Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia
Author: Flora Lu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137533625

This book addresses the political ecology of the Ecuadorian petro-state since the turn of the century and contextualizes state-civil society relations in contemporary Ecuador to produce an analysis of oil and Revolution in twenty-first century Latin America. Ecuador’s recent history is marked by changes in state-citizen relations: the election of political firebrand, Rafael Correa; a new constitution recognizing the value of pluriculturality and nature’s rights; and new rules for distributing state oil revenues. One of the most emblematic projects at this time is the Correa administration’s Revolución Ciudadana, an oil-funded project of social investment and infrastructural development that claims to blaze a responsible and responsive path towards wellbeing for all Ecuadorians. The contributors to this book examine the key interventions of the recent political revolution—the investment of oil revenues into public works in Amazonia and across Ecuador; an initiative to keep oil underground; and the protection of the country’s most marginalized peoples—to illustrate how new forms of citizenship are required and forged. Through a focus on Amazonia and the Waorani, this book analyzes the burdens and opportunities created by oil-financed social and environmental change, and how these alter life in Amazonian extraction sites and across Ecuador.

Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia
Author: Flora Lu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137533625

This book addresses the political ecology of the Ecuadorian petro-state since the turn of the century and contextualizes state-civil society relations in contemporary Ecuador to produce an analysis of oil and Revolution in twenty-first century Latin America. Ecuador’s recent history is marked by changes in state-citizen relations: the election of political firebrand, Rafael Correa; a new constitution recognizing the value of pluriculturality and nature’s rights; and new rules for distributing state oil revenues. One of the most emblematic projects at this time is the Correa administration’s Revolución Ciudadana, an oil-funded project of social investment and infrastructural development that claims to blaze a responsible and responsive path towards wellbeing for all Ecuadorians. The contributors to this book examine the key interventions of the recent political revolution—the investment of oil revenues into public works in Amazonia and across Ecuador; an initiative to keep oil underground; and the protection of the country’s most marginalized peoples—to illustrate how new forms of citizenship are required and forged. Through a focus on Amazonia and the Waorani, this book analyzes the burdens and opportunities created by oil-financed social and environmental change, and how these alter life in Amazonian extraction sites and across Ecuador.

Hydrosocial Territories and Water Equity

Hydrosocial Territories and Water Equity
Author: Rutgerd Boelens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1351973649

Bringing together a multidisciplinary set of scholars and diverse case studies from across the globe, this book explores the management, governance, and understandings around water, a key element in the assemblage of hydrosocial territories. Hydrosocial territories are spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water. Territorial politics finds expression in encounters of diverse actors with divergent spatial and political–geographical interests; as a result, water (in)justice and (in)equity are embedded in these socio-ecological contexts. The territory-building projections and strategies compete, superimpose and align to strengthen specific water-control claims of various interests. As a result, actors continuously recompose the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, and political–economic relationships. Using a political ecology focus, the different contributions to this book explore territorial struggles, demonstrating that these contestations are not merely skirmishes over natural resources, but battles over meaning, norms, knowledge, identity, authority and discourses. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Water International.

Ecological Nostalgias

Ecological Nostalgias
Author: Olivia Angé
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789208947

Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.

The Social Lives of Land

The Social Lives of Land
Author: Michael Goldman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2024-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501771817

From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession. Contributors: Kati Álvarez, Clint Carroll, Flora Lu, Richard Mbunda, Gregg Mitman, Paul Nadasdy, Robert Nichols, Andrew Ofstehage, Laura Schoenberger, Kirsteen Shields, Emmanuel Sulle, Erik Swyngedouw, Gabriela Valdivia, Katherine Verdery, Callum Ward, Ciara Wirth, Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo

Reckoning with Harm

Reckoning with Harm
Author: Amelia M. Fiske
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1477327800

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity. Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

Ethnographic Constructions of Indigenous Others

Ethnographic Constructions of Indigenous Others
Author: George Byrne
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 104001819X

This book examines the ways in which indigeneity interacts with climate change politics at multiple levels and at the same time offers a self-critical reflection on the role of ethnographic research (and researchers) in this process. Through a multi-sited ethnography, it shows how indigeneity and climate change mitigation are at this point so intensely intertwined that one cannot be clearly understood without considering the other. While indigenous identities have been (re)defined in relation to climate change, it argues that Indigenous Peoples continue to subvert pervasive notions of the nature/culture dichotomy and disrupt our understanding of what it means to be human in relation to nature. It encourages students and researchers in anthropology, international development, and other related fields to engage in more meaningful reflection on the epistemic shortcomings of “the West”, including in our own research, and to acknowledge the ongoing role of power, coloniality, extractivism, and whiteness in climate change discourses.

Oil

Oil
Author: Gavin Bridge
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2017-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509511768

Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power, and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil-rich countries. The politics of oil are now at a turning point, and its future will not be like its past. In this in-depth primer to one of the world’s most significant industries, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary political economy of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by global shifts in demand toward Asia, growing reliance on unconventional reserves, international commitments to reduce carbon emissions, a growing campaign for fossil fuel divestment, and violent political struggles in many producer states. As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Highlighting the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the efforts of firms and states to craft new institutions, this fully updated second edition identifies the challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, decarbonize energy systems, and improve governance in oil-producing countries.

Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era

Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era
Author: James McCarthy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000606554

This volume explores the many and deep connections between the widespread rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics in recent years, and the domain of environmental politics and governance – how environments are known, valued, and managed; for whose benefit; and with what outcomes. The volume is explicitly international in scope and comparative in design, emphasizing both the differences and commonalties to be seen among contemporary authoritarian and populist political formations and their relations to environmental governance. Prominent themes include the historical roots of and precedents for environmental governance in authoritarian and populist contexts; the relationships between populism and authoritarianism and extractivism and resource nationalism; environmental politics as an arena for questions of security and citizenship; racialization and environmental politics; the politics of environmental science and knowledge; and progressive political alternatives. In each domain, using rich case studies, contributors analyse what differences it makes when environmental governance takes place in authoritarian and populist political contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Between the Forest and the Road

Between the Forest and the Road
Author: Andrea Bravo Díaz
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180539357X

During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations. For the Waorani living along the oil roads, living well has taken many pathways. Notably, they have developed new spatial organizations as they move between several houses, and navigate between the economy of the market and the economy of the forest.