mining shift the uneven distribution of impacts and benefits?
A dizzying array of international standards, agreements, associations and mechanisms purport to even the playing field between communities, the environment and extractive corporations. Examples include the International Council on Mining and Metals, the World Bank Group’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, and the Equator Principles. Almost all embed participation as a technique for empowering communities affected by mining. But these standards have all been heavily criticised as voluntary, unenforceable and ultimately of limited benefit.
This critique leads to another set of questions: What is the relationship between local resistances and global governance mechanisms? What might lead people affected by mining to ‘participate’ in corporate mechanisms or resist change?
Literature on mining conflicts and contestation is divided by methodological and ontological focus on particular types of institutions, actors or, most commonly, scales of contestation (with rare exception). This produces some wildly contradictory conclusions. For example, literature on ‘resource nationalism’ starts with the observation that states have increasingly been able to assert more interventionist control over foreign investment in mining sectors and the profits from extractive industries. This is especially so in Indonesia, where resource nationalism has been most successful in transferring assets, control and profits from western multinational miners to domestic conglomerates. On the other hand, authors focused on community-corporate conflict, corporate social responsibility, and participation at local scales observe that state institutions are withdrawing from community development and environmental management. They see this as evidence of neoliberalism ‘rolling back’ the state.
Both sets of authors are correct, and both produce valuable insights within their own scalar and institutional foci. But how can we have a state that is powerfully expropriating some of the most notorious multinational corporations and simultaneously withering before neoliberalism?
The answer, of course, is the way powerful actors strategically contest issues at scales, or across multiple scales, that are the most beneficial to their interests. Yet, even within critical political economies of extractive industries, which should provide the theoretical and analytical tools to explain such contestation within capitalist development, there is a sharp divide. The macro, or structural variant, best represented by ‘the new extractivism’, recently revived in critiques of new green-developmentalism and energy transition minerals is concerned with how ongoing crises in global capitalism drive states’ ‘post-neoliberal’ developmentalist strategies. The micro variant a collection of critical approaches to studying conflict from below, drawing from political ecology, critical agrarian studies and everyday political economies. Combining macro and micro critical political economy approaches conceptualises states, corporations, governance and resistance as internally related parts of a social whole. It is in this combination that we can find explanations for when, how and why corporate participatory mechanisms emerge and how people affected by mining choose to participate or not.
This book begins to craft a new multi-scalar political economy of the social conditions of extractive accumulation. I define extractive accumulation as the collection of strategies and relationships at local, national and global scales that enable corporations to first secure natural resources and then profit from their extraction. To do this I combine Marxist approaches to land-grabbing with feminist social reproduction theory, the ‘modes of participation’ approach and a Gramscian conception of ideology and common sense.
The initial acquisition of resource deposits (land-grabbing) necessitates a dispossession, generating rapid changes to existing political, social and economic relations. Repurposing land means changing social relations surrounding that land. That is, changes in the function of land entails not only a change in the productive function of land, but also relations of social reproduction of its people. The insights of Rebecca Hall are invaluable for pointing out how the practices of social reproduction, non-capitalist subsistence and capitalist production can all become sites for exploitation and resistance, domination and agency as groups of people struggle to reproduce themselves, their families and communities, which of course is racialised and gendered.
For example, the peasants of coastal Kulon Progo, covered in chapter six of my book, have a slogan: ‘Mananam adalah melawan’ – Farming is fighting! They understand that their efforts to reproduce themselves as successful intergenerational farming communities is literally fertile soil for their resistance to mining.
An often-overlooked insight of Silvia Federici is that the state takes on the role of “chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining of the workforce” lest recalcitrant populations reproduce themselves in opposition to capital. In the case of contemporary mining conflicts, it is more often the multinational corporation that takes on this role of discipline and supervision. To avoid blockades, ‘illegal mining’, sabotage and so on – corporations manage some of the inequalities and disruption involved in changing relations of production and reproduction.
Discipline and supervision is increasingly managed through new modes of participation. The modes of participation framework is concerned with “the institutional structures and ideologies that shape the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in the political process.” The strength of this approach is that it understands participation as a strategy to contain conflicts that emerge from inequities and contradictions of capitalist development and crises. In this view, corporate social responsibility, community development, ‘gender-mainstreaming’ and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation.
For example, in chapter four of my book I describe how in upriver East Kalimantan, Rio Tinto’s community development programs attempted to teach local Dayak people sedentary farming by funding cocoa and other mono-culture plantations. Their traditions of shifting cultivation, rubber plantations, fishing and panning for gold frequently brought them into conflict with the mine. Violent policing of ‘trespassing’ the forest/mine boundaries frequently led to community protests and blockades. Corporate community development of sedentary farming encouraged activities compatible with large scale mining. But groups resisting Rio’s mine also organised with national and international civil society organisations to take their fight to Jakarta, Melbourne and London.
Returning to the global scale, it is notable that while participatory mechanisms operate at very local scales and are tailored to local conditions, their ideological legitimacy and guiding principles are inscribed in the array of global governance standards I mentioned in paragraph four. These global mechanisms began to proliferate at the end of the twentieth-century in response to the growing oppositions to mining as several high profile conflicts ‘jumped-scales’ to horrify international audiences. Sustained negative publicity, and civil society campaigning led to protracted crises of legitimacy. Beyond reputational damage, several cases saw multinational miners sued by affected communities in their home jurisdiction. Simultaneously, in response to domestic pressure, governments in resource rich countries began to draft stricter environmental and social regulations that would reduce corporate profiteering. Multinational miners pre-empted state intervention by establishing institutional guidelines and ideological legitimacy to manage the social and environmental impacts of mining via those global, voluntary self-governance mechanisms.
Perhaps the most significant implication of this theoretical approach is that the proliferation of global governance mechanisms is the result of a long process starting with resistance of local communities affected by mining. International standards are a reaction to the threat of national regulation, not of corporations stepping in to fill regulatory gaps. The agency of peoples’ resistance is significant on a global scale.
Through the theoretical framework briefly outlined here, its application to the evolution of extractivism in Indonesia, and three detailed local case studies, I return to offer a tentative answer to my original question: How can people affected by mining shift the uneven distribution of impacts and benefits of mining? I answer by highlighting four factors:
- Control of land – the ability to exclude other actors from their land, either legally or extra-legally
- Histories and structures of organisation – how are local organisations independent of capitalist and state control?
- Alliance structures and possibilities – are their national and international allies available to help resistances jump scale to pressure for national regulation or international crises?
- Ideologies and common-sense understanding – it is through ideologies, or common-sense understandings of the world, that people affected by mining understand their tactics and agency, relationships to land, how they construct organisations, and select allies.
Comments