Presentation short abstract

This paper considers competing conceptions and complex implications of Ecuador’s 2023 referendum, in which 58.95% of voters opted to halt oil drilling in Yasuní national park. Key paradigms are (neo)extractivism, direct climate democracy and asset stranding from below.

Presentation long abstract

On 20 August 2023, 58.95% of voters in Ecuador chose “yes to Yasuní”, in a pioneering referendum on whether to keep oil underground inside Yasuní national park. A world first in oil drilling halted through direct climate democracy, merely obtaining a referendum took ten years of political and legal struggles by grassroots campaigners. In 2007, Ecuador’s then-President Rafael Correa launched the Yasuní-ITT initiative, which sought to pre-emptively suspend oil extraction from the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil field in return for $3.6 billion from the international community for “net emissions avoided”. The project failed; only 0.37% of the target was raised. Correa cancelled the initiative in 2013, catalysing a decade of grassroots and Indigenous resistance. Drilling began in 2016, intensified from 2019, and was legally challenged by grassroots Yasunídos, who found eventual popular success in the sí vote. The complex contours of this longstanding struggle render it a pertinent case study to investigate two pervasive, converging phenomena: (neo)extractivism and ‘asset stranding’.

Building on the literature on the post-extractivist, geopolitical and asset stranding dimensions of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative and its failure, this paper extends the focus to the grassroots campaigns against drilling following Correa’s 2013 abandonment of the Initiative, which culminated in the vote to stop drilling in 2023. Specifically, I consider the meanings of the 2023 referendum and broader Yasunído struggle, and how they intersect with (neo)extractivism and asset stranding. I address research gaps on the 2023 referendum specifically, and on dialogues between the concepts of (neo)extractivism, asset stranding and direct climate democracy.