A failed Social Licence to Operate for the neoliberal modernization of Amazonian resource use: the underlying causes of the Bagua tragedy of Peru

Resumo

This paper analyses the social acceptability of the neoliberal economic policies pursued by Peru’s government among Amazon basin residents during Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). The García administration sought political and social approval for economic policies that profoundly differed from those advocated by indigenous groups, their representatives and support organizations, and other actors with a stake in the future of the Amazon region. The García administration sought to open the Amazon as a space for large-scale private sector investment from national and transnational corporations that would have expanded estate crop plantations, mostly in oil palm. It was believed that these policies would promote development pathways of the country’s Amazon region at the expense of indigenous traditional livelihoods and selfdetermination (Vittor, 2008). The policies encountered widespread organized social resistance in the Amazon resulting in the so-called Bagua tragedy of 2009 that made international headlines (Carlsen, 2009), resulting in 33 deaths and some 170 injured, at least half by gunfire.

We use the concept of a social licence to operate (SLO) to interrogate why the policies of economic reform in the Amazon failed to secure social legitimacy. Since 1997, the concept of a SLO has assumed a growing importance in the theory and practice of corporate governance. However, so far the concept has been developed and applied only to private sector businesses. We broaden the definitional scope of the concept of a SLO and apply it not to the private sector actors who sought to benefit from the García administration’s opening of the Amazon, but to the administration itself. We argue that the resistance against the administration of Alan García in the Amazon can be explained in terms of a failure to secure a SLO? While the García administration was successful in obtaining legal approval from the political machinery of the Peruvian state, it failed to secure a SLO for these policies from an important section of Peru’s society, despite significant efforts to obtain such acceptance. The paper is structured as follows. The next section reviews the literatures on SLO, situating this concept in relationship to other forest policy tools such as legality verification, forest certification and corporate social responsibility (CSR). A central concept to all these tools is legitimacy. The related concepts of SLO and legitimacy form the analytical framework for the paper. The following section presents the case study, including a brief introduction to Peru and its forest communities. It also explains the policies of the García administration that were intended to open vast tracts of the Peruvian tropical forest region to mineral exploitation and agro-industrial production by national and international corporations. We consider the Peru-US Trade Promotion Agreement, which the García administration used as an instrument to pursue these policies. In the final discussion section, we argue that SLO analysis should be broadened from projects proposed by companies to a wider scale, namely government policies that enable business investment in resource extraction projects that are contested by social actors.We argue that in the case of Peru, the state is not necessarily a neutral arbitrator or intermediary that pursues optimal outcomes for society at large, but an active agent that is ideologically predisposed to certain models of economic development over others.