"Like an abandoned son": Clientelism, assistentialism, and state failure in Amazon oil benefit sharing policies

Abstract

Local benefit sharing is a highly relevant and unresolved topic in natural resources policy and research. This study examines local de facto outcomes of Ecuador's 2010 hydrocarbon policy reform in which the state legally assumed welfare responsibilities of communities affected by oil drilling, a role that oil companies had prior occupied in the country's emerging oil boom.

Using political ecology lenses, this paper reveals how local clientelist and assistentialist relationships between oil companies and Indigenous Waorani communities have predominated in the region and affected the intended outcomes of the policy reform. These political dynamics enabled de facto arrangements of benefit sharing, wherein Waorani actors received continuing benefits from oil companies despite the reform's formal cancelling of these provisions. Moreover, the study shows how clientelist relationships continued through the state's policy reform as the state also failed to fulfill its reform promise to provide benefits at the local level.

Drawing on an extended empirical fieldwork data set of interviews, document reviews, and participant observation at local, regional, and national levels, the case study illustrates local realities of extractive policy implementation in the Yasuni Amazon rainforest, which offers valuable empirical lessons on unintended de facto outcomes of benefit-sharing policy efforts at the intersection of resource extractive conflicts, Indigenous interests, and conservation goals.