Temporalities of infrastructure: An ethnographic study of rural road building,spectral mining,and good living

Abstract

Purpose

We examine how citizens and the state negotiate infrastructure projects using the concept of temporal incongruence. We consider infrastructures in a plural sense, following several projects in Andean, Ecuador, a region known for challenging roads and a history mining exploration and resistance. We set these layered infrastructure projects in the context of the postneoliberal state, an era characterized by the building of unprecedented mega-infrastructure as a way of fostering human wellbeing.

Findings

The introduction of the political value, buen vivir (good living) set the stage for the shift in infrastructure temporality by creating a political and economic environment that prioritizes human and ecological well-being. By juxtaposing the state-led approach to infrastructure with people's responses, we tease out temporal incongruence. We found that people's responses to infrastructure projects are closely tied to their ability to meet their immediate needs and ensure the well-being of people and nature.

Conclusion

Temporal incongruence is not merely a mismatch of timelines but a site of political contestation, where competing visions of development are negotiated and reimagined. The temporal reorientation towards the present, via buen vivir, calls for scholarly attention to the immediacy of lived experience taking precedence over yet to be delivered future gains.

Introduction

“Winter brings death and destruction” was the front-page headline on Periódico Intag's March/April 2009 issue. Rainfall had made the main roadway connecting the rural Ecuadorian Intag valley to the urban centers of Cotacachi and Otavalo treacherous and, on some days, impassable. On February 18th, 2009, following heavy rains, a bus became stuck midway, unable to continue through the muddy terrain. Two passengers decided to disembark and walk through the mud. They were caught by a landslide and died. The article began “The heavy rains . . . have caused tragedy” (Vetancourt, 2009: 1).

This tragedy underlines the delicate balance between life and death on this rural road, a balance which is at the mercy of nature. Nature figures in this newspaper account as a powerful force which damages infrastructure and takes away life. As the article continues, the focus shifts culpability from nature to the state. Quoting residents, reporter Pablo Ventacourt moves his analysis from a physical description of the accident to people's reactions. One resident was quoted, “If the Provincial Government of Imbabura's machinery were working, the accident never would have happened.” The Director of Transportation responded to the critique by assuring that they had been carrying out due road maintenance. In fact, just two days prior to the accident, the provincial government had machines working in the area. Residents retorted that, two months ago, in the same location, they had to clean a landslide by hand because the provincial government had ignored the situation.

Following the arc of this newspaper account, we can see how the state mediates between life and nature. In this instance, infrastructure fails as a life-preserving technology of the state, meant to control the hostility of nature. When making sense of the accident, local residents, Inteños, see state neglect as one of the contributing factors in this tragedy: preventative maintenance using heavy machinery would have staved off the damage caused by rain. It is the job of the government to build and maintain infrastructure which allows Inteños to mobilize themselves safely in all weather.

We claim that the temporality of infrastructure shifted during the postneoliberal period, creating temporal incongruence, in which past failures and future hopes took a backseat to the immediate and pressing needs of people and nature. Temporal incongruence signals a shift that is not merely a reordering of priorities but also a deeper transformation in how development is imagined and enacted. We follow accounts of several infrastructure projects, namely roads and a spectral mine, that were at various stages of development. We follow people's reaction to these projects with special attention to how people resist and refashion state-led development through alternative temporal logics. When people negotiated infrastructure projects, they did so using temporally layered narratives, invoking memories of past disappointments and aspirations for future livability. However, what ultimately prevailed were the urgent demands for present-day livability, indicating a politics of infrastructure rooted in the now. This present-oriented temporal frame, we argue, is a defining feature of the postneoliberal era where development is increasingly evaluated not by its promises of future growth but by its capacity to sustain life in the present.

