Rural geography I

I Introduction

A key contention of the counter-urbanization and gentrification literature of the 1990s and 2000s was that certain types of people (e.g. Travellers; (Halfacree, 1996)), activity and land use (e.g. drug cultivation) were ‘out of place in rural space’ (Cloke et al., 2000). That is, ‘the rural’ did not necessarily enclose an innocent, bucolic space but rather an arena of active political engagement and contestation in which certain groups (e.g. middle class ex-urban migrants) either campaigned against the presence of such ‘outsiders’ or, through their investment activities, wittingly or otherwise, manipulated land and housing markets such that ‘less desirable’ groups were displaced or excluded. In this sense, the rural had become, or had been made over as, a pure and exclusive space.

Of course, this contention referred to a particular social construction of rurality favoured by select groups and seen in equally select places. Woods’ (2007) notion of the ‘global countryside’ posited the idea that the globalizing tendencies of neoliberalized capital, population and cultural flows were introducing profound changes into rural places and spaces across the globe, albeit in a highly uneven and differentiated fashion. Woods’ intervention was not just a corrective to earlier conceptions of globalization that conflated that phenomenon with the emergence and increasing economic and demographic dominance of global cities: it also highlighted the fact that select rural areas offered a unique ‘spatial fix’ for a restless global capitalism (Harvey, 1996).

Drawing inspiration from recent rural geography progress reports which have stressed the impacts on rural space of, inter alia, climate change mitigation schemes, the ongoing search for ecologically sustainable energy supplies (Woods, 2012), new forms of productivism and the growing influences of ‘land grabbing’ strategies in securing individual nations’ access to food and other basic supplies (McDonagh, 2014), this report focuses on the now substantial international rural geography literature on the emergence of so-called ‘resource peripheries’ linked to the economic expansion of newly industrializing nations such as India and China. In this sense, this review marks something of a departure from recent progress reports, not only for its focus on the hitherto largely ignored mineral and energy resources sectors and the global commodity chains that link the ‘first nature’ of the resource base to processors and end markets, but also because of its coverage of research emanating from but also empirically focused on so-called ‘Global South’ nations, populations and environments. In the remainder of this report I outline the major foci and key arguments of this body of work, noting its connections to, but also elaborations of, important concepts used within rural geography, including global commodity chains and their multi-scalar governance involving, in part, political, economic and social relations between corporations and local communities.

II Mineral and energy development in rural space and places: The creation and conceptualization of resource peripheries

The mineral and energy resources sector has played important if often spasmodic roles in shaping the demographic, economic and socio-cultural character of select rural and remote regions around the globe. In some so-called ‘settler state’ nations (e.g. Canada, Australia, New Zealand) discoveries of precious metals (e.g. gold) and energy (e.g. oil) triggered massive demographic and economic expansion in affected regions and colonies/provinces, and reinforced the central historical role played by rural areas in national economic and political affairs. Typical of its ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ nature, though, the mineral and energy resource sector’s influence on rural and broader society has frequently been episodic.

At the commencement of a boom, resource epicentres experience rapid amplification of employment, investment, building and other essential infrastructure development. However, once a combination of technological limitations, commodity price fluctuations, corporate restructuring and/or regulatory change conspire to bring about closure, a hasty retraction of mobile production factors ensues. Underscoring the highly temporal and spatial unevenness that is characteristic of the sector, some regions and towns go on to thrive post-mining, even capitalizing on their particular historical legacy through distinctive place marketing (e.g. Wheeler, 2014) while others linger as declining and decaying towns, surrounded by the ‘stranded assets’ of rusting plant and machinery and crumbling buildings that represent the sunk costs from previous rounds of investment. The relatively scant international literature on mining and energy development in rural areas prior to the 2000s generally stressed the unfulfilled promises of employment, infrastructure and wealth creation for local ‘affected’ communities, indigenous and non-indigenous (Connell and Howitt, 1991; Ballard and Banks, 2003; O’Faircheallaigh, 2013), including notions of a ‘resource curse’ (Auty, 1993).

