Helios 5: Populist Moments and Extractivist States with Nicholas Carby-Denning, Teresa Kramarz, and Donald Kingsbury

Nicholas Carby-Denning is Assistant Professor on the Isabel Hamilton Benham Professorship in International Affairs in the International Studies Department at Bryn Mawr College. Teresa Kramarz is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment. Donald Kingsbury is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

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In late 2022, Nicholas Carby-Denning sat down to talk with Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury about their recent book, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Equador: The People's Oil? Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Nicholas Carby-Denning: You write that the seeds of the book grew out of your interest in what you call the “afterlives” of the failed Yasuní-ITT initiative. Can you briefly describe the initiative, what you were hoping to find, and how this case fits into your broader research agenda?‍

Donald Kingsbury: What drew me to the Yasuní-ITT initiative was that it was a novel attempt at supply-side decarbonization. It was a way to address the climate crisis that didn't focus on techno-utopian fixes, like putting a Tesla in every garage. Instead, it proposed to cut the supply of oil and fossil fuels that produce climate change. The other part that really drew me to it was I saw it as a kind of reassessment and maybe an upending of conventional North-South relations, where Ecuador and the then recently elected President Rafael Correa called the international community on essentially 30 years of bluffing and talking about the Amazon as the lungs of the planet. The initiative, drawing from 20 years of (local) activist attempts to protect the Amazon, essentially says: “We will save the Amazon,” or “We won't exploit it for the resources that we need from a human development standpoint if you pay us for the value of the resources we would have exploited.” Put another way, if the international community ponies about $3.6 billion, which is roughly half the value projected into 2007 dollars of the oil underneath the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil blocks for the Yasuní National Park, then Ecuador would use that money to address its 70% rural poverty rates, 50% urban poverty rates, rampant inequality, lacking infrastructure, underdevelopment, literacy, you name it. They would use this money for vital human development needs in exchange for leaving the oil in the ground.

Looking more into Yasuní, I was struck not only by the failure but also by how it became a symbol for various movements and for different ways of looking at the relationship between state, society, and nature in Ecuador. That's why we talk about afterlives a lot more than we talk about failure. Yasuní becomes a moving signifier that animates ecological movements but also more conventional socio-political movements trying to address how the state relates to its populace and how it relates to the landscapes that ostensibly have rights in a country like Ecuador.

Teresa Kramarz: I found that the way Yasuní was getting studied said more about the international community and scholars than it said about the initiative itself. Often, we flatten reality because we're in the business of creating categories that we can study out of a very complex social world. I was interested in how Ecuadorian society made sense of this initiative before, during, and after Correa. From the academic community, the initiative incited a lot of effervescence on what this could mean for a post-Kyoto world and the potential of a “made in South America” or “made in the Global South” approach to climate change mitigation. As a result, when it failed or looked like it wasn’t going to move forward as planned, much of the scholarship focused on why it failed. Who was to blame? Correa often figured in those accounts as the populist who couldn't be trusted, which is a popular characterization of South American presidents.

‍Nicholas: Might you say more about what the “effervescence” of the academic community may have occluded and why this story is about more than simply ascribing blame to Correa for being a “populist who couldn't be trusted.”‍

Teresa: This initiative grew not out of Correa but out of a civil society movement, and many of these people were brought into Correa’s administration. National NGOs were intellectual authors of the initiative, although they weren't necessarily in conversation with many other sectors of Ecuadorian society, including those who might be most closely affected by the initiative. But I think it was exciting that you had this very novel financial mechanism to leave oil underground and seek compensation for future sustainable development projects. It was a very different approach to decarbonization at a time when multilateralism was failing. There was a vacuum in the international arena, and a small and poor OPEC member–an oil-producing country–was implementing a new strategy. So, it had all the makings of exciting stuff. I was certainly very excited about it myself, but parking it there as a mode of studying the Yasuní initiative is not enough. Understanding what people saw in Yasuni, what were the different visions and metaphors, and yes, why it failed – beyond the popular explanation of Correismo - and what it meant for different sectors of society -that’s the gap that we tried to fill, the interesting question that we felt was not getting asked.

