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Resource-making, materiality and the disruptive geographies of the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific
The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 733–736
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis
Original article
Resource-making, materiality and the disruptive geographies of the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific
T
Matthew G. Allena, , Keith Barneyb ⁎
a b
School of Government, Development and International Affairs, The University of the South Pacific, Laucala Bay, Suva, Fiji Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Mining Asia and the Pacific Resource-making Socio-spatial relations Disruption
This essay introduces a Special Section on ‘Recent Developments in the Extractive Industries in the Asia-Pacific’. Though diverse in their approaches and objects of study, the five articles speak strongly to understandings of extractive industry as a socio-spatial and political-economic process of ‘disruption’. Taking the disruptive possibilities of the “socio-spatial dialectic” as our starting point, and drawing inspiration from work on the “operations of capital” and “world ecology”, we briefly sketch out a set of relational and disruptive moments that are identified in this rewarding collection. Above all from this Special Section we are reminded of the tight, recursive imbrication of mineral extraction and resource-making with processes of state formation and capitalist accumulation.
1. Introduction The five articles in this Special Section speak strongly to understandings of extractive industry as a socio-spatial and political-economic process of ‘disruption’. In this introduction we take our initial lead from geographer Eric Sheppard’s (2016) recent mobilisation of “disruptive geographies” as a decisive critical intervention into orthodox economic renderings of globalisation and capitalism. In particular we explore how the idea of the “socio-spatial dialectic” (Soja cited in Sheppard, 2016:3) is useful for unsettling the entrenched binaries, monolithic categories and techno-rationalist logics that have permeated much research and knowledge production on the extractive industries. The socio-spatial dialectic foregrounds the recursive co-constitution of space and society, in general, and the inescapably relational character of extractive resource development, in particular; as a “coproduction of socionature” (Bakker and Bridge, 2016:19). From this point of departure, the articles in this Special Section push us to view the disruptive character of resource extraction in terms of the diverse and uneven ways in which nature and environmental resources become linked to processes of capital accumulation and state formation (Bridge, 2014). And while not framed explicitly in these terms, we find the articles point to other formulations of the capital-state-nature relation. For example Jason Moore has extended the idea of the uneven geographies of resource extraction within a world economy, through a conception of a “world ecology”, as formed through historical-
⁎
dialectical centre-periphery relations, and the continual opening and exhaustion of resource frontiers (e.g. Moore, 2017). Moreover, Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2015:2) work on the “operations of capital” foregrounds the capacity of mineral extraction, as organised through networks of materials, logistics and finance, “to violently disrupt and fabricate space, territories, and lives.” In advancing the operations of capital lens in a study of the incorporation of farmland into financial markets, geographer Stefan Ouma stresses the reconfiguration of “organizations, economic relations, labor and nature at specific historical conjunctures” (2016:83), and the need, therefore, for “a grounded understanding of historio-geographically variegated financial economization processes” (2016:84). The shifting regional and global geographies of mineral-resource extraction can themselves be read as series of socio-spatial disruptions. Indeed, a critical, geographically-informed perspective on mining and the extractive sector provides stark examples of the limits to the “geographical economics” perspective that Eric Sheppard takes umbrage with. Far from being a straightforward outcome of “place-based characteristics and distance” (Sheppard, 2016:xvi), the historical and contemporary geography of mining investment is heavily mediated by the organisation and weight of political-economic and social forces. This is amply demonstrated by Bridge’s (2004) account of the geographical shift in mining investment that occurred during the 1990s as a consequence of the adoption of neoliberal economic policies in many parts of the global South. The more recent rise of Chinese and Indian
Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M.G. Allen), [email protected] (K. Barney).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.06.006 Received 2 April 2019; Received in revised form 18 June 2019; Accepted 21 June 2019 Available online 01 July 2019 2214-790X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 733–736
M.G. Allen and K. Barney
investment in overseas mining ventures appears to represent another significant disruption to the existing social and economic relations of resource extraction in the Asia-Pacific (and elsewhere), just as the “neoextractivist” model has done in the context of Latin America (though this remains much debated: see Bebbington and Bebbington, 2011). Sheppard (2016:xv) writes that: “Globalizing capitalism is in continual spatio-temporal disequilibrium, riven by socio-spatial unevenness and conflict and confounded by more-than-economic processes.” The accounts of extractive industry documented in the articles that follow demonstrate this need for nuanced spatial histories of mining capitalism and disruptive development.
