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 theorize 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 racialized-ethnic positions. Agendas diverge from a shared sense of inevitability: a dog-eat-dog criminal accommodation, and a lawful pursuit of inclusive, ethical, sustainable development. Lawful accommodators deploy contention strategies that broker fixes, fixes—raising wages and improving labor conditions, expanding land leases and contract farming, and adopting climate-smart practices—to soften harms to working people and the environment. Yet these gains normalize green prosocial branding, keep commodity chains certifiable, and reproduce the green agro-extractivist order and its racialized 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 stabilize extractivism. The analysis speaks beyond Guatemala to resource frontiers where pragmatic, accommodative reform both tempers and entrenches extractivism.