Donald: Yasuní, depending on your vantage point (government, Amazonian civil society, urban Civil society, International NGOs, business, etc.), meant something completely different. It was still a mobilizing kind of cinching point that, as a landscape and as a moment in political time, articulated many different hopes, anxieties, and aspirations about development, conservation, climate change, the unequal relationship between sovereign nations in the North, and South, the unequal relationship between Ecuador and its citizenry. The initiative also shifted meaning depending on juridical and geopolitical contexts. For example, the 2009 Constitution famously endowed the natural world with its own legal rights. It is not the right of citizens to have an x or y relationship with nature, be it exploitation or conservation, but rights as a political subject itself. Leaving oil in the ground thus can be seen as a way of protecting nature’s right to exist. But, the proposal also came at a time of a changing geopolitical landscape between US and North Atlantic domination and the increasing role of the Chinese. In this context, the initiative posed new questions about the Ecuadorian state’s role in mediating the relationship between its citizens, which in a way now included nature itself, to foreign capital. Yasuní becomes this point where all of these different stakeholders see something different that could tell us not only what was happening in Ecuador during those five years but also how socio-environmental politics in Ecuador and beyond had played out since.

Nicholas: Your book is titled Populist Moments and Extractivist States: The People’s Oil? What is the key argument of the book? How would you define “Populist Moments” and “Extractivist States,” and how are they related?

‍Donald: We were unsatisfied with how populism – especially in political science – has become a lazy explain-all when discussing the early 21^st century in Latin America. It strikes us as willfully naïve to place all blame (or, obversely, praise) on a figure like Correa in Ecuador or Chávez in Venezuela. We don’t deny that both figures are historically important, even if they are epoch-defining. However, as regards the politics of resource extraction, the continuities across regime types and historical contexts all too often get overlooked in favor of Great Man theories of the political. In both the case of Venezuela and Ecuador, the oil sector has become a state within a state. Civilian, military, left, and right governments have all adapted themselves to this extractive state form, which ascribes to a business model in its relations to the population rather than a civic one. Chávez and Correa may have spent a greater share of oil revenues on social needs than others, but this is a question of degree rather than type. The particularities of the global oil industry, furthermore, put hard constraints on the potential venues and extent for citizen engagement. It is by its nature opaque, verticalist, and lends itself to clientelism over participation. As a result, extractivist states can give rise to what we call populist moments – moments because they are interruptions, perfectly rational interruptions, in an elitist and exclusionary model of state-society-nature relations.

Nicholas: Why engage “populism” as a central concept of the book if you are critical of its use? Do you see any purchase in populism as an analytical framework, perhaps in its relation to extractive states and extractivism?

Donald: I think most studies about populism miss or obfuscate what's actually interesting about what's happening here, which we characterize as a populist moment. Empirically speaking, we can say with absolute certainty that Correa did not create the conditions that produced his presidency, nor did he create or author really interesting initiatives like Yasuní ITT. As social movements, including Acción Ecológica and the National Indigenous Confederation of Ecuador, were literally overthrowing governments in the 1990s, Correa was teaching economics at the most prestigious university in Ecuador. He recognized and exploited a political opportunity – much more of an entrepreneur than an activist – which is why we talk about populist moments. What we're interested in are all the social forces that lead to a radical rupture, an opening of the possibility of writing the rules of engagement of politics.

So, we engage with populism in part because of the narrow academic interest in doing so. It's part of the terrain, especially as social scientists. But we also engage with it in order to point out that the foibles of Correa or Chavez are not the point. What's important is the kind of ruptures with an established, exclusionary status quo that produce possibilities for things like the Yasuní initiative. Extractive states are an example of exclusionary political orders, which exist not primarily to fulfill some kind of contrived function, like the liberal social contract, but rather to facilitate the extraction of natural resources from the territory that it controls and to ship those resources out of the country, usually to the Global North but also increasingly towards China. There might be other details, but the primary function, the reason for existence, is to facilitate the export of nature, to paraphrase Venezuelan Anthropologist Fernando Coronil. A state that operates in this kind of mediating export role abides by different logics than those of democratic consultation, accountability, and procedure. It's a businessman, it's a negotiator, and you can't have, according to the logic of the market, a huge and open democratic table to debate every decision or contract. What the international financial and extractive industries want is a set of transparent, predictable agreements that guarantee the supply of the goods they're purchasing-this is not democratic. This is a usually opaque, usually very technocratic set of constraints that really exclude the vast majority of the population. When discontent with the results of this order boils over, that's when you get these populist moments or ruptures that make everything open for revision.

