Mobilising Rents: Natural Gas Production Networks and the Landlord State in Peru and Bolivia

Abstract

The ongoing choreography of extractive industries asks for a deeper appraisal about the processes and scales underpinning resource extraction. This paper unpacks how the assembly between natural gas production networks, extractivist states and local politics is anchored in resource peripheries in Peru and Bolivia through contingent schemes of value distribution. From a critical production network approach, the paper examines the transformation of resource peripheries through the transfer of natural gas rents to sub-national governments and, more specifically, through investments in public infrastructure. Such investments embed natural gas production networks to local politics through three processes: providing an image of modernisation and progress; coopting local elites through corruption; and mobilising local labour. In conclusion, the articulation between production networks and extractivist states involves an entangled scheme of rent distribution that flows at very local levels and consolidates multi-scalar arrangements for resource extraction.