Can direct democracy deliver an alternative to extractivism? An essay on popular consultations

Between 2013 and 2018, ten different municipalities in Colombia held popular consultations in which people were asked to decide whether they wanted or not extractive industries in their territory. Promoted and articulated by environmental movements for the defence of water resources and local livelihoods, popular consultations led to surprising alliances of traditionally opposed actors, that found their interests temporarily aligned in opposition to resource extraction. In all of the ten popular consultations people voted massively against allowing the industry to enter. Through the defunding of the popular consultations and through a series of legal challenges, the government rushed to stop an additional 54 votes from happening that threatened to derail its finances and model of development. In this essay, I identify three main boundaries in the literature concerning popular consultations: between what counts as legal and legitimate, between the centre and the periphery as loci of political power, and between people and nature as bearers of rights. By providing an analysis of the absent elements of the political and academic discourse, I argue that popular consultations as spaces of experimental autonomous activity have the potential to engender alternatives to extractivist development. Hence, building on the notion of ‘resource sovereignty’ and contemporary discussions on autonomy as a prefigurative force, I reconfigure the three boundaries into a theoretical framework to guide research and political action for alternative post-extractivist futures.     

Finance is History!

A new sensitivity to the significance of historical experience has developed since the 2007 financial crisis. There are three possible ways of drawing on the past: as a source of advice on policies, of patterns of past evolution, of multiple possibilities. The best way of thinking about history is as a way of testing conventional hypotheses – particularly when those hypotheses are being used to create market opportunities (by making for false confidence; but also by engendering exaggerated despair).     

Using Information Technologies for Collaborative Learning in Geography: A case study from Canada

In this paper, we share our experiences in designing, offering and evaluating undergraduate assignments that used information technologies to help undergraduate students from different universities collaborate on resource and environmental management problems in Canada. We focus on conditions of collaborative learning and peer review, especially how our uses of information technology reduced or increased the challenges of creating the conditions necessary for collaboration. In particular, we consider our successes and setbacks regarding five challenges: (1) composing effective groups, (2) providing sufficient time, (3) encouraging individual accountability, (4) enhancing regional perspectives, and (5) incorporating peer review and reducing competitiveness.     

ENSO influence on Holocene Aboriginal populations in Queensland, Australia

In the Pacific region, the onset of modern El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity at approximately 5000 years ago may have played a significant role in the development of cultures in the Pacific basin. Within Australia, similar trends in population and resource use have been identified but largely ascribed to cultural changes. To test human responses to changing ENSO activity through the Holocene we analysed a comprehensive suite of 710 radiocarbon ages from archaeological sites in ENSO-sensitive Queensland. We observe a dramatic and sustained increase in landscape activity at inland sites from 4860 ± 15 years ago, statistically indistinguishable from the timing of the onset of modern ENSO activity. Subsequent changes in long-term activity directly impacted on human populations indicating that once established, ENSO maintained a continuous influence on disparate cultures throughout the Pacific basin.     

The evolving techniques of the social engineering of extraction: Introducing political (re)actions ‘from above’ in large-scale mining and energy projects

Ecological catastrophe and global inequality are pressing, yet socio-ecologically destructive natural resource extraction continues unabated. This special issue explores the strategies and tactics employed by large-scale mining and energy companies to render extraction socio-politically feasible in the face of multi-pronged opposition. Extraction, we contend, does not only need physical engineering, but requires social engineering as well. This entails shaping the behavior of people to ‘manage’ dissent and ‘manufacture’ consent. Situating the social engineering of extraction in key debates in the literature, this special issue introduction traces the evolution of its main technologies and techniques, related to colonialism, wars of decolonization, neoliberalism and the ‘green’ economy, respectively. We conclude by outlining a number of ways to advance research on the social engineering of extraction.