a useful contribution to our understandings of the shifting political geographies of mining in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. While some researchers have characterised BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries’ approach to foreign and economic diplomacy as “unashamedly mercantilist” (Alden and Schoeman, 2013:109), others have provided more nuanced interpretations. Carmody, for example, argues that Chinese investment broadly accommodates itself to the international neo-liberal economic order but is highly flexible in its approach to specific national contexts, where bilateralism is preferred to multilateralism; a form of “flexeconomy” (2017:868). In a similar vein, Gonzalez-Vincente shows that while Chinese firms generally accept the “mainstream Western conceptualisation of the ‘right’ economic world order” (2012:43), Chinese mining companies operating in Peru have been reluctant to participate in multilateral transparency and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, preferring to tailor their own CSR programs in response to local demands (2012:40). Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt’s research unearths some striking similarities in the overseas operations of Chinese and Indian mining companies, but also some important dissonances. Drawing upon a detailed exploration of the political economy of India’s domestic coal miningenergy complex and case studies of Indian mining ventures in Mozambique and Indonesia, they suggest some general characteristics of the nature of Indian overseas mining investments. The overarching driver of this investment is India’s reliance, for industrial development, on electricity generated by coal-fired plants. Against this backdrop, Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt depict a national extractive industry that is “inward-looking” in respect of the state’s central role in both coal mining and energy provision; organised and regulated through a “statist and outdated” legal framework that eschews international norms and policies; and that remains generally outside of global corporate supply chains. The latter in particular has meant that rather than looking to integrate with existing global commodity and trading networks, “India is moving abroad to secure valuable energy and other mineral supplies” via “new Indian supply chains”. In this sense, then, Indian investment in overseas extractive operations, especially coal mining, could be read be read as a form of neomercantilism or security mercantilism (McMichael, 2013); a characteristic that is broadly shared with Chinese investment in overseas natural resource sectors. Other similarities between China and India emerge from the way in which the inward orientation of India’s domestic extractive industry shapes its international operations. Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt show how the fragmented, fluid and highly variable domestic mining scene in India has taught Indian mining companies to be “flexible to just about any eventuality”; a flexibility that the authors suggest has served them well in their international operations (but has come at the cost of coherence in planning and adherence to industry standards), and has resonances with Carmody’s concept of a “flexeconomy”. Moreover, just as Chinese mining companies operating in Peru have adopted a reactive approach to CSR, Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt demonstrate that Indian companies have shunned global standards in favour of striking deals “when various pressures made this favourable compared to continued strife”. On this point, however, they also highlight a difference with China; contrasting the latter’s shift to a greener and more innovation-driven growth model with India’s continuing apparent tolerance for corruption and environmental externalities in its mining industry. Kristen Lyon’s article on Indigenous resistance to the proposed Carmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin grapples with a specific instance of Indian investment in an overseas mining operation. Indeed, this case bears out several of the general characteristics of Indian mining capital and the political economy of India’s coal-energy complex that are proposed by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt. For example, the mine’s developer, industrial conglomerate Adani Enterprises, operates a string of coal-fired power plants in India and is proposing a ‘pitto-port-to-power point’ operation; which corroborates the direct supply
2. The special section articles Stephen Gale’s historical exposition of the geo-politics of phosphate mining on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru provides a fascinating example of how resources are made and unmade over time and space. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the governments of Australia and New Zealand came to the realisation that phosphate fertiliser was essential to the continued productivity of their national agricultural economies. Each nation then engaged in the aggressive pursuit of Nauru’s phosphate deposits. The ensuing and unedifying scramble for control over the island and its resources played out through violent colonial rivalries and the geo-political paroxysms of the First and Second World Wars. The upshot was that Nauru was subjected to a form of colonial and post-colonial “security mercantilism” (see McMichael, 2013). In effect, Nauru’s rich inheritance of birdlife-based phosphate deposits have been depleted to near exhaustion to support the continued economic vitality of many parts of rural Australia and New Zealand. Much more could be said of Nauru and its historically unequal relationship to Australia, not least of which is the observation that having been re-territorialised by the latter for the purpose of extracting its rich phosphate deposits, the Australian government has more recently imbricated Nauru into extra-territorial arrangements, in the form of secured off-shore detention facilities for incarcerating asylum-seekers to Australia (see Afeef, 2006). However, Gale’s story of Nauru, along with those of other Pacific islands that were mined by Pacific-rim colonial powers for their phosphate resources, can also be read through the lens of world ecology. The accumulated bird guano deposited on these islands over millennia has been extracted and “metabolised” by distant agro-industrial colonial-settler societies to produce food for export and domestic consumption. Having exhausted the soil fertility of their own domestic agricultural frontiers, Australia and New Zealand turned to their periphery, just as Europe and North America had done half a century earlier in a similar rush for phosphate. (In the case of the US, Gale notes that nine of the 66 guano-bearing islands that were taken possession under the 1856 Guano Islands Act – including several in the Pacific Ocean – remain under US control). We are remined here of Moore’s (2017:607) observation that “capitalism is co-produced by and within the web of life at every turn… every state, class and colonial project, every revolt and strike, and every movement and accumulation of money has been bundled with extra-human nature.” Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt’s article also addresses the themes of offshore mining investment and the recursive encounter between natural resources and state-formation, though in very a different spatial and temporal context. Their focus is upon the increasing scale and prominence of Indian companies’ investment in overseas extractive industries, and, in particular, how domestic political-economic conditions in India shape the foreign operations of these emerging multinationals. They situate their analysis in terms of the significant shifts in the global geographies of extraction that have been underway since the 1980s, most recently taking the form of the emergence of new players from the global South. While considerable attention has been paid to the rise of Chinese investment in overseas mining operations, much less is known about how Indian mining companies operate abroad; making this paper 734