Teresa: Engaging with the notion of populists is also engaging with this idea of an electorate that has been duped. But we also want to point out what is the rational consensus of a population that is not finding accountability in the traditional democratic institutions that are supposed to produce answerability and channels of redress. What does a polity do when it does not have a judiciary, legislative, or executive branch that are responsive in the way that a liberal democratic order is supposed to be for your well-being, for your benefit sharing, for your access to justice? From that perspective, it is not irrational to vote for the individual rather than the institutions. So, when someone comes and says, I will answer to you, not these people in agencies, not these judges that have been manipulated, not these legislators. But you and I, you and I will have a contract. That's not irrational for me to put my chips on that because everything else has shown persistent failures of accountability. Our purpose in engaging with a populist literature is also meant to push back on the idea that populations are manipulated and duped by intellectually crafty individuals who can just finesse the dumb masses into acceptance.

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Nicholas: Your book is compelling because it engages a few realities that readers may find paradoxical. First is the question of why a petro-state would adopt an anti-extractivist environmentalist politics. Second, against the expectations of the literature on populism, you argue that far from a populace being duped, it's logical that a society suffering exclusions, violence, and a lack of accountability in the extractive state to be drawn to a populist political agenda. Third, there’s the tension between the pro-environment rhetoric of a populist administration and the political reality that involves the large-scale expansion of an extractive industry that has been called progressive neo-extractivism (perhaps because initiatives like Yasuní ITT provide cover not to question extraction elsewhere). Each of these situations on their own might seem paradoxical to readers, but they seem to argue that they are, in fact, reasonable and related to each other. Finally, we have talked mostly about Ecuador, but your book does interesting work comparing the situations in Venezuela and Ecuador, two countries with distinct histories of extraction. In your final chapter, you examine how Ecuadorians, who have a much more recent history with oil extraction than Venezuela, supported ITT because they recognized that they're not getting the benefits from their petrostate. Can you speak to some of the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes you encountered?

Donald: In the book, we avoid talking about Venezuela and Ecuador through the conventional format that you often find in political science and social sciences, where you explicitly compare factor A and factor B and then produce a neat report that summarizes how each compared to some other metric. Rather than conventional case studies, we emphasize the fact that they are different countries with different histories and different experiences with extraction. Venezuela is for many people, the prototypical petrostate. It becomes a state that, in the words of some Venezuelan commentators, is less a country than a flag attached to an oil rig. By the 1930s, you've already got key figures and influential folks in government saying oil is harmful for our economy, our culture, and our development. We need to sow the oil into something else so that we're no longer dependent because, by the 1930s, Venezuela had already been through a boom and bust cycle. That brings me to say that it's not a paradox that people living in an extractive state would support a project to no longer be an extractive state and instead to keep oil in the ground. There are a few different reasons: 1. When the oil industry collapsed in Venezuela, people couldn't feed their kids. The lights didn't turn on. The water stopped running. Similarly, when Chevron moved into the Amazon in Ecuador, with a carte blanche from the national government in the 1970s, communities were inundated with oil spills because there was no regulation. Accountability here was not a matter of “Oh, what do we do when we get to the polls?” Instead, it's what happens when an oil company covers your home and your field in oil and then leaves. That's the kind of accountability we're talking about here. So, I don't think it's a paradox that people would say “we no longer want to be so reliant on oil that we eat” or “don't eat based on the capriciousness of the international market.” At the same time, people gotta feed their kids, right? If oil is the only thing that they can sell, they're going to sell it. Again, it's not a paradox. It's an impossible situation that defines extractivism.

Teresa: But it is a paradox for neoliberal economists. So again, it depends on your framing. For that kind of economic calculation, it made no sense. Certain informants would affirm this, that it makes no sense to have a country like Ecuador that is so dependent on oil to stop producing oil. Justin Trudeau said the same about Canada, so it’s not just a Global South problem. It's a commodity dependence problem.

I get where you're coming from in asking the question. If you’re sitting on a pile of resources in a country where there's a lot of need, the most rational thing seems to be to exploit it. But for those people who have actually experienced the resource curse and who see the distribution of benefits after that exploitation takes place time and again, it's also rational to say, if we leave this underground, then we might have another shot at getting at some benefits through an international organization that is going to bring some development benefits to our community. There’s rationality to go around, but it depends on your framing and assumptions.

