Transnational Corporations and Livelihood Transformations in the Peruvian Andes: An Actor-Oriented Political Ecology

Corporations have become the primary actors directing the structure and function of the global political economy and the influence of many of the largest transnational corporations exceed that of all but a handful of the most powerful nation-states. In the past decade, the power of transnational corporations has been consolidated through rapid capital accumulation, increasingly uniform production and consumption, and the extension of operations into many new areas of the planet. As the global system of natural resource extraction and industrial production has been unified under a system of neoliberal economic and social policies, free trade, and investment, transnational corporations have also initiated profound transformations of natural environments that affect not only global and regional ecological processes, but also the local populations that are dependent upon them for survival. This article calls for new research in political ecology research to address these changes through the use of actor-oriented political ecology approaches focused on transnational corporations. I argue that this approach is one way to generate more careful