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chain approach outlined by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt. The Adani case would also appear to affirm the latter’s observation that multinational Indian mining companies have thus far eschewed ‘international best practice’; and that Indian mining, more broadly, is associated with environmental destruction and rampant corruption. Indeed, Lyons dedicates an entire section to Adani’s “poor track record” in both India and abroad, pointing to instances of environmental damage, human rights abuses and “business impropriety”. In light of the complex, multilevel political settlement that undergirds the proposed Carmichael development, we are tempted to also ponder whether the “flexibility” in adjusting to local conditions that is highlighted by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt may have played a role in Adani’s success to date. In the context of Lyon’s primary focus upon two groups of Traditional Owners who have refused to consent to the development of the mine on their ancestral homelands, the international norm of the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples takes center stage in her narrative. FPIC is enshrined in the Equator Principles upon which many Australian and international banks and financial institutions stake their corporate reputations, and the dubious status of FPIC in the case of Adani largely explains why the ‘major’ international and Australian banks (bar one) have ruled out financing the project. Yet, as Lyons shows, these reputational and normative considerations have deterred neither Adani nor the Australian federal government, the latter having extended significant finance to the project. And this goes to the crux of her argument: that despite these and other international norms, a coalition of Indian mining capital, an Australian “colonial settler state” and other elite interests, has engaged in “territorializing Indigenous lands for coal extractivism”. We are again reminded here of the recursive dynamic of state and resource formation. Indeed, by situating this case in Australia’s violent history of dispossessing Indigenous lands, its extractivist economic history, and its continuing dependence on mineral exports, Lyons imbricates the settler-colonial frontier with the contemporary coal frontier; showing us that they are co-produced, and, in turn, perpetuate the relations of property, race, and resource extraction that “remain imprinted” in Australia’s political and legal system. Here it is worth a pause to briefly note another globally important dimension of the Adani mine. As Lyons notes in her introduction, the Adani story can be read against another significant contemporary norm shift: the global energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. In addition to the local forms of Indigenous resistance closely documented by Lyons, the Adani mine has also garnered opposition in Australia and internationally, much of which can be read in terms of a growing global social movement that seeks to “choke off fossil fuels at the point of extraction and decarbonize economies at source” (Bridge, 2010:830). As this article goes to press, Adani has achieved its final regulatory approvals and, given that it is the ‘first-mover’ in the potential opening up of Australia’s largest coal frontier (and that the Carmichael mine will in its own right be one of the world’s largest thermal coal mines), history may well record this as a watershed moment in the global contestation over “the anthropogenic mobilization of carbon via fossil fuel combustion” (Bridge, 2010:830). While Lyons adopts an explicitly activist positionality in her research on Indigenous resistance to the Adani mine, the article by Bainton and Owen tackles head-on the broader ontological, ethical and methodological challenges of ethnographic and social science research on mining. They anchor their discussion in Ballard and Bank’s (2003) seminal article on the anthropology of mining in which the ‘conventional’ stakeholder categories of state, company and community are prised open to shed light on the vexed questions of positionality and ethics. Bainton and Owen revisit these questions via an extended critical reflection on Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism: The Relationships Between Corporations and Their Critics (2014). While acknowledging the many strengths of Kirsch’s ethnographic work among communities impacted by the notorious Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) (and the NGOs and activists who have opposed the mine’s social and
environmental excesses) – and also that it can be difficult for researchers to access the inner workings of the corporate domain – they take umbrage with Kirsch’s activist-critic positionality and his reluctance to engage directly with mining company personnel. Kirsch’s approach is depicted as a form of “ethnographic refusal” that produces a “methodological imbalance between a richly characterised ‘critic’ group and a thinly rendered ‘corporate’ group” and, ultimately, “a world without interface”. Having critiqued the way in which Kirsch executes his analytical focus on the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics, Bainton and Owen draw upon conceptual work on interfaces and conjunctures to set out a sophisticated understanding of contemporary mining arenas as “zones of entanglement”. This approach, they suggest, can better account for the plurality of perspectives, actors, interests, materialities and temporalities that produce mining activities and territories as fundamentally relational arenas. Their analysis ultimately leads them back to Ballard and Bank’s conclusion that rigorous social scientific engagement with the contemporary extractive industries requires “work at multiple sites and multiple scales over a sustained period”; and that mobility therefore becomes a “strategic resource” for the ethnographic researcher. The collection is rounded out with an insightful contribution by Boldbaatar et al. that scrutinises the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in the particular case of Mongolia. The authors regard the country as an ideal case study because, despite being a recognised leader in EITI participation and the first country to adopt new EITI standards that extend disclosure requirements from revenues to “contextual information” (including contracts and licenses), Mongolia nevertheless continues to be plagued by a raft of resource governance challenges. Mongolia also occupies an interesting place in the shifting geographies of mining investment that have occurred over recent decades. Its mining investment boom was triggered by the adoption of a “progressive” investment regime in 1997, when it became known in mining circles as the “Chile of Asia” (Bridge, 2004:419). Mongolia’s keen participation in EITI would appear to indicate that it has adopted the global “good governance” agenda around extractive industries just as eagerly as it did the earlier neo-liberal paradigm. Boldbaatar et al.’s main focus is upon the extended disclosure requirements that were introduced to the EITI standards in 2013. They draw upon social accountability literature to develop a causal framework with which to assess how increased disclosure might lead to improved governance outcomes. This framework is applied to two types of contracts, water usage agreements and community benefit-sharing agreements. The authors found relatively