The ethics of material provisioning: Insiders’ views of work in the extractive industries

Abstract

While social science research has vividly studied the extractive industries by documenting and theorizing their impacts on communities and the corporate social responsibility teams who manage those relationships, this article draws on ethnographic research to investigate the ethical and political frameworks of the people who work in technical positions inside of these industries. I argue that they provide one example of a much larger phenomenon of an “ethics of material provisioning” that seems to animate industry insiders’ understandings of their work: they view themselves as providing the material basis for people’s everyday lives around the globe. This ethical framework is simultaneously a political one, as foregrounds an imperative to meet rising resource demand rather than questioning or reducing that demand. Analyzing these professionals’ point of view as an ethical and political framework rather than as only the play of ideology draws attention to how debates about resource production are fundamentally about our moral commitments and the role of minerals in the kinds of lives we desire for ourselves and our others.