Political ecologies of time and temporality in resource extraction

Abstract

This article introduces a Special Section on time and temporality in natural resource extraction. The Special Section illuminates the importance of both resource temporalities and temporal strategies around resource extraction, including nostalgia and identity, political strategies to delay projects, and contested attempts at predicting and managing the future. In addressing these themes, contributors highlight divergent spatio-temporalities and memories of extractive landscapes, local people's anticipation of future effects from mining, and governmental and corporate practices to speed up project implementation. We suggest that various temporal aspects – such as history, memory, velocity, delay, and epistemologies of time – play a central role in how struggles and controversies over extractive development manifest in particular places. We also offer additional avenues for research on contested understandings of time and temporality in political ecology.