This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than half of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been marked for oil drilling, overlapping with Indigenous territories and areas of high biodiversity. The ecological and cultural impacts of oil extraction are well documented and have fueled some of Latin America's most prominent environmental movements.
Yet at the local level, extraction is not always met with resistance. My research investigates why Quichua communities living along the lower Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon accepted oil extraction despite its expected environmental consequences, such as river pollution, deforestation and habitat loss. Their territories overlap with the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project, which became famous during the 2007–2013 Yasuní-ITT initiative.
This proposal attempted to leave 20% of the country's last known oil reserves underground in Yasuní National Park in return for $3.6 billion (£2.6 billion) from international donors. The initiative aimed to avoid the emission of 407 million metric tons of CO₂ and protect the biodiversity of Yasuní. Its failure in 2013, officially due to the lack of financial support, cleared the way for the ITT oil project, which began operating in 2016.
It also gave rise to a national conflict led by the Yasunidos, a coalition of youth groups defending Yasuní and its people. This culminated in a national referendum in August 2023, in which Ecuadorians voted to halt the ITT oil project. When I first visited the lower Napo River in 2014, I wanted to investigate the potential consequences of the oil project for local people and their territories.
I expected to hear how residents would be affected. Instead, they kept telling me about the benefits they were going to receive. While the project was expected to have ripple effects on the river, land and forest, it would also bring jobs, indemnification money and so-called "social compensation" through projects in health, education and infrastructure.
I started to perceive oil as a local dilemma: either livelihoods were going to be affected or potential benefits from the oil company had to be renounced. What I didn't yet understand was why this dilemma so often seemed to result in the local acceptance of oil extraction. I traveled back to this region in August 2016, a month before the inauguration of the ITT oil project.
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