Undermining Resistance: Contesting extractivism in Indonesia

Literature on mining conflicts is divided by methodological and ontological focus on particular types of institutions, actors and scales of contestation. This produces some wildly contradictory conclusions. For example, literature on ‘resource nationalism’ starts with the observation that states have increasingly been able to assert more interventionist control over foreign investment in mining sectors and the profits from extractive industries. This is especially so in Indonesia, where resource nationalism has been most successful in transferring assets from western multinational miners to domestic conglomerates. On the other hand, authors focused on corporate social responsibility and participation at local scales observe that state institutions are withdrawing from community development and environmental management. They see this as evidence of neoliberalism ‘rolling back’ the state.

Both sets of authors are correct, and both produce valuable insights within their own scalar and institutional foci. But how can we have a state that is powerfully expropriating some of the most notorious multinational corporations and simultaneously withering before neoliberalism? The answer, of course, is the way powerful actors strategically contest issues at scales, or across multiple scales, that are the most beneficial to their interests. Of course, the strategies of the powerful are a reaction to the resistance of people affected by mining.

Chapter three of my new book Undermining Resistance: The governance of participation by multinational mining corporations (Mancherster University Press) applies such a framework to Indonesia. It charts the shifting alliances between multinational corporations, domestic conglomerates, the military and powerful politicians in the national government from the colonial, New Order and decentralisation eras, through the resource nationalism of the 2010s until the current ‘green-developmentalist’ and ‘new-authoritarian’ approaches has seen a rush of Chinese capital into the nickel industry driven by the global push for electric vehicles and decarbonisation.