Mining and Social Movements: Struggles over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

36 Pages Posted: 9 Sep 2008

See all articles by Anthony J. Bebbington

Anthony J. Bebbington

University of Colorado at Boulder - Department of Geography

Jeffrey Bury

University of California, Santa Cruz - Environmental Studies

Denise Humphreys Bebbington

University of Manchester - Institute for Development Policy and Management

Jeannet Lingan

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Juan Pablo Muñoz

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Martin Scurrah

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: April 2008

Abstract

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalised groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements' internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining), and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilisation and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.

Keywords: social movements, rural development, extractive industries, Peru, Ecuador

Suggested Citation

Bebbington, Anthony James and Bury, Jeffrey and Humphreys Bebbington, Denise and Lingan, Jeannet and Muñoz, Juan Pablo and Scurrah, Martin, Mining and Social Movements: Struggles over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes (April 2008). Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper No. 33, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1265582 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1265582

Anthony James Bebbington (Contact Author)

University of Colorado at Boulder - Department of Geography ( email )

Campus Box 260
Boulder, CO 80309-0260
United States

Jeffrey Bury

University of California, Santa Cruz - Environmental Studies ( email )

Santa Cruz, CA 95064
United States

Denise Humphreys Bebbington

University of Manchester - Institute for Development Policy and Management

Manchester
United Kingdom

Jeannet Lingan

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Juan Pablo Muñoz

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Martin Scurrah

affiliation not provided to SSRN ( email )

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
354
Abstract Views
2,569
Rank
131,946
PlumX Metrics