Recent years have seen increasingly aggressive expansion of the extractive economy in the Andean- Amazonian region, as both hard-rock mining and hydrocarbon frontiers move into new territories and deepen their presence in old ones. In ways reminiscent of the film Avatar, this expansion drives...

This paper addresses institutional and political relationships that govern the interactions between natural resource extraction, economy and society with a focus on the mining and hydrocarbon sectors. These relationships help define the implications of resource extraction for democracy and the...

The last decade and a half has witnessed a dramatic growth in mining activity in many developing countries. This paper reviews these recent trends and describes the debates and conflicts they have triggered. We review evidence regarding debates on the resource curse and the possibility of an...

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...