The third standpoint: the politics of accommodating to green agrarian extractivism

Extractivism is rife with multiple, dynamic politics. Beyond supporters and challengers, many – arguably most – act to accommodate to the extractivist order as best they can. Grounded in Guatemala’s green agrarian extractivism in the oil palm complex, I theorise this third standpoint and examine who accommodates, why and how. Using a ‘multi-dynamic politics framework’, I map actors, agendas, frames and repertoires. I distinguish accommodators by legal character (lawful/criminal) and by accommodative will (amenable/reluctant) across co-constituted class, gender and racialised–ethnic positions. Agendas diverge from a shared sense of inevitability: a dog-eat-dog criminal accommodation, to a lawful pursuit of inclusive, ethical, sustainable development. Lawful accommodators deploy contention strategies that broker fixes, fixes – raising wages and improving labour conditions, expanding land leases and contract farming and adopting climate-smart practices – to soften harms to working people and the environment. Yet these gains normalise green prosocial branding, keep commodity chains certifiable, and reproduce the green agro-extractivist order and its racialised class hegemony, even as criminal accommodation further entangles agro-extractive frontiers with violent, illicit economies. Naming and specifying accommodation clarifies how harm-reducing reforms can also stabilise extractivism. The analysis speaks beyond Guatemala to resource frontiers where pragmatic, accommodative reform both tempers and entrenches extractivism.