The postneoliberal period

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted during the postneoliberal period in Ecuador, an era marked by a departure from neoliberal orthodoxy. Postneoliberalism, as used here, refers to a period of time when people and governments explicitly rejected the primacy of market logics and aimed to reorient political and economic life around principles of social inclusion, ecological responsibility, and state-led development (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012). Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia were amongst the first globally to pronounce the end of neoliberalism in the early 2000s via the election of Left-wing leaders who promised to turn away from the free market in favor of universal equality, national interests, and wellbeing of humans and nature (Coronil, 2011; Escobar, 2010). By 2008, the global stage was set for an upheaval marked by economic crises and large-scale political resistance such as the Arab Spring, the Greek debt crisis, and the Occupy Movement (Ishkanian and Glasius, 2018).

In the Latin American context, the postneoliberal period was characterized by re-centralization of the role of the state and nation-building, which included major shifts in the legislative and economic realms. Some common threads included nationalization of natural resources, extensive state-led development such as economic megaprojects (roads, dams, mines), and investments in health, education, and social systems (Falconer, 2018; Silva, 2016).

In Ecuador, the initiating of postneoliberal reforms began by striking a constituent assembly that rewrote the constitution (Conaghan, 2008). This new constitution erased the political ideal of freedom that characterized the neoliberal period (Harvey, 2007) and replaced it with a new political value the “regime of buen vivir” (Radcliffe, 2012). Sumak Kawsay in Quechua or buen vivir in Spanish privileged the immediate needs of life. The postneoliberal shift from freedom to good living was picked up by other Latin American governments, including Bolivia and Nicaragua, all of whom articulated an ethos of what it means to live well (Fisher, 2020; Ranta, 2016).

Buen vivir provided both a moral vocabulary and legal framework through which the state redefined its development agenda. For the first time globally, the Ecuadorian constitution codified the rights of nature. Chapter VII of the constitution stipulates that “Nature, or Pachamama, where life exists and is reproduced, has the right to have its comprehensive existence respected and its maintenance and regeneration of essential cycles, structures, functions, and evolutionary functions” (Constitution, Ecuador Asamblea, 2008, Article 71). Alberto Acosta (2009), president of the constituent assembly (2007–2008), described the rights of nature as a “freeing” of Pachamama, via a process of de-marketizating nature and a “reunion” between nature and human beings. The postneoliberal era provided the possibility of supporting the coexistence of humans and the natural world, yet this value-based model of development coexisted uneasily with an extractivist economic strategy (Caria and Domínguez, 2016).

With buen vivir in mind, the Ecuadorian government developed an array of social programs linked to core government competencies such as public schools, health care, poverty alleviation, and infrastructure. These programs were financed through a neo-extractivist economic model, neo because extractivism was used to support human welfare programs and, more controversial, advanced the premise that more extraction was needed to bring forward an economy that would eventually rely less on extraction (Beling et al., 2021; Riofrancos, 2017). This logic of development calls on competing temporal frames, where social programs, delivered in the present or near-future relied on prospects from the extractive industries. In a similar vein, fostering social wellbeing hinged on Ecuadorian communities accepting an ecological debt. This is an example of temporal incongruence we explore later in this article.

Much of the literature on buen vivir has importantly demonstrated how governments have used buen vivir as a political ideal to advance an alternative model of development that shifts the relationship with nature to one of coexistence rather than domination (Caria and Domínguez, 2016; Gudynas, 2011). At the same time, buen vivir is used to advance the extractivist model of development and at times used violent tactics to criminalize and delegitimize protestors (Merino, 2016; Sieder and Barrera Vivero, 2017). In line with previous work, we follow buen vivir as a state project as well as a terrain of contestation. We push the scale of analysis beyond the state to examine how everyday people understand and make sense of buen vivir, as well as how it is contested in mundane situations. June Nash (1992) was one of the early social scientists to note that the language of protest had shifted to life in Latin America, specifically in extractive contexts. Nash demonstrates how life was used by people who felt the very foundation of their way of living was at risk, while, ironically, political leaders were using the discourse of life to advance state agendas.