As with earlier waves of industrialization and modernization, the far-reaching changes associated with China’s and India’s recent economic expansion – a process that has triggered rapid urbanization, ecological and social change (see Webber, 2012; Siciliano, 2014; Congzhi and Jingzhong, 2014) – exemplifies key elements of Woods’ (2007) global countryside. Both nations’ demand for industrial staples – chiefly coal, iron ore, and liquid natural gas (LNG) – has seen numerous rural and remote source regions around the globe drawn together in an integrated web of physical infrastructure, foreign direct investment flows and corporate hierarchies. Over the past five years or so, rural geographers have documented the many and various dimensions of this most recent boom, noting its multi-scalar implications, with a particular focus on local impacts – positive and negative. For instance, key concepts from evolutionary economic geography (EEG) (Boschma and Martin, 2010), such as path and place dependence, embeddedness and hysteresis, have been applied to the development of causal explanations of, for example, mining’s impact on regional economic performance (Tonts et al., 2012, 2014; Plummer and Tonts, 2013; Halseth et al., 2014). In doing so, this scholarship has highlighted elements of both change and continuity with previous mineral and energy resource booms and with earlier modes of conceptualizing economic geographical change.

From about the 1970s meta-theoretical frameworks such as ‘World Systems Theory’ and the ‘New International Division of Labour’ (NIDL) (see Fröbel et al., 1981; Fagan and Webber, 1994; Fagan and Le Heron, 1994), themselves drawn from structural Marxist precepts, became increasingly popular in academic geography. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of eschewing such modernist modes of conceptualization in an increasingly ‘post-prefixed’ human geography (Sheppard, 2011: 320), the enormous disparities in economic and political power between private and state-owned mining corporations, on the one hand, and host nations, regions and local communities, on the other, are starkly obvious when brought together in the process of resource extraction. Further, the modus operandi of mineral and energy corporations in relation to exploration, extraction and community liaison varies substantially with the perceived ‘developmental status’ of the host society concerned. By the same token, though, simple ‘top-down’ notions of exploitation emanating from a steamroller model of globalization, in which national governments and societies passively bend to the will of a remote CEO and his/her board, cannot account for the complexity and the reflexivity of political and economic relations across geographical scales.

As Michael Watts’ (2004) scholarship on ‘oil governance’ emphasizes, in a manner not dissimilar to Innis’(1930) staples theory, certain types of primary commodity production, processing and distribution almost inevitably engender particular multi-scalar power relationships based in part on: the nature of the markets in which the commodity is traded (frequently global markets subject to considerable volatility due to seasonal fluctuations, sudden changes in demand and/or cartel behaviour); the structure of the industry itself, frequently involving substantial interest if not control by foreign companies; and the long-term trend for the terms of trade for these commodity types to decline (Barnes, 2005).

In North and South America and Oceania (e.g. New Zealand and Australia) the geography of the regional settlement network, including its urban hierarchy, substantially influences the carve-up of the relative shares of income and job opportunities for work from these activities. Mineral and energy extraction frequently occurs at some location remote from long-established population centres and transport routes and infrastructure, leading to the reinforcement of pre-existing so-called ‘heartland/hinterland’ settlement structures and space economy (Barnes et al., 2001; Barnes, 2005; Tonts et al., 2013). It is in these senses, then, that such spaces have been labelled as ‘resource peripheries’. For Watts (2004), the creation of such settlement and economic types is not a simple and natural outcome of market processes but the product of deliberate acts of governments, local elites and corporations. Writing on the political economy of oil extraction in the Global South, Watts (2004) argues that oil governance operates by creating separate governable spaces in which key groups and organizations are rendered visible – to themselves, each other and the rest of society – in their authoritarian control of the extraction of oil (and surplus value):

These spaces and forms of power emerge from the oil complex as part of an overarching logic of petro-capitalist development, that is to say a particular sort of extractive development generative of differing sorts of scale … Oil violence is generated by the evil twins of authoritarian governmentality and petro-capitalism. (Watts, 2004: 62)

