Paper short abstract:

The paper examines extractive capital social investment in Indigenous Communities. It traces tensions between funding for micro-entrepreneurship and community governance projects and considers what such frictions tell us about the vexed moral economy of late capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

In the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, a number of mining companies have made legal agreements with Indigenous Communities (as collectivities) for transfers of social investment funding such as health, education, and welfare programs and infrastructure projects. SQM, a lithium producer that operates with Chilean-Chinese capital, has differentiated its corporate social investment from other extractive capital. It has explicitly avoided dealing with Indigenous Community governance, investing only in company-defined projects, local business support through a competitive funding program to which individuals may apply (a form of microfinance). Speaking to a meeting of the Junta de Vecinos (neighbourhood council) in one community, an officer of SQM explained, 'we fill a niche', and outlined the ways in which the objective of the company was to support viable local business, not Indigenous Communities per se.

This paper will consider the claims to distinctiveness made by the company - it's 'niche' - as against a range of corporate led social investment in the region that promises 'development' for Indigenous Communities. I am particularly interested in the diverse ways that mining projects imagine a better indigenous 'self' through programs of 'creating capacity' (capacitación), Indigenous community responses to these programs and the local governance effects of corporate social investment delivery. The paper analyses tensions created by extractive capital social investment in Indigenous Communities, focussing on the tensions between fostering micro-entrepreneurship and projects of community governance and more broadly, what such tensions tell us about the vexed moral economy of late capitalism.