Scaling Democracy

Democratic theorists have long wrestled with the question of the appropriate scale of democracy and its collective subject, the people. A tradition that runs from Jean Jacques Rousseau to contemporary deliberative democrats asserts the democratic value of small polities and local decision-making, seen to facilitate face-to-face interaction, substantive participation, and robust civic culture. ^{Footnote 19} Another tradition, running from Immanuel Kant to contemporary proponents of “cosmopolitan democracy,” advocates for globally encompassing democratic governance. ^{Footnote 20} Recently, debates have emerged over delineating the “outer edges” of democratic decision-making: the “all affected” and “all subjected” principles, existing state borders, and the notion of the “unbounded” demos. ^{Footnote 21} These debates within political theory appear to be intractable in part because any democratic procedure presupposes who the relevant people are and the “proper unit” of its application, understandings that seemingly cannot be subjected to democratic procedures without inviting the problem of what Jürgen Habermas referred to as the “infinite regress” of legitimation. ^{Footnote 22}

I doubt that there is a theoretical solution or institutional fix to the dilemma of democratic scale. Political theories and formal institutions may designate the territorial bounds of a democratic polity and the relationship between subnational, national, and supranational scales, but so long as there are competing sources of democratic legitimacy available to nested and overlapping political communities, conflict over the scales of democracy will reignite. Moreover, contestation over the scales of democracy is itself a democratic practice. For I believe, following the radical democratic theories of Chantal Mouffe, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Sheldon Wolin, that democracy is enacted, and expanded, through the eruption of conflict over the terms of collective life. ^{Footnote 23} Of course liberal democracy or “polyarchy” is characterized by certain institutional conditions. But they are themselves the product of ongoing contestation. More importantly, such institutions furnish the sites where ongoing contestation continues. Arguments about the appropriate scale of democracy epitomize this ongoing disagreement at the heart of democracy: when actors contest and attempt to transform the scales of democracy, they demonstrate that the answer to “who rules” cannot be settled in theory or by law. Rather, democracy is the practice of continuously subjecting institutional arrangements to conflict and scrutiny, with the aim of extending democratic participation to all arenas of collective life. Communities affected by resource extraction that clamor to be included in the process of decision-making thus resonate with a long history of democratic contestation. As Wolin puts it, “democracy was born in transgressive acts, for the demos could not participate in power without shattering the class, status, and value systems by which it was excluded.” ^{Footnote 24}

If the scales of democracy cannot be settled in the abstract, analysis ought to focus on empirical processes of scaling democracy. More generally, scale-making is the process by which political space is differentiated and hierarchized into vertically ordered, territorial units such as the local, the national, and the transnational. ^{Footnote 25} Such units are constituted, entrenched, and contested through political action. ^{Footnote 26} Disputes over the scales of decision-making are only ever provisionally resolved, and the resulting dispensation forms the ground of future conflict. When these conflicts relate to the scale of democratic decision-making, political actors engage in scaling democracy. Scaling democracy refers to the practices by which democracy—understood as both a set of procedures and a claim to legitimate authority grounded in popular sovereignty—is mapped onto more or less encompassing territorial scales. With the aim of relocating the scale of decision-making, adversarial groups articulate opposing visions of “the people” grounded in distinct territorial scales.

Scholarship in the fields of decentralization and federalism investigates the historical origins of federal arrangements, demonstrates the political (e.g., government responsiveness) and economic (e.g., fiscal performance) stakes of states’ territorial organization, and analyzes the coalitions that impel de- and re-centralization processes. ^{Footnote 27} These processes are often conflictual because bounding decision-making within a given territorial unit empowers some groups and disempowers others. In addition to these findings, the concept of scaling democracy draws our attention to the ways in which the collective identities and interests attached to the various scales of democracy are politically constructed.

At first blush, conflicts over the scale of decision-making appear to be structured by economic incentives. In the universe of cases addressed here, national administrations have an interest in control over revenue-generating extractive projects, and directly affected communities that bear the brunt of displaced livelihoods and environmental degradation have an interest in compensation or outright opposition. But these incentives cannot be understood in isolation from their political articulation. It is within the context of the Latin American “pink tide” and the recent commodity boom that central governments have advocated for resource nationalism, and, concomitantly, that indigenous and environmentalist movements have decried the impacts of extraction on local communities. The salience of—and opposition between—the national demos and the local community is historically contingent. These interest-articulations and collective identities are shaped by available institutional norms, organizational infrastructures, and social meanings. Within such contexts, actors agonistically deploy democratic procedures such as elections, referenda, consultations, and deliberative fora—and appeal to notions of the democratic people—to ground their claims to democratic authority.

Given their embeddedness in specific political contexts, processes of scaling democracy evince distinct combinations of interests, identities, and scales. Although this article analyzes one of hundreds of community consultations organized in opposition to mining, groups with quite distinct conceptions of their identities and interests have advocated local democracy. ^{Footnote 28} Throughout U.S. history, democratic devolution was a strategy to limit the franchise or the full exercise of democratic rights (e.g., “states’ rights” justifications on the part of the white majority to effectively limit black citizenship) and resist environmental regulation (e.g., Western ranchers claiming local autonomy to resist federal EPA intervention), just as there are examples of groups who interpret “local interests” similarly to the actors discussed here (e.g., environmental groups advocating for municipal referenda on oil and gas extraction in California, Ohio, and Texas). ^{Footnote 29} Claims to national democratic sovereignty are no less politically malleable: in contemporary European politics, political parties and civil-society groups with distinct social bases and ideological profiles have asserted the primacy of national democratic processes contra the transnational European Union on topics as diverse as immigration, financial and currency policy, and economic regulation.