Criticism has honed in on three main perceived weaknesses. The first and major critique centres on the GCC/GVC literature’s preferred focus on key firms, particularly the ‘lead firm’. This restricted vision was seen as privileging a business- and capital-centric view of the world. Thus conceptualized, businesses compete, collaborate and negotiate with each other on a more-or-less flat ontological plane, stratified only by generalized ‘global-local’ and ‘core-periphery’ tensions and dynamics (Bair and Werner, 2011; Hough, 2011; Havice and Campling, 2013). Second, and relatedly, GCC/GVC research was regarded as lacking a normative dimension, effectively if implicitly ignoring inequalities (and inequities) in power relations notwithstanding its more broadly construed idea of the commodity chain. In particular, the structural disparities between capital and labour were arguably neglected. This oversight is especially significant in the case of agriculturally-related commodity chains in which a diversity of forms of labour (e.g. paid, sweated, contract) exists. More broadly, these criticisms also stressed the need for more historically- and politically-nuanced accounts of commodity chain development and marketization that explicitly recognize the sometimes troubled and bloody processes of forced dispossession, political repression and political assassination that can underpin processes of capitalist agricultural and natural resource development (e.g. see Hough, 2011; Brown, 2013; Wilson, 2013). These insights highlighted a third weakness of the GCC/GVC literature: its lack of an inclusive and fully articulated perspective on global commodity production/processing/marketing/trade. It is for these reasons the counter critique became known as ‘dis/articulation’ (Bair et al., 2013).

Combined, these empirically-informed critiques emphasized the need for a broader philosophically-oriented and explicitly normative stance towards multi-scalar commodity chains, one that throws light on processes of social and economic articulation and its ‘constitutive outside’ – disarticulation – together with associated dynamics of socio-cultural and economic inclusion and exclusion (Bair and Werner, 2011). Two papers exemplify this approach. Wilson’s (2013) attention is on the international coffee crisis of the early 2000s and how this market ‘shock’ was transmitted unevenly to local coffee growers and workers in Nicaragua’s Matagalpa and Jinotega regions. Brown (2013) explores the complex multi-scalar politics of Fairtrade bananas in farming Colombia’s Urabá region, highlighting the role of previous political, cultural, economic and ecological battles in underpinning the expansion of banana cultivation into the Urabá. Both papers also document the role of primitive accumulation – often with the tacit or explicit support of the regional and/or nation-state – in providing local and/or foreign elites (including multi-national corporations) access to key natural resources and cheap, apparently docile labour. As will be seen in the rest of this report, dispossession, political repression and primitive accumulation are widely used in many of the globe’s resource peripheries and play integral roles in perpetuating the uneven development of rural areas.

III Resource peripheries in the Global South and North

Quist and Nygren’s paper (2015) broadly follows a dis/articulation approach with their problematization of the ‘hybrid techniques of neoliberal governance’ evident in the multi-scalar politics surrounding the resource conflict between local fishers, the Mexican government and the state-owned oil and petrol corporation, Pemex. Recognizing neoliberalism as a heterogeneous political and spatial if not ideological project, Quist and Nygren (2015) map out the highly uneven political-economic terrain facing Tabasco coast fishers in their battle for access to fishing grounds against both Pemex and the Mexican state. IMF- and World Bank-mandated debt reduction strategies and free trade deals (e.g. NAFTA) have thoroughly reworked the key institutional framework and settings of the Mexican state, and led to the dismantling of, inter alia, fishing co-operatives from the 1990s onwards, along with the re-regulation of the national oil sector so as to permit foreign investment and direct participation in oil extraction, though principally under licence to Pemex.

In protection of its own version of ‘oil violence’ the Mexican state deliberately advantaged the interests of oil production over local fishers by forcibly demarcating exclusion zones around the offshore oil rigs that have sprung up along the Tabasco coast. Local fishers therefore face increased risks to life and livelihood as they fish further out to avoid the exclusion zones. However, this is not a simple story of global TNCs and a comprador state oppressing small, local fishers and their communities, with the political interests of Tabasco fishers themselves split between licenced and unlicenced operators. Upton (2012) discusses a similar case of effective dispossession and disempowerment in relation to Mongolian nomadic herders, with the national government ‘allocating extraction and exploration licenses to foreign and domestic mining companies across an estimated 32 per cent of the country’s land area’ (Upton, 2012: 229).