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Nicholas: I would be interested to hear more about your theorization of “Extractive States.” What do you mean by this term? Specifically, how might you be theorizing “extractive states” in a way that is distinct from the term extractivismo as used by Latin American academics and social movements?

Teresa: One dimension is the narrow menu of options available to govern. I just came back from Argentina where I did fieldwork on lithium, one of the critical metals required for the renewable energy transition. And it's still striking to me seeing what a limited policy space exists in extractive states for decision making, both financially and institutionally. In Ecuador, shortly before Lenin Moreno took office, most of the oil revenue was already spoken for. So, in terms of state revenue, you’ve only got little bits of money on the margins to do something. Being a node in a much larger network of extractive relationships and “sacrificial orders,” as Michael Barnett calls them, reveals some of the nested dimensions of extractive states. Narrowing explanations to the populists in power in Ecuador or Venezuela misses seeing the ways in which extractive states are inside a network of dependencies where it matters less what is the regime type or who is the government in power.

Donald: Populism, as it's often bandied about, is, I think, an insufficient attempt to pinpoint where power is. It’s much more diffuse, it's much more structural, it's much more historically rooted. I also think, as Teresa mentions there, it's one of the things we saw in the case of Yasuní. While there was this radical rupture in the early days of the Correa administration—or a rupture that produced the possibility for the Correa administration—you always had the already established institutions and individuals of the petrostate, of the extractive state, ready to jump in the second any alternative proposal faltered. That's precisely what happened in the case of Yasuní. Correa was faced with a difficult situation. On the one hand, he'd promised a novel supply-side decarbonization program that would not only produce development funds but also raise Ecuador’s stature in the international arena. But on the other hand, he had very real human needs to address. The second the alternative faltered, the people who had the proposal to start drilling were in the office next door, and they had the proposal ready, and they put it on his table. And the room for policy maneuver shrank even more.

Regardless of Chavez’s talk about socialism for the 21st century, or Correa’s talk about a citizen's revolution, the extractivist global network that both countries are firmly enmeshed in remains fundamentally governed by late carbon capitalist logics of accumulation and distributional vulnerability. And this extends beyond oil – this is not a situation of commodity determinism, to paraphrase Michael Watts. In Ecuador, they say a post-petroleum Ecuador will be a mega mining Ecuador. In Venezuela, the Maduro government has opened the Arco Minero del Orinoco – some 12 percent of national territory in the Amazon – for mining by private actors. They're no longer resource nationalists here. These are foreign firms coming in to mine, usually in coordination with the military rather than the civilian government. When Maduro announced the opening of the Arco Minero, he did so saying Venezuela needed to leave behind a dysfunctional petro-extractivism. “We need to no longer be a rentier state”—he used these exact terms and then said we're going to get out of rentier capitalism in oil by becoming essentially rentier state capitalists in mega mining. So (the room for maneuverability) when an extractive state has established itself is very marginal, because Maduro can't say tomorrow like, OK, we're done with mining, we're done with oil, we're going to build airplanes. That's not an option.

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Nicholas: One of the claims that is central to the discourse of extractivism is the denunciation of colonialism and the linkage of contemporary realities to the legacies of 500 years of colonization. There's also the question of sovereignty, as accusations of colonialism by indigenous movements raise the issue of indigenous sovereignty. Then, there are denunciations of colonialism that were central to Correa’s rhetoric in his interview published in New Left Review, where he said that the neo-colonial situation facing Ecuador means it doesn't have a choice over extraction. What do you make of such a diverse spectrum of actors, across the state, NGOs, civil society, social movements, and indigenous federations, all invoking colonialism as a key part of their discourses?