Given the variable combinations of interests, identities, and democratic scales, analysis of scaling democracy focuses on how collective identities and interests are linked to specific scales of decision-making and territorial notions of the people, and how these are enacted through a variety of democratic practices, whether direct or representative, formal or informal. We should expect that transformations in the political, economic, and institutional contexts would trigger contention over the scale of democratic decision-making. Such transformations alter the stakes of decision-making and the available sources of democratic legitimacy. This is precisely what has occurred in Latin America in a context marked by the adoption of participatory institutions and the commodity boom.

Democratic Participation, Social Conflict, and Political Scale in Extractive Economies

New participatory institutions and collective rights have potentially transformed resource extraction, a policy area historically managed by state or corporate technocrats, into an arena of democratic contention. These institutions and rights are linked to a global shift in resource-related contention. Conflict over oil and mining development has a long history, often centering on labor exploitation, ownership, and the distribution of economic benefits. ^{Footnote 30} But over the past two decades, scholars across the social sciences have observed a new kind of dispute over resource extraction wherein directly affected communities are the primary sites and protagonists of contentious actions. ^{Footnote 31} Like the industrial working class whose radical potential was rooted in their social location at crucial bottlenecks of production chains, the political power of affected communities resides in their spatial proximity to the process of extraction.

The potential for tension between local communities and national governments (and foreign firms) apparently reflects the uneven territoriality of resource extraction: the socio-environmental costs are concentrated near the sites of extraction, while economic benefits, whether tax revenues or profits, are channeled to state or corporate coffers (which may be redistributed to affected communities—or not). ^{Footnote 32} But as I have argued, such costs and benefits cannot be understood in isolation from the existing set of institutional norms, organizational infrastructures, and social meanings. It is the availability of new collective rights and participatory institutions that has empowered affected communities to claim local democratic authority. These communities are now the subjects of formal rights enshrined in international conventions and national constitutions that guarantee their territorial and cultural integrity, and require their participation in decision-making over extractive projects. Like all scales of democratic decision-making, these rights and institutions are the outcome of conflict and negotiation: specifically, the political struggle for the recognition of indigenous territory. But the adoption of institutions of local participation has in turn fueled dispute.

Prior consultation, the right of affected communities to be consulted prior to resource extraction, has become a significant locus of conflict, triggering contentious processes of scaling democracy. ILO Convention 169, ratified by 22 countries, establishes that indigenous peoples must be consulted whenever a policy measure could directly affect them or their environment. ^{Footnote 33} In response to the demands of indigenous groups and to oil-related conflict, Ecuador ratified the convention in 1998. ^{Footnote 34} Prior consultation was incorporated into the 1998 Constitution, strengthened in the 2008 Constitution, and has been regulated by presidential decrees. ^{Footnote 35} In Ecuador, this right is not limited to indigenous communities; a separate constitutional provision extends it to any community whose environment is potentially impacted by policy decisions. But many scholars, and environmental and indigenous activists, assert that prior consultation has not been substantively enforced. In response, affected communities have organized community consultations. Scholars have documented “hundreds” of cases of such consultations in Guatemala, but the practice extends across Latin America. ^{Footnote 36} These consultations often provoke state and corporate actors to delegitimize them as unconstitutional, non-binding, and the result of “manipulation” by indigenous or environmental groups.

In Latin America, the coincidence of a veritable revolution in citizen participation and the intensification of resource extraction presents a novel opportunity to empirically study scaling democracy—and to reconsider taken-for-granted notions about the relationship between democracy and resource dependency. ^{Footnote 37} Ever since the Workers’ Party first implemented participatory budgeting (PB) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, institutions of participatory democracy have proliferated across the region. To varying degrees, these institutions have democratized decision-making—on issues such as social spending, land use, and environmental licensing—formerly restricted to representative or technocratic bodies. International institutions praise such “democratic innovations” for incorporating citizens into policymaking and furnishing institutional channels for social demands. ^{Footnote 38} But the institution of prior consultation has polarized state and social actors, stoking political conflict. Analyzing prior consultation through the lens of scaling democracy provides a new perspective on participatory institutions, yielding four contributions to this area of inquiry.

First, I build on existing scholarship that “flip[s] the direction of the causal arrow” by addressing how existing participatory institutions reshape civil society and give rise to new forms of collective action. ^{Footnote 39} Most work on participatory institutions asks under what exogenous political conditions they flourish, but Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Patrick Heller, and Marcelo Silva find that in cities where PB has been implemented, it has improved the organizational and demand-making capacity of civil-society groups. ^{Footnote 40} In these cases, PB has endogenously generated the conditions of its own success and “democratized democracy” even where the initial context was less than auspicious. ^{Footnote 41} Similarly, where such institutions or rights are under-enforced by state institutions, social movements may take implementation into their own hands. ^{Footnote 42} This has been the case with community mining consultations in Latin America: affected communities have organized their own consultations as a response to state inaction. The under-enforcement of rights to participation has channeled social movements toward the popular enactment of rights and institutions. ^{Footnote 43}

