Remoteness and subjectivity in gas extraction: Indigenous agency and the roadless design

Abstract

Past research has confirmed how ‘green’ extractive projects can reproduce exclusion and displacement overall, but constructions of otherness and remoteness that emerge in such green illusions of extractivism and their resistance remains little understood. Peru’s Camisea liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction in the Peruvian Amazon has been framed as an environmentally friendly flagship project because of its enclave or roadless design that enables a smaller environmental footprint. Drawing on a political ecology analysis of subject formation and co-production of remoteness, this paper analyzes the agendas and effects of constructed “remoteness” in its resource extraction as a strategy to design, legitimize, and enforce territorial control. This analytical lens moves away from strict binaries of the powerful and the powerless towards a continuum of power in the resistance of extraction. We found that the notion of ‘remoteness’ is a central rhetorical strategy that paradoxically enables and limits corporate expansion, neoliberal agendas and Indigenous tactics to negotiate access to benefits. This study contributes to and works toward a more diversified power knowledge base on the ways in which environmental claims in extractivism are assessed.