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Explaining contentious collective action over the environmental impacts of oil : the state and indigenous organizations in the Peruvian Amazon (2006-2019)

University of British Columbia

What determines the dynamics of contention and actors' engagement in collective action? Social movement research focuses on civil society's power to organize and react to challenges and emphasizes the importance of social movement autonomy. I argue that although social movements may have the autonomous capacity to respond to and to produce changes, the state's capacity and political will to implement policy critically shapes the political environment and cycle of contention within which social movements operate. The state is at once the source of citizens' grievances and deprivations and potentially the source of solutions--whether in terms of allocating goods and services or opening and closing the policy arena for political participation. I evaluate this argument by analyzing Amazonian Indigenous organizations and their struggle regarding oil extraction in Block 192 in Loreto, Peru. The Peruvian state is often reactive but not responsive to its population's needs and demands due to its lack of capacity and political will to implement change. This thesis examines state capacity and will in terms of the exercise of authority and policy implementation. It concludes that the broader political environment creates incentives for the emergence, development and strengthening of social movements and the persistence of the social conflict between movements and the state.

Text

2021-03-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77485

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/