higher but still incomplete levels of disclosure, discussion and monitoring in relation to benefitsharing agreements; and very little public disclosure of water usage agreements. Their overall conclusion is that despite notable efforts to promote the disclosure of mining-related contracts, “it remains incomplete as a driver of improved resource governance”. This conclusion prompts the authors to observe that given Mongolia’s relatively strong democracy and civil society, and its awardwinning track record in EITI compliance, if the disclosure requirements are not working there, then they appear to have little prospect of working anywhere else. This observation finds traction in some of the other Special Section articles. For example, Lyons notes that Adani has been criticised for refusing to allow independent scrutiny of its Indigenous Land Use Agreement; and Bainton and Owen point out that there is very little documented information about the actual outcomes of the benefit-sharing agreements negotiated between the national government and landowners in relation to extractive projects in PNG. 3. Conclusion This introduction has briefly sketched out a set of relational and disruptive ‘moments’ that are identified in this rewarding collection of contemporary research on the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific 735
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region. We have drawn our overarching framing not from understanding the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific region as based upon distinctive traits or regional mining sector characteristics. Rather our emphasis is upon drawing out how the authors in the Special Section trace the region as a site for various forms of place-based mining activity that are ‘grounded’ in local contexts (Bridge and Jonas, 2002: 765), and how the Asia-Pacific region is in turn connected into global extractive processes that are also operative in other jurisdictions. Geographical work on the production of nature, mining capitalism as a socio-spatial dialectic, and the uneven geographies of disruption in the extractive sector, further builds our relational perspective. Nature, resources, and contested struggles over environment, and political ecology, are therefore not just a patina or backdrop to bigger questions of state politics and economic development. Economy and society are inescapably established through nature and ecological processes, and local political ecologies are connected into a world ecology. The extractive industries can be a very useful lens through which to understand this ‘material world’. Material extraction, logistics and finance, are central modalities through which the global economy is organized in practice (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015; Ouma, 2016). It is this full sense of the socio-spatial dialectic and the co-production of nature and society that we draw inspiration from (Smith, 2008; Moore, 2017). While not claiming to represent a comprehensive picture, this collection of articles usefully broadens and deepens our understanding of recent and historical developments in the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific. From examinations of regional mineral resource frontier relationships (Gale); the internationalisation of the Southern extractive sector (Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt); Indigenous resistance to colonialsettler zones of extraction (Lyons); and the globalization of mining regulation and governance (Boldbaatar et al.), the individual articles can be placed within the interplay of nature and resource frontiers, the modes and logics of state power and authority, and the ongoing restructuring of a global mining economy. Meanwhile, Bainton and Owen’s intervention returns us to the responsibilities of scholars, and scholar-activists, for grasping the full implications of researching the
participants and positions in the extractive industries. We hope this introduction has also pointed to some ways forward for framing new research on the extractive sector within an ambitious critical-historical and geographical conceptual canvas. References Afeef, K.F., 2006. The Politics of Extraterritorial Processing: Offshore Asylum Policies in Europe and the Pacific. Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper, 36. Oxford University, Oxford. Alden, C., Schoeman, M., 2013. South Africa in the company of giants: the search for leadership in a transforming global order. Int. Aff. 89 (1), 111–129. Bakker, K., Bridge, G., 2016. Material worlds? Resource geographies and the ‘matter of nature’. Prog. Hum. Geog. 30 (1), 5–27. Ballard, C., Banks, G., 2003. Resource wars: the anthropology of mining. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 32, 287–313. Bebbington, A., Bebbington, D., 2011. An Andean Avatar: post-neoliberal and neoliberal strategies for securing the unobtainable. New Polit. Econ. 43 (6), 1152–1162. Bridge, G., Jonas, A., 2002. Governing nature: the reregulation of resource access, production, and consumption. Environ. Plan. B Urban Anal. City Sci. 34, 759–766. Bridge, G., 2004. Mapping the Bonanza: geographies of mining investment in an ear of neoliberal reform. Prof. Geogr. 56 (3), 406–421. Bridge, G., 2010. Resource geographies I: making carbon economies, old and new. Prog. Hum. Geog. 35 (6), 820–834. Bridge, G., 2014. Resource geographies II: the resource-state nexus. Prog. Hum. Geog. 38 (1), 118–130. Carmody, P., 2017. The geopolitics and economics of BRICS’ resource and market access in Southern Africa: aiding development or creating dependency? J. S. Afr. Stud. 43 (5), 683–877. Gonzalez-Vincente, R., 2012. Mapping Chinese mining investment in Latin America: politics or market? China Q. 209, 35–58. Kirsch, S., 2014. Mining Capitalism: the Relationship Between Corporations and Their Critics. University of California Press, Berkeley. McMichael, P., 2013. Land grabbing as security mercantilism in international relations. Globalizations 10 (1), 47–64. Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., 2015. Operations of capital. S. Alt. Q. 114 (1), 1–9. Moore, J., 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. J. Peasant Stud. 44 (3), 594–630. Ouma, S., 2016. From financialization to operations of capital: historicising and disentangling the finance-farmland-nexus. Geoforum 73, 82–93. Sheppard, E., 2016. Limits to Globalization: Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Smith, N., 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
736
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis
Original article
Resource-making, materiality and the disruptive geographies of the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific
T
Matthew G. Allena, , Keith Barneyb ⁎
a b
School of Government, Development and International Affairs, The University of the South Pacific, Laucala Bay, Suva, Fiji Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Mining Asia and the Pacific Resource-making Socio-spatial relations Disruption
This essay introduces a Special Section on ‘Recent Developments in the Extractive Industries in the Asia-Pacific’. Though diverse in their approaches and objects of study, the five articles speak strongly to understandings of extractive industry as a socio-spatial and political-economic process of ‘disruption’. Taking the disruptive possibilities of the “socio-spatial dialectic” as our starting point, and drawing inspiration from work on the “operations of capital” and “world ecology”, we briefly sketch out a set of relational and disruptive moments that are identified in this rewarding collection. Above all from this Special Section we are reminded of the tight, recursive imbrication of mineral extraction and resource-making with processes of state formation and capitalist accumulation.
