Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Extractivist economies are interwoven with socio-environmental conflicts throughout Latin America, where mining and agribusiness have damaged ecosystems, livelihoods, public health and socio-cultural practices. These conflicts frequently unfold in areas of criminal rule, yet variation across these governance regimes remains poorly understood. We contend that empirical cases across Latin America reveal substantial diversity in how criminal groups engage with socio-environmental conflicts: at times violently enforcing extractive frontiers, while at others, mediating disputes, responding to community grievances, imposing environmental rules and/or banning particularly harmful activities. The article examines these incongruous dynamics to propose a new typology of criminal socio-environmental governance. Drawing on primary research from the Colombian Pacific and key examples from across Latin America, we analyse how criminal groups engage in and respond to socio-environmental conflicts, mapping across governance regime-types, relations with communities, economic actors and the state. The article advances the criminal governance literature by shifting the empirical focus from the urban to rural sites of extractivism. This shift illuminates the quasi-social contracts between criminal groups and local communities that shape how criminal socio-environmental governance regimes are formed, experienced and contested. In foregrounding the varieties of these governance regimes, the typology aims to forge new avenues of research that address the everyday realities of affected communities.
Authors: Gillies, Allan, Hume, Mo
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213481834