Second, my case study builds on work that emphasizes the conflictual dimension of participation. ^{Footnote 44} In much existing literature, the complementary “synergy” between committed state actors and autonomous but involved civil-society groups is seen as a pre-requisite for democratically robust and stable participatory institutions. ^{Footnote 45} Scholars often portray participatory institutions as deliberative fora in which actors orient to shared norms, thereby consensually aligning their political preferences. ^{Footnote 46} Some scholars contrast participatory institutions with contentious modes of articulating demands, such as protest. ^{Footnote 47} However, the politics of prior consultation demonstrate that participatory institutions can become the crux of struggle. Existing research shows that politicians may adopt such institutions to galvanize supporters and claim the brand of “good governance.” ^{Footnote 48} But community consultations suggest that activist groups also see the political potential of participatory processes, converting the consultation into a protest strategy. ^{Footnote 49} In the case of policy areas such as resource extraction, state/society synergy is elusive, and participatory institutions instead stage a polarized conflict between affected communities—who seek to bolster the binding authority of such institutions—and nationally-elected governments—who seek to limit the extent of participation, convert it into a technocratic exercise, or use national election results to democratically legitimize their resource policies. ^{Footnote 50}

Third, this understudied institution adds a new angle to research on participatory democracy: the scale of participatory institutions. Activists who implement consultations explicitly frame “the community as the proper scale for decision-making on mining and natural resources management.” ^{Footnote 51} Insofar as the literature on participatory democracy addresses scale, the territorial units of local, regional, and national are taken for granted as a pre-existing hierarchy, rather than the outcome of political struggle. ^{Footnote 52} But in the context of resource extraction, participatory institutions such as prior consultation are the means through which the relationship between scales is established.

Fourth, my case study invites us to reconsider the relationship between resource extraction and democracy. In a research area dominated by the prediction that resource dependency undermines democracy, the hundreds of documented cases of community consultation suggest that new forms of citizen participation have potentially opened up this policy area to democratic scrutiny. Political contention over the appropriate scale of democratic decision-making is itself a democratic practice as it entails subjecting institutional arrangements to scrutiny and collective action. I address this implication in the conclusion.

The Quimsacocha Consultation: Scaling Democracy in Action

In Ecuador, leftist President Rafael Correa (2007–2017) came to power riding the coattails of mass demonstrations against neoliberal economic policies and in the midst of a crisis of political representation, wherein citizens had grown disenchanted with existing political parties. ^{Footnote 53} In response to longstanding social movement demands, he promised to convene a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution, reassert national sovereignty over an economy long dominated by oligarchic elites and foreign investors, pay off the “social debt” accumulated over decades of fiscal austerity, and implement new forms of political participation with the aim of democratizing the state. Although Correa’s administration made advances along these lines, notably resulting in one of the most progressive constitutions in the world and in admirable reductions in poverty and inequality, he soon found himself in conflict with the very social movements that had initially, if hesitantly, supported his candidacy. ^{Footnote 54} A key arena of contention was resource extraction. Although his government renegotiated oil contracts and replaced the woefully inadequate mining regulation with a new Mining Law (2009), indigenous and environmental movements increasingly entered into conflict with the administration over what they perceived as its aggressive promotion of resource extraction at the expense of healthy ecosystems and constitutional rights. The mining consultation I observed was situated in this emergent terrain of dispute: these activists deployed new participatory institutions with the aim of resisting a planned mining project that would directly affect their environment and livelihoods, and that they saw as emblematic of what social movements called the “extractive model” of development.

On October 2, 2011, the members of two community water systems (united under the umbrella organization UNAGUA) in the highland province of Azuay, Ecuador, decided to enforce their constitutionally mandated right to be consulted prior to the development of a nearby large-scale mine—a right they claimed that public institutions had failed to guarantee. The community-organized consultation presented UNAGUA members with a single question: are you in favor of the Quimsacocha gold mine, or not? Over 90 percent voted against the mine. President Correa responded swiftly. He dismissed the event as unconstitutional and invoked his impressive electoral record to assert the legitimacy of resource extraction. Each side appealed to distinct scales of democratic decision-making and distinct conceptions of the demos: the water-users’ association asserted the autonomy of locally affected communities; Correa countered that he was elected president of a nationally conceived demos. These appeals were shaped by available institutional norms and political objectives. UNAGUA based its claim to local authority on national laws and international conventions, with the aim of building a translocal anti-mining movement. Correa and bureaucrats relied on national and subnational electoral results to claim broad support for mining projects they saw as key to national development.

UNAGUA is the Coordinating Committee for Community Water Systems of Azuay, an umbrella organization comprising 31 community water boards in the canton of Cuenca, including those of the Victoria del Portete and Tarqui parishes that organized and participated in the consultation. ^{Footnote 55} UNAGUA is embedded in a multiscalar federation: it is part of the province-wide Federation of Peasant and Indigenous Organizations of Azuay (FOA), which is a part of the regional highland indigenous federation (ECUARUNARI) and, ultimately, the national indigenous federation (CONAIE). Although UNAGUA is linked to the regional and national indigenous movement, its members do not all, and at the time of my fieldwork did not primarily, identify as indigenous, but as campesinos: small-scale farmers, mostly in the dairy sector. ^{Footnote 56} However, during the consultation and other protest events, UNAGUA members deployed symbols and discourses that indexed indigeneity.