1. Introduction The five articles in this Special Section speak strongly to understandings of extractive industry as a socio-spatial and political-economic process of ‘disruption’. In this introduction we take our initial lead from geographer Eric Sheppard’s (2016) recent mobilisation of “disruptive geographies” as a decisive critical intervention into orthodox economic renderings of globalisation and capitalism. In particular we explore how the idea of the “socio-spatial dialectic” (Soja cited in Sheppard, 2016:3) is useful for unsettling the entrenched binaries, monolithic categories and techno-rationalist logics that have permeated much research and knowledge production on the extractive industries. The socio-spatial dialectic foregrounds the recursive co-constitution of space and society, in general, and the inescapably relational character of extractive resource development, in particular; as a “coproduction of socionature” (Bakker and Bridge, 2016:19). From this point of departure, the articles in this Special Section push us to view the disruptive character of resource extraction in terms of the diverse and uneven ways in which nature and environmental resources become linked to processes of capital accumulation and state formation (Bridge, 2014). And while not framed explicitly in these terms, we find the articles point to other formulations of the capital-state-nature relation. For example Jason Moore has extended the idea of the uneven geographies of resource extraction within a world economy, through a conception of a “world ecology”, as formed through historical-
⁎
dialectical centre-periphery relations, and the continual opening and exhaustion of resource frontiers (e.g. Moore, 2017). Moreover, Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2015:2) work on the “operations of capital” foregrounds the capacity of mineral extraction, as organised through networks of materials, logistics and finance, “to violently disrupt and fabricate space, territories, and lives.” In advancing the operations of capital lens in a study of the incorporation of farmland into financial markets, geographer Stefan Ouma stresses the reconfiguration of “organizations, economic relations, labor and nature at specific historical conjunctures” (2016:83), and the need, therefore, for “a grounded understanding of historio-geographically variegated financial economization processes” (2016:84). The shifting regional and global geographies of mineral-resource extraction can themselves be read as series of socio-spatial disruptions. Indeed, a critical, geographically-informed perspective on mining and the extractive sector provides stark examples of the limits to the “geographical economics” perspective that Eric Sheppard takes umbrage with. Far from being a straightforward outcome of “place-based characteristics and distance” (Sheppard, 2016:xvi), the historical and contemporary geography of mining investment is heavily mediated by the organisation and weight of political-economic and social forces. This is amply demonstrated by Bridge’s (2004) account of the geographical shift in mining investment that occurred during the 1990s as a consequence of the adoption of neoliberal economic policies in many parts of the global South. The more recent rise of Chinese and Indian
Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M.G. Allen), [email protected] (K. Barney).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.06.006 Received 2 April 2019; Received in revised form 18 June 2019; Accepted 21 June 2019 Available online 01 July 2019 2214-790X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The Extractive Industries and Society 6 (2019) 733–736
M.G. Allen and K. Barney
investment in overseas mining ventures appears to represent another significant disruption to the existing social and economic relations of resource extraction in the Asia-Pacific (and elsewhere), just as the “neoextractivist” model has done in the context of Latin America (though this remains much debated: see Bebbington and Bebbington, 2011). Sheppard (2016:xv) writes that: “Globalizing capitalism is in continual spatio-temporal disequilibrium, riven by socio-spatial unevenness and conflict and confounded by more-than-economic processes.” The accounts of extractive industry documented in the articles that follow demonstrate this need for nuanced spatial histories of mining capitalism and disruptive development.
