Extractive capital and multi-scalar environmental politics: interpreting the exit of Rio Tinto from the diamond fields of Central India

Arnab Roy Chowdhury and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

Third World Quarterly, 2021, vol. 42, issue 8, 1770-1787

Abstract: Rio Tinto had been developing a diamond mining project in Madhya Pradesh for a decade when in 2017 it hastily abandoned the project. We analyse this counterintuitive exit through an ethnographic approach nested within a qualitative case study framework. We argue that the exit was caused by multi-scalar politics. Local protests over livelihood and labour issues –pre-emptively rearticulated by regional civil society groups through an ecological ‘framing’ – led to litigation. The national forest bureaucracy posed regulatory hurdles, and a change in the national political regime in 2014 brought to power a party that leveraged national capital of a certain variety, which weakened Rio Tinto’s political position. Lastly, a slump in the global diamond market created economic uncertainties, finally leading to its exit. It has not, however, deterred the government from facilitating investment by Indian mega-corporate houses in mining diamonds, once again ignoring local dissent. Under the current regime in India, the space for activism is increasingly restricted, and that restriction, we contend, can lead to the disarray in strategising alliances and goals between ecological and social justice concerns.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2021.1917356 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:42:y:2021:i:8:p:1770-1787

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2021.1917356

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().