UNAGUA was founded to construct and maintain water infrastructure (drinking and irrigation) in response to being underserved by the public water utility (ETAPA). It became involved in anti-mining resistance in 2001, when Canadian mining company Iamgold received the 8,030-hectare concession to explore Quimsacocha, a planned large-scale gold mine in the high-altitude wetlands (páramos) above the two parishes. The project, considered, along with four others, “strategic” by the Correa administration, has not advanced past exploration, and in June of 2012 was acquired by Canadian exploration junior INV Metals. The relative cohesion of resistance to the Quimsacocha mine hinges on UNAGUA’s efforts and on the involvement of urban environmentalists. The communities that comprise the project’s area of influence are within the canton of Cuenca. The municipal center of Cuenca is Ecuador’s third-largest city. Rural and urban anti-mining activists have forged alliances by mobilizing to protect the Yanuncay watershed, which supplies farmers and city residents alike.

It was just after 2:00 p.m. on a chilly October afternoon in the páramo. Six of us crowded into the Victoria del Portete parish council’s office, which had been lent to UNAGUA for the consultation. We were “National and International Observers” from Ecuador, Spain, Holland, and the United States, and we had spent the day monitoring the consultation. We now turned to draft and sign an “Act of Observation,” the textual artifact that validated our own activity and that of the 1,037 voters, and which would be read aloud on the wooden stage in the plaza below, signaling the moment for music, dancing, and perhaps a surreptitious bottle of aguardiente.

According to the Act, the consultation was a democratic election: “ballot boxes” in “alphabetical order” required voters to register “with their personal information and identity documents” and “deposit” a “secret ballot.” The Act characterized the process as “peaceful and orderly, showing the civic attitude of the population of Victoria del Portete” as well as an “exercise of free speech and the right to be consulted in decisions that affect their life.” The wording of the text—“voting” by unidentified “participants”—effaced debates among both observers and organizers over how to refer to an emergent set of actors and practices. What is the relevant scale of the citizen? Is it an individual or a collective unit? Did the legitimacy of the consultation emanate from the local community, or from national laws and international norms, or from the presence of international observers?

Rescaling the Demos

The consultation began, as did many acts of protest in Ecuador, with a ceremonia ancestral. The musky sweetness of burning palo santo infused the air around the concentric circles of fruit, vegetables, grains, and flowers arranged on an electric pink and blue cloth embroidered with a highland Kichwa motif. This tableau served as a stage for speeches that testified to the alliances between the water-users’ association, the regional and national indigenous federations, environmental group Acción Ecológica, and Pachakutik, the indigenous political party. When the ceremony ended, voting began. As per the instructions elaborated at a UNAGUA assembly, from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., UNAGUA members voted yes or no to the following: Are you in agreement with mining activity in the wetlands (páramos) and watershed of Kimsacocha? ^{Footnote 57}

From its inception, event participants engaged in the politically charged process of scaling democracy. UNAGUA members asserted their authority over a project that they feared would contaminate the local ecosystem and waterways. This assertion drew on available legal norms—the ballot cited the 2008 Constitution, ILO Convention 169, and UNAGUA’s legal status as a water committee—linked to a variety of scales of governance (from the canton to the globe) and scales of democratic subjecthood (from the individual voter to “mother earth”).

The instructions not only cited legal norms, but also explicitly mimicked their formality, even conforming to the format of an Ecuadorian law. They stipulated the election of a Community Electoral Tribunal, which along with the vote counters and the observers comprised the consultation’s electoral institutions. The tribunal presided and the observers watched as water users waited in line, were located on the voting roll, presented identification, and marked their ballots, which were subsequently tallied, recorded, and filed. The document stated that “part of the democratic exercise of communities, communes, peoples, and nationalities is the democratic participation at the ballot box to construct and decide transcendental issues” and cited constitutional articles and international conventions. The scalar shifts (from “communities” to “nationalities”) recapitulated the federated structure of indigenous ethno-territorial organization in Ecuador. ^{Footnote 58} But they also aligned with the scalar logic of the consulta. Through the routine techniques of democratic procedure, a local organization drew on the democratic legitimacy of a series of broader collectivities, and invoked concentrically encompassing units of “democratic participation” to ground the democratic credentials of the two voting parishes.

Throughout the consultation, UNAGUA members imagined the process as enacting the plurinational statehood established in the first article of the 2008 Constitution. They de facto defined plurinacionalidad as the multiplication of sites—and scales—of democratic decision-making. The consulta, then, was a multiplex act of resistance and rule, of subversion and compliance, at once routine (organizers called it a “civil” process) and extraordinary (“a marvel”). ^{Footnote 59} The water users of Victoria del Portete and Tarqui claimed an authority grounded in the “ancestral rights” of a community that “predates the state.” ^{Footnote 60} But their tactics did not refuse state authority; instead, they repurposed nationally and internationally recognized forms of democratic participation in protest against the government’s resource policies. They deployed a constitutionally guaranteed participatory institution to both display and consolidate local resistance to a nationally-strategic extractive project. This tactic soon inspired other communities affected by planned mining projects: the vertically scalar appeals to national and international norms intersected with the lateral scale-making of building a translocal, anti-mining movement.

