The early 21st century in Mexico has been referred to as Mexico’s mining decade.” In 2006 the Calderón Administration took power as mineral prices for key commodities – iron ore, copper, gold, and silver – changed from gradual increases to a historically unprecedented boom. Combined with the capturing of the legislative Congressional majority in 2006-2009, Calderón was able to target the policy areas most directly benefitting the mining sector: expanding the mining concession system on commonlands, providing tax breaks for foreign mining investors, and creating flexibilized labour laws to encourage the practice of subcontracting and weaken collective bargaining power in the sector. The result was an influx of foreign mining investment, which bolstered a pre-existing class of newly privatized domestic mining companies that had long standing linkages to national politics and the various institutions governing mining and NRG. The domestic mining technocracy, supported by the national mining chamber of commerce, mobilized advocates in favour of mining expansion in the national policy process, which slowly implemented a revolving door between pro-industry policy makers and the Mexican Mining Directorate and the Mexican Geological Service, the two agencies governing mining activities within the Executive Cabinet. This helped to fuel the expansion of the concession regime and mining production throughout the country, which further impacted mining states and rural communities within them.

Drawing on primary documents and interviews with a range of industry elites, government elites, and community actors, this paper traces the processes by which mining industry technical experts and financial specialists – referred to as “policy entrepreneurs” became key agents of change in Mexican natural resource governance via their permeation of existing environmental and land-tenure institutions of the Federal bureaucracy. This slow-moving institutional takeover was part of a shift in the relative influence of mining interests over community interests in national politics.

For South America’s developing and fossil fuel-dependent economies, energy transitions present openings with the potential to transform neo-extractivist development models. Decarbonization can reduce hydrocarbon extraction and generate industrial capacity for more sustainable energy sectors to improve terms-of-trade and better social welfare. At the same time, these openings pose risk whereby pursuing new energy sectors can entrench neo-extractivist challenges. Development financing institutions (DFIs) have an outsized financial and policy influence on whether opportunities outweigh challenges for South America’s hydrocarbon economies. They impact how green industrialization is approached and, in turn, how countries become integrated into global energy and financial networks.

This article examines the impact of DFIs on energy transitions in Ecuador and Brazil, as two paradigmatic yet diverse sites hydrocarbon neo-extractivism and energy transitions. Both countries are also receiving financing from predominantly United States- and Chinese-led DFIs. Yet, different positionalities in the international political economy (IPE) mean Ecuador and Brazil face diverse opportunities and challenges in leveraging development financing for energy transitions.

By analyzing patterns of DFI initiatives aimed at Ecuador and Brazil’s energy transitions and advancing a critical IPE perspective, I make two key arguments. First, US- and Chinese-led DFIs strategies tend toward maintaining existing globalized capitalist dynamics of energy and financial networks. In particular, there is a detrimental lack of focus on green and just industrialization. Second, Ecuador and Brazil are increasingly turning to regional and national DFIs to serve developmental goals, with varying degrees of success that can be attributed to their respective positions in the IPE.

Few countries have raised the expectations of exploiting the contemporary surge in demand for battery metals like Bolivia. The country sits on the world’s largest known deposit of lithium but has thus far failed to generate revenues of any significant value. Explanations for Bolivia’s less than remarkable record are attributed to an unforgiving climate (too much rain, too much magnesium), regional and class conflicts, and competing visions about the role of lithium in national and subnational development trajectories. In 2023, the state-owned lithium company (Yacimientos de Litio Boliviano) signed agreements with Russian and Chinese companies to develop a new and largely untested technology for extracting lithium from the Uyuni salt flat. However, the agreements complicate an already strained relationship with the United States, raising questions about the future of lithium extraction in Bolivia. Drawing upon primary interviews in Uyuni, Potosí, and the capital city of La Paz, this paper explores the formal and informal mechanisms that have been used to legitimize and resist the expansion of lithium extraction in Bolivia. By documenting the claims, interests, and expectations of local stakeholders, we generate new insights about the political economy of extraction for a global energy transition.

The extractive sector is experiencing a profound transformation in the Americas. In the 1960s and 1970s, the nationalization of extractive companies was seen as a lever for industrialization and development. At the end of the last century, the opposition to neoliberal privatizations, notably of national extraction companies, was an important focus of social movements’ protests. In the early 21st century, post-neoliberal governments reclaimed property over extractive resources to sustain redistribution and development. The new concepts of neo-extractivism and commodity consensus then gained prominence to critique the sustained reliance on resource extraction for development by neoliberal and post-neoliberal governments alike at an age when, despite technologies, extractive sites are still turned into sacrificial zones.

Such concepts could emerge because the growing environmental consciousness has turned class struggle for resource property into socio-territorial-environmental struggles where extraction is rejected by important social and Indigenous movements as the new face of colonialism. Our studies of different sites of struggle – El Salvador, where a now contested metal mining ban was adopted; Honduras, where extraction stalled despite a neoliberal government installed by a coup; Ecuador, where official and informal referendums rejected resource extraction; and Chile, where local communities reject lithium extraction despite resource nationalism – unveils how movements have put the extractive sector on the defensive. By forcing a reflection not only about the property and the ways to leverage extractive rent but about whether extraction should take place in the first place, social movements in Latin America have created a powerful continental counter-hegemony: anti-extractivism.