a useful contribution to our understandings of the shifting political geographies of mining in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. While some researchers have characterised BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries’ approach to foreign and economic diplomacy as “unashamedly mercantilist” (Alden and Schoeman, 2013:109), others have provided more nuanced interpretations. Carmody, for example, argues that Chinese investment broadly accommodates itself to the international neo-liberal economic order but is highly flexible in its approach to specific national contexts, where bilateralism is preferred to multilateralism; a form of “flexeconomy” (2017:868). In a similar vein, Gonzalez-Vincente shows that while Chinese firms generally accept the “mainstream Western conceptualisation of the ‘right’ economic world order” (2012:43), Chinese mining companies operating in Peru have been reluctant to participate in multilateral transparency and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, preferring to tailor their own CSR programs in response to local demands (2012:40). Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt’s research unearths some striking similarities in the overseas operations of Chinese and Indian mining companies, but also some important dissonances. Drawing upon a detailed exploration of the political economy of India’s domestic coal miningenergy complex and case studies of Indian mining ventures in Mozambique and Indonesia, they suggest some general characteristics of the nature of Indian overseas mining investments. The overarching driver of this investment is India’s reliance, for industrial development, on electricity generated by coal-fired plants. Against this backdrop, Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt depict a national extractive industry that is “inward-looking” in respect of the state’s central role in both coal mining and energy provision; organised and regulated through a “statist and outdated” legal framework that eschews international norms and policies; and that remains generally outside of global corporate supply chains. The latter in particular has meant that rather than looking to integrate with existing global commodity and trading networks, “India is moving abroad to secure valuable energy and other mineral supplies” via “new Indian supply chains”. In this sense, then, Indian investment in overseas extractive operations, especially coal mining, could be read be read as a form of neomercantilism or security mercantilism (McMichael, 2013); a characteristic that is broadly shared with Chinese investment in overseas natural resource sectors. Other similarities between China and India emerge from the way in which the inward orientation of India’s domestic extractive industry shapes its international operations. Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt show how the fragmented, fluid and highly variable domestic mining scene in India has taught Indian mining companies to be “flexible to just about any eventuality”; a flexibility that the authors suggest has served them well in their international operations (but has come at the cost of coherence in planning and adherence to industry standards), and has resonances with Carmody’s concept of a “flexeconomy”. Moreover, just as Chinese mining companies operating in Peru have adopted a reactive approach to CSR, Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt demonstrate that Indian companies have shunned global standards in favour of striking deals “when various pressures made this favourable compared to continued strife”. On this point, however, they also highlight a difference with China; contrasting the latter’s shift to a greener and more innovation-driven growth model with India’s continuing apparent tolerance for corruption and environmental externalities in its mining industry. Kristen Lyon’s article on Indigenous resistance to the proposed Carmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin grapples with a specific instance of Indian investment in an overseas mining operation. Indeed, this case bears out several of the general characteristics of Indian mining capital and the political economy of India’s coal-energy complex that are proposed by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt. For example, the mine’s developer, industrial conglomerate Adani Enterprises, operates a string of coal-fired power plants in India and is proposing a ‘pitto-port-to-power point’ operation; which corroborates the direct supply
2. The special section articles Stephen Gale’s historical exposition of the geo-politics of phosphate mining on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru provides a fascinating example of how resources are made and unmade over time and space. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the governments of Australia and New Zealand came to the realisation that phosphate fertiliser was essential to the continued productivity of their national agricultural economies. Each nation then engaged in the aggressive pursuit of Nauru’s phosphate deposits. The ensuing and unedifying scramble for control over the island and its resources played out through violent colonial rivalries and the geo-political paroxysms of the First and Second World Wars. The upshot was that Nauru was subjected to a form of colonial and post-colonial “security mercantilism” (see McMichael, 2013). In effect, Nauru’s rich inheritance of birdlife-based phosphate deposits have been depleted to near exhaustion to support the continued economic vitality of many parts of rural Australia and New Zealand. Much more could be said of Nauru and its historically unequal relationship to Australia, not least of which is the observation that having been re-territorialised by the latter for the purpose of extracting its rich phosphate deposits, the Australian government has more recently imbricated Nauru into extra-territorial arrangements, in the form of secured off-shore detention facilities for incarcerating asylum-seekers to Australia (see Afeef, 2006). However, Gale’s story of Nauru, along with those of other Pacific islands that were mined by Pacific-rim colonial powers for their phosphate resources, can also be read through the lens of world ecology. The accumulated bird guano deposited on these islands over millennia has been extracted and “metabolised” by distant agro-industrial colonial-settler societies to produce food for export and domestic consumption. Having exhausted the soil fertility of their own domestic agricultural frontiers, Australia and New Zealand turned to their periphery, just as Europe and North America had done half a century earlier in a similar rush for phosphate. (In the case of the US, Gale notes that nine of the 66 guano-bearing islands that were taken possession under the 1856 Guano Islands Act – including several in the Pacific Ocean – remain under US control). We are remined here of Moore’s (2017:607) observation that “capitalism is co-produced by and within the web of life at every turn… every state, class and colonial project, every revolt and strike, and every movement and accumulation of money has been bundled with extra-human nature.” Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt’s article also addresses the themes of offshore mining investment and the recursive encounter between natural resources and state-formation, though in very a different spatial and temporal context. Their focus is upon the increasing scale and prominence of Indian companies’ investment in overseas extractive industries, and, in particular, how domestic political-economic conditions in India shape the foreign operations of these emerging multinationals. They situate their analysis in terms of the significant shifts in the global geographies of extraction that have been underway since the 1980s, most recently taking the form of the emergence of new players from the global South. While considerable attention has been paid to the rise of Chinese investment in overseas mining operations, much less is known about how Indian mining companies operate abroad; making this paper 734
