Dependency Revisited: Ecuador’s (Re)Insertions into the International Division of Nature

• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211070831
• Author: Pedro Alarcón
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211070831

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 243, Vol. 49 No. 2, March 2022, 207–226

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211070831

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

207

Dependency Revisited

Ecuador’s (Re)Insertions into the International

Division of Nature

by

Pedro Alarcón

Following the guiding thread of recent Ecuadorian economic history, a review of the

attempts of several Latin American natural-resource-rich countries to climb the ladder

of the international division of labor indicates that the construction of a particular per-

spective on development with the goal of reducing dependence on international com-

modity prices is nurtured by dependency theory and by the irruption of environmental

thinking in development studies. The Ecuadorian state embarked upon the pursuit of a

better position in the world economy mainly during its oil booms (1972–1981 and

2003–2014). Since the twilight of the last century, the state’s embrace of an official

environmental discourse and growing social environmental awareness have increas-

ingly held sway in development policy making, but the end of the most recent com-

modities cycle and the COVID-19 crisis have seen a highly indebted economy in which

dependence on exports of natural resources and imports of manufactured products per-

sists as the hallmark of a peripheral state.

Siguiendo el hilo conductor de la historia económica reciente de Ecuador, una revisión de

los intentos de varios países latinoamericanos ricos en recursos naturales por ascender en la

jerarquía de la división internacional del trabajo indica que la construcción de una perspec-

tiva particular del desarrollo con el objetivo de reducir la dependencia de los precios interna-

cionales de los productos básicos se nutre de la teoría de la dependencia y de la irrupción del

pensamiento ambiental en los estudios del desarrollo. El estado ecuatoriano se lanzó a la

búsqueda de una mejor posición en la economía mundial, principalmente durante sus auges

petroleros (1972-1981 y 2003-2014). Desde el ocaso del siglo pasado, la adopción por parte

del Estado de un discurso ambiental oficial y la creciente conciencia ambiental social han

prevalecido cada vez más en la formulación de políticas de desarrollo, pero el final del ciclo

de las materias primas más reciente y la crisis del COVID-19 han llevado a una economía

muy endeudada en la que persiste la dependencia de las exportaciones de recursos naturales

y la importación de productos manufacturados como sello de un estado periférico.

Keywords: Latin America, Neoextractivism, Oil policy, Development studies, Political

ecology, Rentier states

The commodity price downturn of 2014 cast a shadow of pessimism over

Latin America’s “idyllic decade” (Ocampo, 2015: 8). Waking up to the harsh

reality after a bonanza is not, however, new for Latin American countries that

Pedro Alarcón is a postdoctoral researcher on social climate change impacts and sustainability

innovation in southern Africa and northern South America at the Justus-Liebig-Universität

Giessen. He thanks Ronald Chilcote for comments that enriched this paper.

1070831LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211070831Latin American PerspectivesAlarcón/Dependency Revisited

research-article2022

208 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

have traditionally relied on “crisis-prone” natural-resource-driven develop-

ment models (Peters, 2017: 47). In such countries, the COVID-19 pandemic

merely exacerbates existing economic, social, and political crises. The purpose

of this article is to contribute to the study of the structural causes of recurring

crises in natural-resource-rich countries of the Global South, advocating the

revival of key tenets of dependency theory and drawing attention to the irrup-

tion of environmental thinking. International commodity price cycles serve as

a point of entry for an outline of the conditions imposed on peripheral states by

the capitalist world economy.

The article offers an in-depth analysis of the political economy/ecology of

development in natural-resource-dependent countries by focusing on the para-

digmatic case of Ecuador. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the country in the midst

of a multidimensional crisis that started with the end of the “commodities

super-cycle” of 2003–2014 (Erten and Ocampo, 2013). I argue that economic and

social crises are the recurrent outcome of failed attempts to escape dependence

on highly volatile international commodity prices. The ensuing analysis takes

advantage of Ecuador’s condition of “model student” accurately replicating

Latin America’s telling economic and sociopolitical processes during the past

half-century. Three instances of consensus have steered development policy

making and deeply marked Ecuador’s domestic situation: (1) a consensus

around the idea of import-substitution industrialization as a way of departing

from the traditional natural-resource-driven development model; (2) the

Washington Consensus, in which comparative advantage (i.e., the possession

of natural resources) is regarded as the key to neoliberal globalization; and (3)

the “commodities consensus” (Svampa, 2015), which highlights the centrality

of natural resources in the development process and neoextractivism as the

prevailing development strategy.

The article is structured as follows: First, it locates the debate on natural

resource abundance and development in a Latin American framework and

presents an initial crucial issue for revisiting dependency theory: the role of

the state in the national development process. It goes on to contextualize the

concept of neoextractivsm, thereby highlighting the irruption of environmen-

tal thinking into development studies as the next key issue in reassessing

dependency theory. Then it delves into the case study and presents a dia-

chronic comparative approach to the Ecuadorian oil booms (1972–1981 and

2003–2014) in terms of the aforementioned categories of analysis. In the con-

clusions, insights are drawn from the case study with regard to natural-

resource-driven development models across the Global South and serve as a

pretext for a discussion on the direction of development studies and contem-

porary periphery debates.

“SOWING THE OIL”: A LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

ON DEVELOPMENT

The development of the capitalist peripheral state had been widely

approached in the academic literature from the end of World War II until the

late 1970s in terms of its structural heterogeneity and its extraversion. The idea