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This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of discussions in the preceding chapters. The first part of the book analyzed in a small-scale model the interrelation between economic growth, the environment, and welfare of a country. The second part of the book studied the interaction of growth and global warming. The third part was concerned with economic growth and renewable and nonrenewable resources as well as with policies to prevent overextraction of those resources.

This chapter analyses the results of the scenario simulations delivered by the GINFORS model regarding the economic and environmental impact of an ETR implemented in Europe on the rest of the world. We analyse the development of European trade relations with other world regions in order to investigate changes in competitiveness of different European industries on global markets. The economic consequences (in terms of economic growth, investment, international trade, etc.) of the implementation of an ETR in Europe for other world regions, divided into three country groups (other OECD countries; emerging/anchor countries; rest of the world) are described. The chapter also provides a quantitative analysis of changing global patterns in natural resource extraction, energy use, and CO₂ emissions in all world regions due to the implementation of a European ETR.

This chapter examines how natural resource extraction and armed violence cause social and environmental harm. It first considers armed violence as one of several overlapping and mutually reinforcing elite-controlled mechanisms that enable governments and corporations to control or gain disproportionate access to the natural resource wealth of developing nations. It then shows how armed violence is linked to natural resource extraction in many parts of the world by highlighting ten minerals that contribute to the functioning of the U.S. economy and/or military. It also presents a set of short case studies to illustrate the violent activities associated with the extraction of manganese and copper and goes on to discuss how armed violence supported the activities of the world's three largest mining companies: Rio Tinto, CVRD/Vale, and BHP Billiton. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how armed violence works in conjunction with other elite-controlled organizations and mechanisms by focusing on several mechanisms employed by the World Bank to promote natural resource extraction in Africa.

This chapter exemplifies the problem of resource regulation by studying the tax rate as regulatory instrument. It presents a prototype intertemporal model of resource extraction with three state variables and one control variable. The three state variables are the stock of the resource, the capacity of the extractive industry, and its evolution of debt. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 16.2 lays out a three-dimensional model of resource exploitation that originates in Clark's contribution. Section 16.3 demonstrates, by employing a dynamic programming algorithm, that cyclical trajectories remain preserved even if a dynamic equation for the evolution of debt is added to the dynamics. Section 16.4 provides some concluding remarks.

This chapter argues that the parallel processes of political centralization and privileging the extraction of natural resources to finance a stronger state that have taken place during the government of President Rafael Correa (2007-) are leading to a backlash against previously gained indigenous rights in Ecuador. This backlash is made possible by a preceding weakening of the indigenous movement through neo-liberal practices of co-optation. Both, disaffected mestizos and indigenous grassroots that did not see enough change in the previous period have been drawn to Correa’s project. Because collective autonomy is perceived as a threat to an increasingly centralized and authoritarian state and to its ability to use natural resource extraction from indigenous territories to finance itself, individual rights via anti-discrimination laws are being privileged over collective autonomy. However, without strong social movements and collective rights, it is unlikely that even the individual rights of marginalized people will be respected.

In this chapter we analyze data from our original nationwide survey in Ecuador and find that respondents do not express concern for the environment in accordance with predictions of post-materialist norms. In fact, our evidence indicates that the poor who live off the land—those on the front lines of experiencing environmental degradation as a result of oil and mineral extraction—have even stronger perceptions of the importance of environmental problems. This chapter offers the core argument from which succeeding chapters part. After operationalizing our hypotheses and discussing our statistical findings, we utilize extensive interviews with leaders to further illustrate how vulnerability and extraction affect environmental attitudes.

This chapter presents a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of fossil fuel extraction when a backstop technology is available. We investigate the possibility of a Green-Paradox outcome as a result of technological progress of a backstop technology. In our chapter, we identify a new channel: technological progress influences the extraction path indirectly by a change in the equilibrium interest rate. This change induces a change in the time path of extraction in the opposite direction. We show that the indirect effect can be such strong that first-period or even aggregate extraction levels rise with technological progress.

Chapter 6 focuses on polycentric pluralism, mostly at the international and national levels, sidelining vulnerability as a principal cause of environmental attitudes. After briefly introducing rationales behind the interaction between international and domestic policy positions, we show that while there is consensus among Ecuadorians that foreign extractive interests are threats to the Amazon, Ecuadorians are divided along party lines regarding the government’s pursuit of extraction, illustrating the political—rather than cultural—nature of the extractive debate in Ecuador. The upshot is that the Correa administration tried but failed to maintain both its international and domestic images as an environmental force, funding discretionary programs (including “green” ones) through oil drilling. Furthermore, consistent with our argument that polycentric pluralism has been the form that interest articulation takes, variations in approval of policies are more readily explained by cleavages defined by vulnerability and political party affiliation rather than by ethnic identity.

Extending the argument that individual political interests overrule structural identities based on ethnicities or social values, we argue in chapter 3 that mobilization against extraction has emerged because Ecuador’s government exploits institutional mechanisms meant to protect the environment to pursue extractive populism and maintain power. We define populism as putting short-term interests such as re-election and the provision of patronage and other goods ahead of long-term interests like balancing budgets and cleaning the environment after extractive projects generate revenue. Populist leaders like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa sought both to “speak for nature” as a leftist and pro-indigenous leader, while also needing to finance social programs through extractive royalties. Specifically, we show that the mechanism of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC, also referred to as consulta previa, prior consultation, or CP), which was designed to protect indigenous communities from unwanted extraction by requiring their explicit permission for extractive activities, has become a political tool of the Ecuadorian government. As such, the factors that influence public support for prior consultation are largely political, and individuals who hope to protect the environment are less supportive of the process. Prior consultation is neither explicitly individual nor explicitly collective, and thus we consider it as an individual practice and analyze survey findings, and as an interest group process, for which we evaluate group decisions relating to prior consultation.