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chain approach outlined by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt. The Adani case would also appear to affirm the latter’s observation that multinational Indian mining companies have thus far eschewed ‘international best practice’; and that Indian mining, more broadly, is associated with environmental destruction and rampant corruption. Indeed, Lyons dedicates an entire section to Adani’s “poor track record” in both India and abroad, pointing to instances of environmental damage, human rights abuses and “business impropriety”. In light of the complex, multilevel political settlement that undergirds the proposed Carmichael development, we are tempted to also ponder whether the “flexibility” in adjusting to local conditions that is highlighted by Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt may have played a role in Adani’s success to date. In the context of Lyon’s primary focus upon two groups of Traditional Owners who have refused to consent to the development of the mine on their ancestral homelands, the international norm of the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples takes center stage in her narrative. FPIC is enshrined in the Equator Principles upon which many Australian and international banks and financial institutions stake their corporate reputations, and the dubious status of FPIC in the case of Adani largely explains why the ‘major’ international and Australian banks (bar one) have ruled out financing the project. Yet, as Lyons shows, these reputational and normative considerations have deterred neither Adani nor the Australian federal government, the latter having extended significant finance to the project. And this goes to the crux of her argument: that despite these and other international norms, a coalition of Indian mining capital, an Australian “colonial settler state” and other elite interests, has engaged in “territorializing Indigenous lands for coal extractivism”. We are again reminded here of the recursive dynamic of state and resource formation. Indeed, by situating this case in Australia’s violent history of dispossessing Indigenous lands, its extractivist economic history, and its continuing dependence on mineral exports, Lyons imbricates the settler-colonial frontier with the contemporary coal frontier; showing us that they are co-produced, and, in turn, perpetuate the relations of property, race, and resource extraction that “remain imprinted” in Australia’s political and legal system. Here it is worth a pause to briefly note another globally important dimension of the Adani mine. As Lyons notes in her introduction, the Adani story can be read against another significant contemporary norm shift: the global energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. In addition to the local forms of Indigenous resistance closely documented by Lyons, the Adani mine has also garnered opposition in Australia and internationally, much of which can be read in terms of a growing global social movement that seeks to “choke off fossil fuels at the point of extraction and decarbonize economies at source” (Bridge, 2010:830). As this article goes to press, Adani has achieved its final regulatory approvals and, given that it is the ‘first-mover’ in the potential opening up of Australia’s largest coal frontier (and that the Carmichael mine will in its own right be one of the world’s largest thermal coal mines), history may well record this as a watershed moment in the global contestation over “the anthropogenic mobilization of carbon via fossil fuel combustion” (Bridge, 2010:830). While Lyons adopts an explicitly activist positionality in her research on Indigenous resistance to the Adani mine, the article by Bainton and Owen tackles head-on the broader ontological, ethical and methodological challenges of ethnographic and social science research on mining. They anchor their discussion in Ballard and Bank’s (2003) seminal article on the anthropology of mining in which the ‘conventional’ stakeholder categories of state, company and community are prised open to shed light on the vexed questions of positionality and ethics. Bainton and Owen revisit these questions via an extended critical reflection on Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism: The Relationships Between Corporations and Their Critics (2014). While acknowledging the many strengths of Kirsch’s ethnographic work among communities impacted by the notorious Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) (and the NGOs and activists who have opposed the mine’s social and
environmental excesses) – and also that it can be difficult for researchers to access the inner workings of the corporate domain – they take umbrage with Kirsch’s activist-critic positionality and his reluctance to engage directly with mining company personnel. Kirsch’s approach is depicted as a form of “ethnographic refusal” that produces a “methodological imbalance between a richly characterised ‘critic’ group and a thinly rendered ‘corporate’ group” and, ultimately, “a world without interface”. Having critiqued the way in which Kirsch executes his analytical focus on the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics, Bainton and Owen draw upon conceptual work on interfaces and conjunctures to set out a sophisticated understanding of contemporary mining arenas as “zones of entanglement”. This approach, they suggest, can better account for the plurality of perspectives, actors, interests, materialities and temporalities that produce mining activities and territories as fundamentally relational arenas. Their analysis ultimately leads them back to Ballard and Bank’s conclusion that rigorous social scientific engagement with the contemporary extractive industries requires “work at multiple sites and multiple scales over a sustained period”; and that mobility therefore becomes a “strategic resource” for the ethnographic researcher. The collection is rounded out with an insightful contribution by Boldbaatar et al. that scrutinises the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in the particular case of Mongolia. The authors regard the country as an ideal case study because, despite being a recognised leader in EITI participation and the first country to adopt new EITI standards that extend disclosure requirements from revenues to “contextual information” (including contracts and licenses), Mongolia nevertheless continues to be plagued by a raft of resource governance challenges. Mongolia also occupies an interesting place in the shifting geographies of mining investment that have occurred