Visualizing competing claims on resources: Approaches from extractive industries research q Anthony J. Bebbington * , Nicholas Cuba, John Rogan Clark Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester MA 01610, USA Over the last decade, geographers have paid increasing atten- tion to the mining, oil and natural gas industries, collectively referred to as the extractive industries because they involve the physical extraction of a resource from the earth (Bebbington, 2012; Bebbington, Bornschlegl, & Johnson, 2013; Bebbington et al., 2008; Bridge, 2004, 2008; Budds, 2010; Bury, 2005; Emel & Huber, 2008; Haarstad, 2012; Hilson, 2009; Perreault, 2013; Valdivia, 2008). The rapid growth of China, India and other emerging economies has driven growing demand for minerals and energy. This has led to dramatic price increases and, in response, extractive industry companies have sought out new projects e some in regions with a long tradition of resource extraction, others in areas with little or no such tradition. In many countries, the areas that are actually, or potentially, affected by natural resource extraction have grown significantly. This, in turn, has generated new pressures on re- sources as extractive industry competes for land, water, forests or coastal waters that are already being used by a range of other resource users: pastoralists, subsistence farmers, artisanal fish- erman, small scale miners, urban residents who depend on distant water resources, export oriented agriculturalists, organic producers and others. Analyzing such struggles over access to resources has been a mainstay of political ecology, an endeavor that seeks to “under- stand the complex relations between nature and society through a careful analysis of what one might call the forms of access and control over resources and their implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods” (Watts, 2000: 257). Political ecologists’ work, however, relies largely on narrative forms of analysis and representation and (with some exceptions) much less on cartographic, visual or quantitative forms. Yet, one apparent trend in conflicts over the environmental, land use and livelihood implications of this expansion of extractive industry has been the increasing use of maps as a means of drawing attention to the extent and the geography of the new forms of land use competition and conflict being driven by this expansion. Some organizations have come to the view that visualizing the geography of mining, oil and gas investment and the myriad ways in which it overlaps with the geographies of other resources and livelihoods might be a particularly powerful way to advocate for policy and institutional change (for the Andean countries, see for example the work of organizations such as Cooperacción [Peru], Instituto del Bien Común [Peru], Acción Ecológica [Ecuador], CEADESC [Bolivia] and Fundación Tierra [Bolivia]). During 2012, Oxfam America approached us with precisely this idea in mind. Oxfam America has worked on the implications of extractive industry for livelihoods and rights for well over a decade. Not only was it the first of the different Oxfams to take this topic seriously, it was also one of the first international non- governmental organizations to do so. Two countries in which Oxfam America had been particularly active in this regard were Peru and Ghana, and so when the organization proposed that we experiment with ways of visualizing the relationships between resource extraction and agriculture, they asked that our collabo- ration be focused on these two countries. This process, together with the reasons underlying Oxfam America’s growing interest in GIS and mapping, are described in Keith Slack’s paper in this issue. In the process of doing this work we issued a call for papers for a session at the 2013 meetings of the Association of American Ge- ographers that would bring together geographers who had experimented with visualization or the use of spatial metaphors as a means of analyzing and communicating the environmental and livelihood implications of extractive industry. The call became more successful than we anticipated and in the end one special session became two, and could easily have been three had not several persons who expressed interest ultimately been unable to attend the meetings. This special issue brings together some of the papers that were initially prepared for that session. Four of these papers present experiences and experiments in the visualization and/or spatial analysis of relations among extractive industry, livelihoods, natural resource use and environment in a range of countries: Ghana, Peru, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone. In the two remaining papers Keith Slack discusses how and why visualization and mapping have become of particular interest for a large development organization concerned with rights and livelihoods, and Kenneth Young offers a critical commentary on the special issue taken as a whole. In addition to the articles included here, papers were presented on: the use of video and film in documenting livelihood and environmental q This is an introduction for the upcoming special issue on Extractive Industries in the journal of Applied Geography. * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 508 793 7370. E-mail address: abebbington@clarku.edu (A.J. Bebbington). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apgeog http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2014.04.015 0143-6228/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Applied Geography 52 (2014) 55e56