Intercultural Democracies: Power and Resource Flows

Claims from hitherto excluded indigenous groups have led to the rewriting of constitutions in Bolivia and Ecuador to recognize intercultural democracy. At the same time, indigenous environmental justice movements have increased their contestation of hydrocarbon extraction and recently mining due to their socio-political and ecological impacts. Analysis of these movements to date has focused on the consequences of conflicts, but less so on their socio-political and ecological drivers. While evidence has demonstrated the role of an increasing social metabolism referring to the manner in which human societies organize their growing exchanges of energy and materials with the environment as a driver of extraction, less attention has been paid to power relations and competing socio-political forces in postcolonial settings. However, these deeply influence the possibilities for a democratic control of the extractive sector, a crucial factor for achieving greater environmental justice and global sustainability. The proposed research aims to unpack the power relations that interact with biophysical (i.e. material and energy) flows of expanding resource extraction in the intercultural democracies of the Andes. Two mining-related conflicts in Cuenca Poop (Bolivia) and Intag (Ecuador), where indigenous organizations claim greater environmental justice specifically through self-determination as part of intercultural democracy will be analyzed, applying mixed methods: quantitative analysis of biophysical flows and qualitative analysis of interviews and data. It will potentially evidence how ecological and metabolic drivers enable/limit different groups democratic participation through multi-scale power relations around resource appropriation. Competing socio-political forces and resource flows that interact with these multi-scale power relations will be specified towards revealing how these power relations enable/affect indigenous groups democratic participation in particular, thereby enabling/limiting intercultural democracies. The political dimension of political ecology will be detailed through proposing a theoretical framework for postcolonial settings around categories of space, difference and power relations, which can also be applied to environmental justice studies. The understanding of intercultural democracies will be deepened by exploring social justice in postcolonial settings and intercultural democracies through analyzing difference (and related democratic pluralism), scale and political power relations. During my research stays at two host institutions, the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, I will acquire interdisciplinary competences in quantitative economic resource flow analysis and in postcolonial and intercultural geographies, and will contribute my knowledge in political science and Latin American studies. These capacities will be brought back to the University of Viennas Institute of Political Science, where I will actively contribute to scientific excellence at the Institute and with the International Political Ecology Research Group.

No additional funding sources recorded.