over recent decades. Its mining investment boom was triggered by the adoption of a “progressive” investment regime in 1997, when it became known in mining circles as the “Chile of Asia” (Bridge, 2004:419). Mongolia’s keen participation in EITI would appear to indicate that it has adopted the global “good governance” agenda around extractive industries just as eagerly as it did the earlier neo-liberal paradigm. Boldbaatar et al.’s main focus is upon the extended disclosure requirements that were introduced to the EITI standards in 2013. They draw upon social accountability literature to develop a causal framework with which to assess how increased disclosure might lead to improved governance outcomes. This framework is applied to two types of contracts, water usage agreements and community benefit-sharing agreements. The authors found relatively higher but still incomplete levels of disclosure, discussion and monitoring in relation to benefitsharing agreements; and very little public disclosure of water usage agreements. Their overall conclusion is that despite notable efforts to promote the disclosure of mining-related contracts, “it remains incomplete as a driver of improved resource governance”. This conclusion prompts the authors to observe that given Mongolia’s relatively strong democracy and civil society, and its awardwinning track record in EITI compliance, if the disclosure requirements are not working there, then they appear to have little prospect of working anywhere else. This observation finds traction in some of the other Special Section articles. For example, Lyons notes that Adani has been criticised for refusing to allow independent scrutiny of its Indigenous Land Use Agreement; and Bainton and Owen point out that there is very little documented information about the actual outcomes of the benefit-sharing agreements negotiated between the national government and landowners in relation to extractive projects in PNG. 3. Conclusion This introduction has briefly sketched out a set of relational and disruptive ‘moments’ that are identified in this rewarding collection of contemporary research on the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific 735
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region. We have drawn our overarching framing not from understanding the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific region as based upon distinctive traits or regional mining sector characteristics. Rather our emphasis is upon drawing out how the authors in the Special Section trace the region as a site for various forms of place-based mining activity that are ‘grounded’ in local contexts (Bridge and Jonas, 2002: 765), and how the Asia-Pacific region is in turn connected into global extractive processes that are also operative in other jurisdictions. Geographical work on the production of nature, mining capitalism as a socio-spatial dialectic, and the uneven geographies of disruption in the extractive sector, further builds our relational perspective. Nature, resources, and contested struggles over environment, and political ecology, are therefore not just a patina or backdrop to bigger questions of state politics and economic development. Economy and society are inescapably established through nature and ecological processes, and local political ecologies are connected into a world ecology. The extractive industries can be a very useful lens through which to understand this ‘material world’. Material extraction, logistics and finance, are central modalities through which the global economy is organized in practice (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015; Ouma, 2016). It is this full sense of the socio-spatial dialectic and the co-production of nature and society that we draw inspiration from (Smith, 2008; Moore, 2017). While not claiming to represent a comprehensive picture, this collection of articles usefully broadens and deepens our understanding of recent and historical developments in the extractive industries in the Asia-Pacific. From examinations of regional mineral resource frontier relationships (Gale); the internationalisation of the Southern extractive sector (Oskarsson and Lahiri-Dutt); Indigenous resistance to colonialsettler zones of extraction (Lyons); and the globalization of mining regulation and governance (Boldbaatar et al.), the individual articles can be placed within the interplay of nature and resource frontiers, the modes and logics of state power and authority, and the ongoing restructuring of a global mining economy. Meanwhile, Bainton and Owen’s intervention returns us to the responsibilities of scholars, and scholar-activists, for grasping the full implications of researching the
participants and positions in the extractive industries. We hope this introduction has also pointed to some ways forward for framing new research on the extractive sector within an ambitious critical-historical and geographical conceptual canvas. References Afeef, K.F., 2006. The Politics of Extraterritorial Processing: Offshore Asylum Policies in Europe and the Pacific. Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper, 36. Oxford University, Oxford. Alden, C., Schoeman, M., 2013. South Africa in the company of giants: the search for leadership in a transforming global order. Int. Aff. 89 (1), 111–129. Bakker, K., Bridge, G., 2016. Material worlds? Resource geographies and the ‘matter of nature’. Prog. Hum. Geog. 30 (1), 5–27. Ballard, C., Banks, G., 2003. Resource wars: the anthropology of mining. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 32, 287–313. Bebbington, A., Bebbington, D., 2011. An Andean Avatar: post-neoliberal and neoliberal strategies for securing the unobtainable. New Polit. Econ. 43 (6), 1152–1162. Bridge, G., Jonas, A., 2002. Governing nature: the reregulation of resource access, production, and consumption. Environ. Plan. B Urban Anal. City Sci. 34, 759–766. Bridge, G., 2004. Mapping the Bonanza: geographies of mining investment in an ear of neoliberal reform. Prof. Geogr. 56 (3), 406–421. Bridge, G., 2010. Resource geographies I: making carbon economies, old and new. Prog. Hum. Geog. 35 (6), 820–834. Bridge, G., 2014. Resource geographies II: the resource-state nexus. Prog. Hum. Geog. 38 (1), 118–130. Carmody, P., 2017. The geopolitics and economics of BRICS’ resource and market access in Southern Africa: aiding development or creating dependency? J. S. Afr. Stud. 43 (5), 683–877. Gonzalez-Vincente, R., 2012. Mapping Chinese mining investment in Latin America: politics or market? China Q. 209, 35–58. Kirsch, S., 2014. Mining Capitalism: the Relationship Between Corporations and Their Critics. University of California Press, Berkeley. McMichael, P., 2013. Land grabbing as security mercantilism in international relations. Globalizations 10 (1), 47–64. Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., 2015. Operations of capital. S. Alt. Q. 114 (1), 1–9. Moore, J., 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. J. Peasant Stud. 44 (3), 594–630. Ouma, S., 2016. From financialization to operations of capital: historicising and disentangling the finance-farmland-nexus. Geoforum 73, 82–93. Sheppard, E., 2016. Limits to Globalization: Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Smith, N., 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
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