Donald: Colonialism is a moving target here. Correa uses colonialism constantly to justify extractive projects. People in the Amazon used colonialism to talk about the people in Quito (Ecuador). There are different ways in which it moves. The thing that we're working with here and the way in which we're interested in colonialism and decolonial projects, which I have a personal investment in and ethical commitment to, is that the way in which colonialism gets used by the Correa administration, in particular, has this paradoxical effect to actually support and justify projects—mega mining, oil extraction—that actually reinforce unequal terms of trade, unequal power relations, unequal global divisions of nature, which all favor the North Atlantic, or China, increasingly. In this way, I think we prefer to use extractivism the way we use it not because it replaces other important concepts, other important historical and contemporary experiences like colonialism, capitalism, or developmentalism, but because extractivism, in this case, allows us to identify a particular late 20th and early 21st-century articulation of these already existing terms, concepts, and experiences. Extractivism in this way identifies a kind of ideological complex, keeping in mind that ideology is material experience and not just pretty words and ideas, as well as the fact that it's been internalized by decision makers and other citizen subjects as a means to achieve development, but also as a notion of development reliant on economic growth that puts blinders up to any alternative.

That, again, is where Yasuní becomes really important. It offers a competing way to think about our interrelations with each other and with nature that aren't predicated on the neoliberal rationality Teresa was talking about and that we've been bouncing back and forth here that bases human well-being on economic growth and says the only road to economic growth for a country like Ecuador is to export its subsoil.

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Nicholas: What do you think are social movements’ successes or failures to articulate a post-extractivist politics or, as you put it, to act as “norm entrepreneurs” to change national and transnational notions of environmental sustainability? Perhaps you might engage with two of the claims that you make in the book: on the one hand, what a bottom-up politics looks like and, on the other, what do you mean by the privatization of accountability?

Teresa: The ostensible raison d’etre of the state is representation, the provision of public goods, and enacting the will of the people. Unlike firms or civil society, which have different logics of action, we look to a state that is responsive and delivers on political claims and demands. Broadly speaking, we are seeing less of the kind of representative state that would benefit communities and nature. Parallel to this we’re seeing the logic of the market start to imbue all relationships of accountability, and that becomes problematic because the goal of the market is to produce the best goods at the best price for the benefit of consumers. That's a very different kind of logic than this logic of representation I just described. If you want to find out who has the authority to impose rules across the supply chain of oil or, lithium, or cobalt, ask who can establish more sustainable practices that mitigate environmental harms or protect human rights. Who gets to set those rules and who has authority to enforce them? Increasingly, it is the consumer who gets to impose those conditions, rather than the commodity supplier state. This is what we mean by the privatization of accountability. You can see this play out in very practical terms in the surge of private, voluntary standards, initiatives, and certification schemes that companies may choose to adhere to in order to benefit their bottom line. I was just at the big mining conference where the topic of the day was ESG. So, companies are picking up on this because there is a consumer demand for it. Does that fulfill the role of the state? Can “publicness” by the private sector emulate the role of the state in ways that really fulfill the state’s function of representation and provider of public goods? I don't think so. I think that there is a problem there. When accountability is privatized it becomes circumscribed to the needs of a market that has to produce goods at the best prices. And that's not how you satisfy political claims or protect the commons.

I wanted to pick up on this because you mentioned the word sovereignty: communities want accountability for extraction and they need a legitimate state that is sovereign and can be responsive to their claims. Sometimes, there's tension because consumer demands in the Global North can actually generate more accountability mechanisms in a supply chain than the commodity producer state that, as it turns out, is not so sovereign after all. This raises important questions around accountability, democracy, and effective outputs for sustainability. This is one avenue for future research that emerges from our book.

Donald: This ties into your initial question of how we came to this project. Teresa was working on questions of accountability and development in transnational governing spaces and their relationships or nonrelationships with local communities. I had been working on questions of constituent power and the relationship between social movements and the state in Venezuela. So, we've had this very fruitful convergence on this question of the privatization of accountability and the relationship between communities, landscapes, and the state. In a lot of writing about constituent power, there is often a very positive reading of what happens when you have an absence of sovereignty. Free of the sovereign, the constituent energies of communities flourish. But at the same time, mutual aid is just a fact of life in rural communities in places like Ecuador. They become the mode of organizing social relations: much more horizontal, much more egalitarian, much more democratic, inclusive, and contingent. It is more of an open and fluid interaction and relationship rather than a sovereign decision. I’m idealizing a lot here, but I’m trying to capture where discussions about constituent power often lead. These populist moments that we write about, these radical ruptures with constituted orders, open both the possibility for these constituent energies to reshape the rules of engagement and modes of relationship, as we saw in Venezuela and in Ecuador. But they also open the door for other actors or for the private sector, for the entrenched institutions of the extractive state, to say no, here's how we are imposing our rules of engagement. Ruptures with established orders also open the door for the privatization of accountability with potentially grave implications for constituent power. Somewhat similarly, the only recourse Ecuador has to collect the $10 billion in damages Chevron owes them is to try to find international courts willing to gather it. You just can't find a jurisdiction willing to seize their assets. That's a profound privatization or outsourcing of accountability. And the result is that in some cases people do actually want to have states, but we want them to be accountable and responsive, and to fulfill the functions that we call upon them to perform.