This chapter introduces the concepts employed in this book. States are not created at a single specific instant and do not remain static thereafter; they change, adapting to different circumstances. They have to continually balance the three basic functions of security, welfare, and representation; they need resources and legitimacy to do so, and taxation is a key element in this. However, in the Middle East, states have relied not on taxation to accumulate capital, but rather on rents. The interplay of rentierism with traditional patterns of authority (tribal, sectarian, and religious) and the means of exercising violence (internally and externally) has thereby greatly influenced the process of state making.

Our conclusion strives to reconcile environmentalism as studied via survey responses with environmentalism as studied via social movements. We conclude that these two approaches may seem to yield different results to the question of Who Speaks for Nature? However, we argue, subject to further research, that movement leaders’ abstract and symbolic appeals may help improve bargaining positions to attain the concrete objectives individuals actually care about most. More broadly, we conclude with a summation of extensive evidence presented, that indigenous communities and other victims of some of extractivism’s excesses are best served by polycentric pluralist interest articulation, where individual interests can aggregate into a range of organizations and networks, rather than multiculturalism, where the interests represented are primordial, predictable, and static.

Chapter three focuses more directly on literary works that illuminate open, promising futures in relation to the transnational forces that shape life in the ocean. New Zealand poets Hone Tuwhare, Cilla McQueen, and Ian Wedde critically explore the relationships of human and nonhuman beings across long distances, including over national borders, in processes of capitalist resource extraction and production. They connect hope with concern for the exuberant differences that characterize the life of the ocean but also with the ability to speak regarding people, places, beings, and institutions in spaces that stretch well into and beyond the ocean. Yet their works are almost always conversational in form, speaking with rather than simply about others. They associate hope with differences as well as with the conversations that are enlivened by such differences.

This chapter illuminates how the production of vulnerability proceeds through—and is supported by—interconnected economic development and resource use activities across city and regional scales. It explores the connection between lucrative resource extraction, realty speculation, reforestation, and home construction activities in the Tunnel Fire area. These Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire activities and resulting forms of vulnerability are linked to the development of the San Francisco Bay Area. The historically resource-rich Oakland Hills “countryside” played a crucial role in shaping and facilitating San Francisco's post-Gold Rush economic ascendance. These resource-provisioning activities generated roadways that several decades later fell under the speculative eye of housing developers in search of suburban homes and vacation retreats for the region's new elite. This transition from resource extraction to real estate speculation was instantiated in the landscape, as several logging paths in Oakland became arterial roads populated by municipal infrastructure, flammable tree cover, and eventually a vast collection of new home developments in high fire risk areas.

This short epilogue restates and emphasizes the importance of an anthropological approach to contested presence in state-led development efforts with reference to the post-protest Olympic campaigns in Rebgong, as well as the renewed military crackdown on Tibetans’ self-immolation protests, in the summer of 2008 and beyond. The author does this by looking at Rebgong Tibetans’ counter-uses of the new Drolma Square in front of Rongbo Monastery that was planned and built in 2006 by the prefecture party secretary to attract tourists. Tibetans however transformed it into a pilgrimage site, which set the stage for its most tragic transformation in 2012, as the site of Tibetans’ self-immolation protests in the wake of new state-led efforts at cultural and linguistic repression, land expropriation and resource extraction.

This concluding chapter returns to the arguments presented in the previous chapters and emphasizes that how states pay for long wars provides leaders with opportunities to expand or contract the state's economy and shape society's relationship to the war effort. These opportunities, however, are shaped by the state's resource extraction capacity, location of war inputs, and the dynamics of the war. The chapter places this study of war finance into the expanding body of work that reflects the tenants of neoclassical realism, arguing that the characteristics of war—that is, duration or intensity—or how a war unfolds as well as the timing of battlefield successes—shapes the preferences of political actors as well as state capacity.

Mining companies have developed various tactics to overcome local opposition, but also to assert a sense of “belonging” in a contentious social landscape. They invoke alluring narratives about jobs, small-town neighborliness, corporate citizenship and responsibility, Wisconsin's supposed mining tradition, the role of resource extraction in modern civilization, and environmental sustainability

The aim of this chapter is to understand the motives behind the contracting problem faced by the government, in the process attempting to rationalize the choices of instruments that are used in practice and finding areas of improvement in the “typical” contract. The objective is to indicate how some elements of the contract can be introduced in the discussion in order to reduce the incentives to renegotiate, and to reduce their disruptions. The chapter also examines the merits of two methods of tax remittance common to resource extraction contracts: income taxes and revenue-proportional royalty payments. In particular, the chapter investigates the incentives created by these two methods of tax remittance, emphasizing the trade-off between efficient incentives and the risk of expropriation.

This chapter moves further upriver to one of the poorest villages in the valley, an important rival community to Kharnak village (the focus of Chapter 3). The chapter begins with an account of the author’s “capture” by the village as a donor supporting the repair of their new primary school’s roof. It then tells the story of the village’s conflictual move from their historical location on a mountain peak down to the valley floor and new highway. The author analyzes interactions around village elders’ petition to the local state, as well as a video they made that touts and contextualizes their new Buddhist temple on the valley floor as the abode of a young and rising, charismatic incarnate lama. In the context of school consolidation and state-led resource extraction in the valley, the author considers the historical narratives in the petition and video to be important parts of villagers’ counter-development efforts as they worked to assert the presence of their community in the face of its administrative erasure.