Social & Policy Sciences Public Lecture by Professor Anthony Bebbington

Resource extraction, climate change and the right to live well: long and short routes to policy change

Abstract: Natural resource extraction has returned with a vengeance: as a model of development, as illicit activity, and as survival strategy. Efforts to promote combined investment in extractive industry, large scale infrastructure and the expansion of the agricultural frontier seem increasingly ubiquitous. Cast as essential for the generation of government revenue, accessibility, energy provision, and employment, this emphasis on resource extraction raises serious challenges for climate change, biodiversity and community rights, not least through its impacts on land cover change and water resources. Effective responses to these challenges are essential if there is to be any chance that extractivism might be at least partially combined with an expansion of the right to live well. Potentially fruitful responses can be found at the interface of social mobilization and policy innovation within large-scale bureaucracies, though the constraints to change are not to be underestimated.

Biography: Anthony Bebbington is the Higgins Professor of Environment and Society at Clark University’s Graduate School of Geography. He is also a Research Associate of the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Peru and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2014-2015). He has also been a Professorial Research Fellow of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (2007-2010), and has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, the Free University and Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the Fulbright Commission, and the Inter-American Foundation. Tony’s work addresses the political ecology of rural change with a particular focus on extractive industries and socio-environmental conflicts, social movements, indigenous organizations, and livelihoods. He has worked throughout South and Central America, though primarily in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and more recently in El Salvador.

Professor Bebbington’s appointment is funded by the International Relations Office’s Global Chair Scheme, a flagship programme designed to attract distinguished, globally renowned scholars to engage in high-profile research activities at Bath.

The lecture will start at 5.15pm and finish at approximately 6.30pm. There will then be a welcome reception for Professor Bebbington after the lecture which will be held in the foyer of 5 West where a selection of canapés wine and soft drinks will be served.