The politics of extractive governance: Indigenous peoples and socio-environmental conflicts

• Socio-environmental conflicts are usually explained as problems of ill designed policies.
• Important conflicts that involve indigenous peoples respond to the permanence of coloniality.
• The conflict known as the Baguazo is embedded in the long history of coloniality.
• The Baguazo shows the importance of recognising and valuing indigenous political ontologies.

Social conflicts related to extractive industries in Peru tend to be conceptualised as problems of governance, namely, as conflicts generated from ill-designed policies for distribution of revenues from extractive industries, formal political participation, transparency and conflict management. The governance approach, however, does not analyse the historical connection between extractive policies and exploitation/dispossession of indigenous peoples and the permanence of colonial patterns of domination. The main argument of this paper is that many social conflicts related to extractive activities do not derive from problems of ‘governance’, but more profoundly, they emerge due to divergences that transcend the current governance and express different political ontologies. This argument will be developed through the case study of the Baguazo and the Awajun territorial struggles in the Peruvian Amazon.