The Corporate Strategies Playbook: Navigating Extractive Industries

The project’s research collaborators are editing a collected volume of stories of resistance entitled The Corporate Strategies Playbook: Navigating Extractive Industries. The manuscript is currently being completing and is intended to be published by Bristol University Press’s Business Finance and Development series.

The volume invited workshop participants to submit short vignettes from their communities and countries which centre upon specific strategies that extractive firms employ to gain access to contested spaces and territories in the contemporary moment. Examples are varied, including environmental impact assessments, police injunctions, risk finance, trade agreement terms, physical repression, subcontracting to state firms and Indigenous affairs ministries, among other tactics.

Chapters detail how firms use these strategies and how organizations and communities have responded to/contested them, drawing on examples from research and lived experiences in the broader region of continental North America and the Caribbean. The volume thus aims to provide information and analysis to students, impacted communities and socio-environmental activists seeking to navigate and contest the strategies firms use to secure licenses and social permissions and to accomplish the physical siting of contested projects.