Kirshner and Power (2015) present a somewhat similar tale of rapid and rampant mineral and energy development in remote regions in their examination of the local impacts of Mozambique’s own ‘boom’. The largest FDI recipient globally in 2013 (Kirshner and Power, 2015: 67), Mozambique’s selective integration into the global economy of mineral and energy flows is no historical or geographical accident but is a product of global (e.g. Rio Tinto) and national (e.g. India’s state-owned International Coal Ventures) corporations’ recognition of ‘peak oil’ and a consequent strategy of ‘expanding into new resource peripheries, including “ungoverned” or marginalized spaces and conflict zones’ (Kirshner and Power, 2015: 70). As indicated above, mineral and energy development is a tide that tends to lift only some boats. Kirshner and Power (2015) describe how the massive flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country since the early 2000s have congealed in the ‘enclavic spaces’ of high intensity resource extraction and processing. These spaces ‘further the fragmentation of national territories, whilst underpinning the operation of contemporary globalised space … and typically have limited linkages to local firms and institutions whilst remaining largely self-contained and detached from the national economy’ (Kirshner and Power, 2015: 70). True to earlier globalization accounts, the Mozambican coal boom has created a new bifurcated and disarticulated economy of winners and losers with foreign capital and labour clearly in the first category and local residents firmly in the second.

The impact of resource extraction-related FDI on rural and remote regions is also addressed by Halseth et al. (2014) in their examination of the northern British Columbia (Canada) resource periphery. In charting the rise of northern BC’s energy economy, the authors note the increasing prominence of high volume hydraulic fracturing (aka ‘fracking’) in this vast region in response to China’s and India’s growing demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) (see also Plummer and Tonts, 2013). This demand has seen massive amounts of capital injected into remote regions for gas wells, pipelines and port and processing facilities. The latest ‘rush’ has seen a substantial shift in the ownership of mineral and energy extraction proposals from local (i.e. Canadian) and US interests in the 1980s to a dominantly international set of TNCs and consortia by 2013, with established and newly emergent Asian industrial powers becoming more prominent. Measham and Fleming’s (2014) examination of the impact of coal seam gas (CSG) exploration and extraction – via ‘fracking’ – in Queensland’s (Australia) Surat and Bowen Basins highlights the benefits of this region’s own ‘rush’, noting the links between resource development and worker in-migration, on the one hand, and improved educational outcomes and wellbeing at the community scale, on the other. As Halseth et al. (2014) note, though, fracking is a practice that has attracted public scrutiny due its actual and alleged social, economic and environmental impacts on source locations. It is this contentious aspect of fracking as a technology and a mode of development in rural areas that has inspired a growing social literature on the subject (see Malin and DeMaster, 2015; Kulcsar et al., 2016) and one that rural geographers are playing an important role in, particularly at the intersection of resource development, social and economic justice and multi-scalar governance.

III Disarticulation and the multi-scalar governance of resource peripheries

An important feature of recent resource periphery research is its focus on the multifarious roles of regional and nation-states in regulating the process of natural resource discovery, extraction and processing. Haggerty and McBride (2016) document a case of ‘regulatory dumping’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) involving a remote Wyoming community, natural gas exploration firms, and federal and state governments. In the contemporary era, mining and energy extraction takes place within an increasingly dense formal and informal institutional framework, with corporations generally compelled to comply with national (and international) environmental guidelines, taxation/duty laws and the like (e.g. Horsley, 2013). Mining firms’ concern to maintain their ‘social licence to operate’ (Cheshire, 2010) has equally seen community liaison groups brought into being as the official face and voice of mining-affected communities (Mayes et al., 2014), though as Haggerty and McBride’s (2016) paper highlights, socio-economic problems associated with CSG (and related) development can effectively be sidelined and/or ignored due, in part, to the fact that social impact assessment (SIA) is neither a universal nor mandatory aspect of mining and energy proposal assessment in many countries (Vanclay, 2006; Michell and McManus, 2013).

