The Global Production Network for iron ore: materiality, corporate strategies, and social contestation in Brazil

•Economic and social actors influence each other through contestation.•The Global Production Network approach is useful for analyzing contestation.•Brazilian iron ore industry is an exemplar of contestation between actors in GPN.•Social actors emulate economic actors to affect corporate behavior.

The purpose of this article is to make explicit the iterative relationship between economic and social agents in the Global Production Network (GPN) for iron ore. Focusing on the Brazilian node of this GPN, it argues that the structure of economic actors and their corporate strategies influence the organization of social actors, whose contestation practices impact the modes of action of economic actors. This iterative model of economic and social agency is reliant upon the integration of the GPN approach to ecological economics and political ecology to explain both the material dimension and ecological distributional conflicts associated with economic activities. Once the conceptual nexus of these domains is established, the Brazilian node of the GPN for iron ore is described and the materiality of this network related to the appropriation of value through commodification of natural goods and dispossession of common goods. Furthermore, the paper identifies how this process drives the reactions of different social actors that emulate practices and strategies of economic actors in developing contesting practices, which can be relevant for conditioning corporate behavior.