In addition to legal norms, the consultation procedure was shaped by the water committee’s organizational practices: 1,037 of the 1,500 water users voted according to the principle of one vote per water right, which usually was one per family but could be up to four. UNAGUA members ratified this vote distribution during two planning assemblies. ^{Footnote 61} Decision-making power and responsibilities in other realms of parish life, such as the communal labor practice called the minga, are allocated according to the household’s water consumption. According to a radio interview on the day of the consultation with UNAGUA President Carlos Pérez,

As Pérez explained, rights are allocated according to household size, including those currently residing in other provinces or countries. (Another member of the household can represent up to four minors, migrants, or elders.) For Pérez, delegation ensures full recognition of the right to water, “which is a human right.” This vote distribution rule, however, would later be labeled “undemocratic” by official discourse. This vote allocation challenged the most fundamental of democratic scales: the individual citizen, wherein one “unit” of democratic authority (the vote) is mapped onto one discretely embodied subject (the voter). ^{Footnote 63}

The results imparted an immediate sense of victory: 93 percent of the 1,037 participants voted against the Quimsacocha mine. The closing speeches characterized the event as an act of democratic sovereignty, and linked it to broader political identities and projects: the participants had registered their “will,” writing themselves into “the history of peoples and nations that have chosen this path,” a history to be read and reread (“this message must spread, comrades”). ^{Footnote 64} ECUARUNARI President Tenesaca invoked an expansive democratic subject: every one of us, our children, pachamama (mother earth). But however broadly construed its collective author, the event exceeded neutral proceduralism. It might have been a civil or civic process—the adjective cívico is ambivalent—but it was also a call to arms. Tenesaca exhorted, “let’s unite more, work more, and from here comrades, we have to organize a march to Quito.” CONAIE President Cholango, raising his fist in the air, proclaimed, “No one and nothing will stop our fight in defense of water and in defense of our territories . . . to construct a better Ecuador, without mining in our territories.” Cholango cast the UNAGUA members as protagonists in the reconfiguration of the relationship between the people, its territory, and its resources. His statement scaled up the consulta from the local and present to the national and historic: it was a means to a “better” Ecuador and an imagined post-extractive future.

It was precisely the deployment of recognizable democratic procedures that allowed for claims to such seemingly disproportionate scales of representation: through the act of voting, 1,037 water users became a nation, a people, mother earth. But the moment such claims were made, they became ammunition in the political battle over resource extraction. Oriented to the future, to its reception and replication in other locales, the consultation became a model for the translocal anti-mining movement activists both advocated and hoped for. The event’s political status—in Ecuador, “political” was most often construed as pejorative—was quickly seized on by the Correa administration to question the consultation’s democratic credentials. State officials would portray the consultation as compromised by procedural irregularities and political manipulation, and the results as failing to represent a democratic will. These portrayals were in turn mobilized to challenge the legitimacy of local participatory democracy, as opposed to national electoral democracy.

Scaling Down the Consulta

When I spoke to Pérez a month and a half later in his law office in downtown Cuenca, he was optimistic. ^{Footnote 65} The consultation had “achieved legitimacy”; its “impact . . . is even at the international level.” Three weeks after the consulta, Correa visited Quimsacocha, accompanied by reporters, to explain that the mining project would not pollute the watershed, and to deride anti-mining activists for spreading “lies” and “mental fundamentalisms.” ^{Footnote 66} For Pérez, the president’s visit testified to the national scale of the event. At the local level, consultation seemed contagious: Pérez told me about several more slated consultas, regarding mining and hydroelectric plants. ^{Footnote 67} “The communities have awoken. The leaders have said, you convinced us.” For Pérez, a new era of anti-mining resistance had commenced:

Peréz played on the multivalence of vía as both road and route, imagining consultas as a material infrastructure to sustain translocal anti-mining resistance. In a political context suffused by new participatory institutions (including four national referenda Correa has convened), consultations project democratic legitimacy.

The official response criticized the Quimsacocha consultation on democratic and constitutional grounds. When I arrived in Victoria del Portete along with the other observers, we saw a sheet of paper tacked to a pole near the plaza: its heading read ALERTA. It stated that “the Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Organizations of Azuay” (FOA), the base level organization of ECUARUNARI of which Pérez was also president, “has convened, without consultation and in an illegal and illegitimate manner . . . the misnamed ‘Consultation’ which is in reality an PROSELYTIC ACT of Dr. Carlos Pérez Guartambel.” It accused the “deceitful consultation” of presenting a “leading and false question without legal grounds because the Mining Law in Article 87 says that the State is responsible for executing the processes of consultation . . . being an authority non-delegable to any private institution” and that all consultation processes must be approved by the National Electoral Committee (emphasis original). It concluded that the consultation “IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” a “crude political manipulation on the part of the permanent opposition to the Government.”

This anonymous warning contained several tropes of the official response to the consultation. It dismissed UNAGUA’s performance of institutional formality, claiming for the state the sole authority to execute consultations and interpret the constitution. It denigrated the process as political, as opposed to constitutional or legal, and as the work of a single politician rather than the community. The warning rejected the scalar logic of the consulta, which claimed the democratic authority of the local community via an appeal to more encompassing legal orders, whether national constitutional rights or international conventions. The warning scaled the event down, reframing the consulta as the political machination of a single individual.

The Saturday after the consultation, Correa devoted a significant portion of his weekly address to the event. ^{Footnote 69}

In addition to outright manipulation, Correa argued that consultation is a political practice that inherently encourages the search for supporters to legitimate a pre-existing objective:

Correa deflated the consultation’s scalar logic: in his framing, rather than enabling a set of individuals to represent a community and that community to represent an entire nation or mother earth, the consultation scaled down (from “the neighborhood” to “the two families”) in a never-ending search for the outcome preferred by its organizers. It merely represented the latter’s political agenda instead of a democratic will.