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Nicholas: You say that these populist moments and these kinds of contentious politics can push the state or make the state somewhat malleable, but these extractive states are so resilient that lasting change is difficult. But also, the optimist in me sees moments like Yasuní ITT and the Rights of Nature, and the ways in which these ideas have sparked these kinds of movements and moments around the world, and I see potential there.

Donald: This is a shameless plug, but that's the topic of my first book, in the Venezuelan context. The state is much more a purely political entity in that book, and that's the limitation of the PhD research I was doing and how I was going about it. One thing that I would point out is that these are the questions that animate constituent moments in Venezuela, or elsewhere, for that matter. It's not high theory, right? People are actually talking about what happens when we become a state, or what happens when we seize state power, and they often draw from theorists like Enrique Dussel, who was eventually recognized with awards and made numerous public addresses in Venezuela. Or, there was an oft-told story that Chávez flew Michael Hardt to Caracas and demanded a conversation about the notions of constituent power that come out of Labor of Dionysus and Empire.

Teresa: It's easy to write up a populist when you get these kinds of nuggets. But Don, your book is also about how the state co-opts constituent power, right? To what extent can these bottom-up initiatives actually position themselves to affect the state and change it? Was the intention in Venezuela, to actually change the state or actually seek self-help?

Donald: To change the state. I guess the question is: is there just a limitation to the form of the state? Dussel argues that constituent power needs constituted power -- the state -- in order to make what's latent in our daily interactions more sustainable—to keep the lights on, to take the trash out, we need institutions. However, once you impose them, once you create an institution, you set a clock, and those institutions start becoming auto-referential, and they think that they are their own reason for existence rather than the response to a demand ‘from below.’

Teresa: So how do you create a vibrant, dynamic, and continuously nurturing source of a voice within these auto-referential institutions?

Donald: That's the challenge. In my mind, that's both an abstract theoretical challenge and one that's experienced in daily interactions and movements in states. But it's also something that extractive states put particular constraints upon because of, not to apologize for (then Ecuadorian President) Moreno, nor to be a Correista, but the state itself has very limited malleability when it's locked into this network by which nature, from places like Ecuador, gets exported.

Teresa: The whole idea of value added creates resource imaginaries in extractive states. How do we break the cycle of exporting low-values inputs and importing high-value outputs? How do we get out of this? In the case of lithium for Bolivia, for example, the socio-technical imaginary has been building batteries. But that’s not so easy. In a recent conversation, someone said to me ‘The idea that we have lithium and so we can produce batteries is like saying I have some steel and therefore I'm going to produce cars.’ There are North-South dependencies, domestic institutions, and actor constituencies, and an international political economy that limits those resource imaginaries. Even developmentalist actors with resource nationalist agendas like Correa Maduro, and Morales during the commodity boom of the 2000s found it very hard to take advantage of rents to create forward and backward linkages and build out the scientific, technical, capital, and geopolitical capacities that could move the state into some sort of value-added economy. This goes back to our conversation regarding the reduced policy space in which these extractivist states operate, regardless of the commodity, so being an electro-state supplying lithium is not very different from being a petrostate.

Donald: And that is really where we are today in Ecuador and Venezuela. Ecuador is now on its third president of the post-Correa era. It remains an extractive state struggling with multiple economic, political, and security concerns. For our purposes, the difference now is that any sort of populist gesture toward a more equitable rentismo – something like a democratization of consumption – has been completely off the table since Correa moved to Brussels in 2017.

Maduro has now been President of Venezuela for as long as Chávez. The Bolivarian Revolution has also all but completely abandoned its social welfare mandates – in addition to the military’s increased role in extraction and governance, you also have the return of foreign direct investment in key strategic sectors and a de facto and de jure austerity regime. In both cases, the populist moment has passed, and the extractivist state remains.

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Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Equdaor: The People's Oil? is available from Palgrave Macmillan.