In this talk we lay the theoretical groundwork for a future collaborative project between researchers based in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and the UK addressing Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World. Our point of departure is the how the move towards new green technologies to tackle climate change is pushing the prices of metals such as copper, lithium and nickel far above their long-term levels, with resource-abundant countries in Latin America yet again finding themselves along emergent extractive frontiers. We contend that framing extractive-led development models as the road to recovery from COVID-19 in Latin America not only ignores their associated vulnerabilities, such as increased inequalities, institutional weaknesses, and political instability. It also misses the opportunity to use the COVID-19 crisis as an inflection point to develop and propose radical policy changes to confront the accelerating climate crisis.

This is the central aim of our new research project. Here, we outline the limitations of the mainstream institutional and resource curse literatures and propose an alternative place-based political economy approach. We will use this to focus on three interconnected dimensions of natural resource governance: international markets for commodities; national-level public sector capacities to manage natural resources; and local practices of social and environmental development. This will enable us to explore how place-based political settlements between different elite and local groups are constructed, evolve over time and shape natural resource governance across different spatial scales, and to develop alternative futures to capital-driven natural resource extraction.

Dr Angus McNelly obtained his PhD in Politics and International Relations from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in 2019. His PhD dissertation examined the experiences of the Left in power of urban working-class groups in Bolivia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. His research agenda can be divided into three intertwined strands investigating: (1) development at capitalism’s peripheries; (2) the political economy of Latin America; and (3) infrastructure, natural resource governance and energy transitions.

Dr Tobias Franz is a Lecturer in Economics and the Programme convenor for the MSc Political Economy of Development. His main interests are the analysis of power balances, natural resource governance, institutional structures at local, national and regional levels, and multidisciplinary theoretical debates on productivity growth and development. His main area focus is on Latin America.

A link to the live event will be emailed to all participants on the morning of 25th May 2022.

This event is part of the Centre for Applied Sociology Seminar Series: Hostile Environments.

Find out more about the Centre for Applied Sociology Research here.