In advance of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ 2012 decision on a case regarding prior consultation, Correa again emphasized that consultations encourage the search for support among an increasingly narrower base. ^{Footnote 70}

Correa both deflates the democratic aspirations of anti-mining activists and takes them seriously in their quest to replicate the Quimsacocha consultation model in every potentially affected community. If such “popular consultations” were carried out in “each community,” he asserted that “democracy” and “our development”— linked through the electoral legitimation of extraction—would come to an end. He opposed the national good to local particularism. Erasing the collective labor of UNAGUA members, Correa referred to political leaders who “obstruct any national development project,” suggesting that the consultation’s local scale favors the rule of the few over the rule of the many.

Concern about local obstruction accounts for the administration’s hesitation to substantively enforce prior consultation. Official participation processes (“socializations”), co-organized by state and corporate actors, have been implemented for many oil and mining projects, including the open pit Mirador mine under construction in the Amazon. ^{Footnote 72} Socializations are informational presentations. Citizens may ask questions and comment, but only “technically viable” statements are included in project evaluation, thus mitigating the risk of creating a forum to oppose projects. While the president and bureaucrats insist that socializations are non-binding, they equally insist that the people rule—and already have ruled in favor of extraction—through national elections that directly communicate their will. Technocratic socializations at the local level are the flip side of unmediated popular sovereignty at the national level.

While the administration sought to limit the potential for local opposition, anti-mining activists aimed to amplify it. In the process, they grappled with the tension that inheres in deploying a democratic institution as a political tool. The legitimacy of collective decision-making is conditioned on the relative open-endedness of outcomes (what Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl refer to as “bounded uncertainty”). ^{Footnote 73} But in order to function as a protest tactic, consultations must display community opposition to mining. As Pérez put it during a forum on “Community Consultations in Resistance to Mining” in Cuenca, a “lost consultation”—a community voting “yes” to a mining project—would not only undermine the local movement but the possibility of consultations as a replicable model. Pérez worried that a defeat would encourage mining companies to carry out consultas and “an important tool of resistance would be lost.” “Urban consultations” were too risky: the perception among activists was that the inhabitants of Quito and Guayaquil were geographically and politically distant from mining projects. ^{Footnote 74} The minutes of a planning meeting in Cuenca for the March for Water, Life, and the Dignity of Peoples reflect this concern:

Activists recognized the risk of battling a plebiscitary president on his own terrain. But they also highlighted the pitfalls specific to a national consultation. In community consultations, the notion of “directly affected” delineates the relevant democratic subject, and national and international legal norms ground the community’s democratic authority. A national consultation would refigure the democratic subject as the national citizenry, whose “outer edges” are drawn by the boundaries of the national territory. At this scale, the effects of extraction are less “direct” or at least less visible; likewise, “the nation” is not the subject of national or international rights to participation in decision-making over extractive projects.

Activists likely had these contrasts in mind when they dismissed the possibility of national consultations as an anti-mining strategy. However, the links between identities, interests, and democratic scale are not written in stone; the scales of democracy are only ever provisionally settled and can be reconfigured through politically effective action. Two years later, environmental activists launched a campaign to hold a national referendum on oil extraction in the Yasuní National Park. While the outcome confirmed activists’ fears that “the government controls everything”—hundreds of thousands of signatures were rejected in a controversial counting process, blocking the referendum—the movement against oil extraction in the Yasuní transcended directly affected communities, and was especially active in the urban areas that anti-extractive activists have found challenging to mobilize. ^{Footnote 76}

Returning to Correa’s speech, he alleged that the “political” orchestration of the consulta resulted in a series of procedural irregularities and undermined its democratic credentials. For state actors, the most salient procedural irregularity—and that most relevant to scaling democracy—was a woman who ostensibly voted six times. She appeared in this speech and in several articles in the state-owned newspaper:

And in a video screened during the speech:

As discussed, voting rights were allocated according to number of water titles. UNAGUA members’ and observers’ efforts to calibrate organizational practices with procedural norms were interpreted as the manipulation of democratic formality to serve “political” ends. But the assertion that multiple votes per person violated democratic procedure is grounded in an assumption about the scale of democracy’s smallest unit: the citizen. Does citizenship map onto a discretely embodied individual, or can it be stretched to encompass multiple individuals? Official criticisms of the Quimsacocha consultation were therefore not merely procedural. Claims about the improper registration of voters were claims about who constitutes the collectivity to be consulted, and staged a debate over the appropriate scale of democratic rule.

The Elusive Demos

Consultation organizers and the Correa administration drew on existing institutional norms, organizational practices, and social meanings to construct the identity of “the people,” articulate their interests, and link both to a scale of democratic decision-making. The analytic lens of scaling democracy reveals that such positions are not preordained. They are articulated in the relational process of political conflict, wherein actors innovate discourses and strategies in response to their opponents and evolving political conditions. In this case, the result was a complex repertoire. In pursuit of their political objectives, each side invoked the legitimating force of both the national “people” and the local “community,” and claimed that these collectivities had communicated their will through mechanisms of representation: the consultation, the election, the referenda.

Responding to demands to “democratize democracy” via substantive consultations, Correa pointed to his electoral record. As he stated in a speech a few months after the consultation,

For Correa, participatory democracy is, in the usage of activists, a deceptive term that proclaims democracy but means its opposite: a regime in which the unelected govern and, as he went on to say, “impose their fundamentalism and infantilism of ‘no to oil’ and ‘no to mining.’”