The search for alternative, non-fossil fuel-based forms of energy equally raises a complex set of social, economic and environmental issues for rural and remote areas and their populations. In Brazil, the world’s second largest ethanol producer, concern is growing that the expansion of sugarcane production (in spatial and volume terms) for ethanol will compromise the nation’s process of agrarian reform, including the support of family farming, equitable land distribution and local food provisioning (Frate and Brannstrom, 2015; see also Selfa et al., 2015). For these authors opinions on this topic do not neatly divide into two diametrically opposed camps (i.e. globally- vs. locally-oriented). The entanglements of powerful and often vested public and private interest groups and actors in the development of so-called alternative renewable energy for rapidly industrializing nations – and the great costs paid by affected localities – is also portrayed clearly in Webber’s (2012) critical dissection of China’s Three Gorges Dam Project. In what is arguably a case of state-led primitive accumulation, the dam directly displaced over one million people, with a further four million ‘encouraged’ to resettle outside of the reservoir zone. Webber (2012) interprets the dam’s construction within the intense and bloody struggles for ascendancy within the Chinese Communist Party and nation-state between conservative and market-oriented leaders.

At the time of writing, the world was marking the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, triggered by an undersea earthquake and tsunami east of Japan (Otsuki, 2015). Focusing on the post-fallout decontamination of the towns and regions surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Otsuki (2015) documents the decision-making surrounding the siting of ‘interim storage facilities’ (ISFs) to hold radioactive material collected within the fallout zone, and the nuclear reactors themselves. Otsuki (2015) documents the powerful influence of a peculiarly Japanese corporatist style of ‘machine politics’ in the original location of the Fukushima Daiichi and other nuclear power plants within the hitherto peripheral rural area of Futaba County. Following the destruction of the Fukushima plant, the region’s political and economic peripherality has been multiply reinforced by the effective termination of its major industry, the impact of widespread contamination (5.5 million m³ of radioactive material had been collected and stored at the time of publication of Otsuki’s paper), and the fact that two major county towns must now also host the ISFs.

IV Conclusion: Resource peripheries and geographical theory

Although the recent surge in rural geography scholarship on resource peripheries around the globe is undoubtedly a response to empirical events and processes, a notable feature of this work is its contribution to the continued theoretical development of the sub-discipline. Two points will hopefully suffice to reinforce and clarify this point. First, the very particular geographical, economic, political and socio-cultural characteristics of most, if not all, resource peripheries has triggered the development of new or simply the extension of old theories to help explain their special nature. An older and somewhat neglected set of ideas that constitute staples theory (Innis, 1930) is being resuscitated by a new generation of rural geographers who see in its core principles (e.g. the structured inequality and inequity between core centres and resource hinterlands; the political and economic vulnerabilities associated with a national and regional dependence on the international trade in natural resources) considerable conceptual and practical purchase (Horsley, 2013; Tonts et al., 2013, 2014; Halseth et al., 2014), though resonances of its general principles can also be seen in Watts (2004).

Additionally, as much of this report has emphasized, these theoretical standpoints can be enriched via a dis/articulations approach that focuses explicitly on the power geometries by which socio-cultural groups are selectively included/excluded in the capitalist expansion process. Also, complex issues of multi-scalar governance have been brought to the fore through this research, adding a further dimension of power to earlier concerns with rural politics and governance (Goodwin, 1998; Woods, 2003), drawing attention to relations between transnational mining and energy corporations, national and local governments and elite groups, on the one hand, and local communities on the other. As noted at the start of this report, this conception of power relations across scale probably seems to fit all too comfortably within a structuralist political economy framework of yesteryear. Yet this would overlook the reflexive vision of much recent work which explicitly acknowledges the (admittedly selective) capacity of formal and informal institutions to extract social and economic gains from the resource extraction process. Yet there is no denying that in the contemporary era this remains a highly uneven contest.