Undermining Resistance

Why and how do people affected by mining embrace or resist mining? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are global private standards for social and environmental impacts of mining proliferating so quickly? Have multinational mining corporations fully shifted to participation as a strategy to undermine resistance? This book introduces answers these questions and more by developing an original political economy approach which It places company-community conflict in the context of shifting global crises in the social and environmental governance of mining. The author draws on new evidence from three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participatory mechanisms continuously reshape and are reshaped by community-corporate conflict. Findings highlight feedback between local social relations, conflict, transnational activism, crises of legitimacy and global governance.Extractive accumulation is the collection of strategies and relationships at local, national and global scales that enable corporations to secure natural resources and profit from their extraction within global capitalist economies. Corporate social responsibility, community development, 'gender-mainstreaming' and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing strategies. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation. Combining the 'modes of participation' approach with social reproduction theory and Gramscian political economy, the book provides a fresh look at the institutions and ideologies shaping corporate management of social and environmental conflicts.