During his speech immediately after the consultation, he was more specific, focusing on parish-level election results to demonstrate the democratic credentials of mining projects:

Likewise, he referred to the results of a 2011 national referendum unrelated to mining (in which the majority of voters in the two parishes voted in favor of the government’s position). Elections and referenda lost their specific content and became interchangeable shows of local support for any government decision. Whatever the outcome of the “so-called consultation,” if elections ensure prospective representation, the people had already willed that the nation’s mineral resources be exploited. ^{Footnote 78} As a corollary, opposition to mining is opposition to democracy (despite the election of anti-mining candidates at the subnational level).

The Correa administration’s model of resource governance thus involves a complex set of relations between affected communities and the geographically dispersed national population. His invocation of parish-level election and referenda results suggests that the government prizes local political support. The viability of extractive projects requires local quiescence, or at least tacit acceptance: resistance can scare off investors and disrupt mining activity. Indeed, activists uniformly interpreted the 2012 sale of Quimsacocha from Iamgold to INV Metals as a sign of political success. Although there are other explanatory factors (e.g., corporate actors saw the 2009 Mining Law as unfriendly to investment), bureaucrats also worried that local protest—especially the 2011 consultation—had stalled the project. ^{Footnote 79} State actors see public investment in local communities as key to mitigating resistance. Decree 870 established a state-owned enterprise (Ecuador Estratégico) tasked with “the redistribution of national wealth and to bring development to citizens . . . in whose territory nonrenewable natural resources are located” to “make these communities the first beneficiaries of oil, mining and natural wealth in general.” ^{Footnote 80}

As Correa stated, however, extractive projects are a conduit of national development. And since Correa was elected on a pro-mining platform that benefits the national majority, mining is democratic. This vision opposes myriad particularisms (“half the community,” or “these three families”) to the national interest in resource extraction. When the CONAIE (the national indigenous federation) challenged the constitutionality of the 2009 Mining Law, Attorney General Dr. Néstor Arboleda claimed that “the State, in search of the buen vivir (living well) of its population, and being the property owner of non-renewable resources, has the obligation to seek the general interest over particular interests.” ^{Footnote 81} For these officials, prior consultation as interpreted by the CONAIE would spell the end of democracy. It would, as Correa stated, be “impossible to govern” because it would fragment the nationally conceived demos and unified territoriality required for state rule. But for indigenous and environmental activists, prioritizing the interests of a homogenously conceived nation over those of affected communities erases the uneven territoriality of extraction. As Monica Chuji—an Amazonian Kichwa activist who served under the Correa administration before resigning due to disagreements over resource extraction and indigenous rights—stated, “the common good is a pretext to violate the rights of communities that are also citizens. It is contradictory. We are also part of the state.” ^{Footnote 82}

The official democratic imaginary became a discursive resource for bureaucrats tasked with mining policy. As Mariuxsi Flores, the Provincial Director of the Public Development Institute for the Amazonian region (ECORAE), told me:

Despite being constitutionally required, Flores ruled out consultations for mining projects in the “national interest.” She repurposed the logic of directly affected to justify the democratic credentials of extraction. Though she referred to “those harmed,” she repeated the positive impacts (“benefit”; “benefits”; “beneficiaries”) for “all of the nation.” But later in our conversation, she extolled the importance of cash transfers and healthcare in “convincing” indigenous Shuar communities to support mining. Flores’ appeal to benefits at the national and local levels reveals how the identity, interests, and scale of democratic peoplehood is partly constructed through public investment funded by resource revenues. In the context of a dispute over the meaning of prior consultation, such situated interpretations have pragmatic effects. Just as activists’ pronouncements potentially consolidate collective action, state actors’ understanding of prior consultation shapes the law’s implementation, enabling particular forms of collective identity.

Anti-mining activists also appealed to multiple scales of democratic decision-making and democratic peoplehood. During the consultation, they shifted from defending the democratic authority of affected communities to making assertions about the people as an undifferentiated mass. The event instructions specified at the outset that the participants were the users of “Community Water System of the parishes of Tarqui and Victoria del Portete.” The document, however, interpolates this particular collectivity as one example of “communities, communes, peoples and nationalities” that exercise democratic rights. Meanwhile, the invitation sent to observers refers to “indigenous and mestizo peoples of Victoria del Portete and Tarqui” and “affected communities.” The Act of Observation we drafted is less precise: “participants” and “the population.” Speeches addressed an even broader collectivity: “the people,” “Ecuador,” “comrades,” “pachamama,” “our children.”

Whether they aim for a país minero or a post-extractive Ecuador, both sides in the dispute over resource extraction in Ecuador appealed to the legitimizing force of local participation in the service of translocal political projects. Just as state discourse alternated between equating and sharply contrasting local preferences with “the national interest,” anti-mining activists alternated between differently scaled democratic collectivities. This proliferation of democratic subjects was not arbitrary. In the case of the Quimsacocha consultation, a situated political calculus drew and innovated on an available repertoire of collective identities, guiding decisions about referential practice. The invocation of a given identity depended on the audience (participants, observers, domestic or international supporters), the context of reception (the plaza, activist listservs, the press), the actor’s objective (mobilizing local activism, building translocal alliances, projecting legitimacy), among other factors. National laws and international conventions encouraged an emphasis on the communities “directly affected” by extraction; the imperatives of movement-building encouraged invocation of other potentially affected communities; the national scale of resource policy, and the president’s plebiscitary bent, encouraged two parishes, the smallest unit of representation in Ecuador, to claim national peoplehood. Political contexts, enduring and ephemeral, shape the substantive content of scaling democracy. And, if felicitous, such descriptions of the relevant collectivity and their democratic credentials can shore up the collective identities and forms of participation they invoke. This is the performative capacity of political discourse—and, in this case, scale-making in action.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Resource Curse and Diversifying Democracy

My ethnographic study of a community-mining consultation in Ecuador demonstrates that conflict over democratic authority at the national and local level can be seen as an agonistic process of scaling democracy. The actors I analyzed aimed to shift the locus of democratic decision-making to more or less encompassing territorial scales, and are grounded in contextually specific understandings of “the people” (the local community or the national demos) and their interests (anti-extractive resistance or extraction-funded development).

