TY - JOUR
T1 - The commodification of nature and socio-environmental resistance in Ecuador
T2 - An inventory of accumulation by dispossession cases, 1980-2013
AU - Latorre, Sara
AU - Farrell, Katharine N.
AU - Martínez-Alier, Joan
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to Pep Serra Díaz, Xavier Pont and Paul Lorca for helping us with the GIS and to the anonymous reviewers of this text for very helpful comments. The first author acknowledges support from the European FP7 Projects ENGOV ( 266710 ) and from the Spanish MICINN Project ( CSO2010-21979 ). Finally, we wish to thank the EJOLT team for their support of this work. Errors, oversights and limitations remain, of course, our own responsibility.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2015/8/1
Y1 - 2015/8/1
N2 - This article aims to advance understanding of the relationship between social metabolism, the commodification of nature, local regime changes, and patterns of resistance to accumulation by environmental dispossession during the most recent phase of global capitalism. Ecuador is a resource-rich periphery country that has moved after 2007 from a neoliberal to a post-neoliberal policy regime. By analyzing 64 socio-environmental resistance cases in the period 1980-2013, we focus on the continuities and changes in the relationship between environmental dispossession and resistance under the two regimes. We find that while resistance to agri-food projects has diminished, having enjoyed some success under during the post-neoliberal regime, resistance to infrastructure and mineral extraction projects has remained steady, with the impacts from environmental dispossession remaining much like those observed before 2007. At the same time, major social investments financed through natural resource extraction and export, combined with the introduction of constraints on the media and public assembly, have created a political climate in which the resistance observed during the neo-liberal period is now a socially deviant behavior.
AB - This article aims to advance understanding of the relationship between social metabolism, the commodification of nature, local regime changes, and patterns of resistance to accumulation by environmental dispossession during the most recent phase of global capitalism. Ecuador is a resource-rich periphery country that has moved after 2007 from a neoliberal to a post-neoliberal policy regime. By analyzing 64 socio-environmental resistance cases in the period 1980-2013, we focus on the continuities and changes in the relationship between environmental dispossession and resistance under the two regimes. We find that while resistance to agri-food projects has diminished, having enjoyed some success under during the post-neoliberal regime, resistance to infrastructure and mineral extraction projects has remained steady, with the impacts from environmental dispossession remaining much like those observed before 2007. At the same time, major social investments financed through natural resource extraction and export, combined with the introduction of constraints on the media and public assembly, have created a political climate in which the resistance observed during the neo-liberal period is now a socially deviant behavior.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.04.016
DO - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.04.016
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84928159549
SN - 0921-8009
VL - 116
SP - 58
EP - 69
JO - Ecological Economics
JF - Ecological Economics
ER -