The analytic lens of scaling democracy sheds new light on the increasingly contentious dynamics that suffuse democratic participation in resource policy in Latin America. In Bolivia, indigenous communities and state actors clashed over the implementation of prior consultation in regards to a highway project. ^{Footnote 84} In Argentina, citizens have voted against mining in popular referenda organized by municipal governments, resulting in conflicts between organized movements at the municipal level and provincial governments that depend on mining rents. ^{Footnote 85} In Guatemala, informal mining consultations like the one I observed have emerged as a successful collective action strategy among indigenous communities emerging from the trauma of civil war. ^{Footnote 86} In Peru, another country where scholars have noted a historically weak indigenous movement, organized peasants have pressured municipal governments to hold popular consultations on mining projects, as well as organized informal consultations—and entered into direct conflict with the national government. ^{Footnote 87} In Colombia, affected communities (both indigenous and non-indigenous) have organized informal consultations; the national government has responded with repression. ^{Footnote 88} Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has ruled against the government for the failure to properly consult indigenous peoples over mining—and some indigenous groups have in turn criticized the Court for what they see as an overly procedural interpretation of consultation. ^{Footnote 89} Most recently, in Venezuela, indigenous communities have protested the government for failing to consult them prior to an executive decree that expanded mining development in the Orinoco Delta. ^{Footnote 90}

In these conflicts, actors appeal to a similar repertoire of claims. As was the case in Ecuador, conflicts tend to be structured by opposing appeals to local versus national authority, and actors tend to ground their claims in distinct legal rationales (international law versus state sovereignty) and ideological frames (popular environmentalism and indigeneity versus resource nationalism). In addition, these conflicts are inescapably transnational, involving multinational corporations and transnational advocacy networks. Despite these shared features, the concept of scaling democracy draws our attention to the political construction of the identities and interests linked to the scales of democratic peoplehood—a process conditioned by contextually-specific institutional norms, organizational infrastructures, and social meanings. Further research on such conflicts over democratic scale would expand our knowledge of the conditions under which the scales of democracy become the crux of political conflict, and of the specific dynamics of how such conflicts unfold.

These emergent democratic practices invite us to reconsider prevailing approaches and findings in the scholarship on resource dependency and democracy. According to the “political resource curse” hypothesis, resource dependency encourages authoritarian regimes or low-quality “pacted” democracies, repression, bloated bureaucracies, and violent conflict. ^{Footnote 91} But when affected communities are politically organized, participatory institutions can potentially bolster the practices of democratic citizenship, challenging the notion that resource dependency and democracy are like oil and water. Precisely because the right to prior consultation is legally recognized but often not substantively enforced, its formal codification has occasioned social mobilization and demands for inclusion in policymaking. Insofar as social actors have filled the enforcement gap with their own informal consultations, they model what a more democratic politics of extraction might look like.

These forms of democratic contestation also impart a methodological lesson. Building on scholarship that has re-evaluated the political resource curse and found that the political effects of oil or mineral dependency are institutionally mediated and historically contingent, I also suggest that there is a link between the predominant conceptualization of democracy in formal-institutional (and easily quantifiable) terms and associated empirical findings. ^{Footnote 92} In contrast, the preceding analysis relies on a qualitative and situated understanding of democracy, including informal practices. Such informal institutions comprise not only deviations from legitimate democratic procedure (e.g., clientelism) but also encompass elite and citizen practices that deepen democratic contestation and accountability. ^{Footnote 93} Informal and context-specific practices such as the Quimsacocha consultation question the assumption that the state is the unique locus and guardian of democracy. In Sheldon Wolin’s terms, such processes constitute “fugitive democracy”: created and renewed in episodic, transgressive acts that challenge constitutional limits on the category of “the people” and institutionalized modes of participation. ^{Footnote 94} Scaling democracy is just such a practice. In collaboration and contention, situated actors map democratic decision-making and the bounds of the demos onto more or less encompassing territories. In the process, they settle and unsettle the scales of democratic sovereignty.

Finally, the concept of scaling democracy suggests a potential affinity between democratic theory and empirical research with an ethnographic sensibility. As Andrew Sabl compellingly argues, the study of democracy is marked by an empirical-normative divide. ^{Footnote 95} The distressing result is that democratic theorists produce work that runs the risk of being unmoored from pressing political events, while empirical researchers define and measure democracy in ways that neglect the conceptual complexity and range of extant theory. I agree with Sabl’s call for conversation across the divide. I would add that the site-intensive observation of contextually-specific democratic practices has the potential both to capture the complexity of democracy often occluded in large-N studies, and to diversify what Boanventura de Sousa and Leonardo Avritzer call the “canon of democracy.” ^{Footnote 96} The study of practices such as scaling democracy offers inspiration for new understandings of citizenship, the demos, the public versus the private, and the modes of participation in collective life—understandings that resonate across the divide of political theory and empirical research.