Drawing on ethnographic data in the Intag valley, we show how postneoliberal infrastructures were grounded in the relationality between humans and nature. The postneoliberal government sought to bring megaprojects such as extraction, energy, and roads into its domain, “freeing” nature from foreign or private interests. One of the ways the Ecuadorian state did this was by dismantling the system of subcontracting and privatization and re-centralizing infrastructure development. By focusing on several infrastructure projects, we show how infrastructures became a vehicle through which the state made claims to fostering well-being for Ecuadorians, while at the same time, the freeing of nature translated into a series of maneuvers which centralized the state's control over its territory and resources. Although postneoliberalism aimed to reconfigure the relationship between human and nonhuman life, it often reinscribed extractivist logics in new guises. Attending to these contradictions at the level of everyday experience reveals the limits of state-led transitions beyond neoliberalism and the contested terrains through which alternative models of development are imagined and resisted.

Postneoliberalism and roads

Roads have historically been used by governments to promote integration and the free circulation of goods and people (Larkin, 2013). President Gabriel Garcia Moreno is often credited with the first major road-building project, in the late 1800s. Nineteenth century Ecuador was a divided country. As a way of fostering unity, Garcia Moreno planned a main artery connecting the two major centers and six additional roads that would spider off and connect the entire country (Henderson, 2008: 7). Garcia Moreno's road building project remained an elusive goal for over a century. Ecuador's ecologically diverse landscapes posed major challenges for road building and cross-country integration. Efforts at road construction or improvement were short lived, or stymied due to assault of the natural elements. During fieldwork, the first author observed how quickly a smoothed dirt road would give way to deep potholes.

The postneoliberal government's use of infrastructure to advance the state-led promises of buen vivir was reminiscent of the way the railroad built under the governance of President Eloy Alfaro, was used as a centerpiece of the liberal revolution (Clark, 1998). Roads were used to make claims that the temporality of development had shifted to the present. In a press release announcing a historic road investment the Minister of Transportation declared “Inequality is over. Today we are building a different country, a different region. Finally, this province is receiving justice with the delivery of a first-class public work” (28 September 2011: Press Bulletin). Importantly, the Minister's proclamation, inequality is over, evoked the present tense. The bulletin emphasized that citizens had been waiting for this road for more than three decades, signaling the failures of previous regimes and a break from past models of development.

Previous research on infrastructure has demonstrated how states use the management of infrastructure to force a divide between humans and nature (Gupta et al., 2018), a type of conquering of the natural world via the technical. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, infrastructure projects in Latin America were influenced primarily by neoliberal and environmental developmentalism. This meant that infrastructure projects positioned nature as a product, or ‘catalyze[d] finite resources [non-renewables] into infinite resources [biodiversity]’ (Wilson and Bayón, 2017). Hetherington and Campbell (2014) refer to this deployment of nature as a “subtler affair…, leading states to emphasize their role as scaffolders of human and natural capacities” (192).

Roads stood as a conspicuous example of the shift from neoliberal developmentalism to post-neoliberal state-centric development. Decaying and abandoned roads symbolized the disappointments of neoliberalism as they failed to conjure a future of connectivity and economic progress. Roads throughout Ecuador, particularly those removed from urban centers, were in a state of disrepair, and, at times, impassable. In an effort to address road conditions, the neoliberal Ecuadorian state began contracting road improvements of main thoroughfares to a private company. The offloading of state competencies onto private industry did not result in better roads but instead shifted the cost of road construction and maintenance to individual users by installing toll stations. This was sharply contrasted by the postneoliberal government that celebrated the completion of road projects with press conferences and glossy brochures. Newly paved roads were peppered with billboards with the government's slogans and a proud announcement of the exact dollar amount invested in the project.

A crucial component of the Ecuadorian state's signaling a break from neoliberal developmentalism was state narratives that shifted the temporality of development from a continued state of deferral. A continued state of deferral meant the promised benefits of development were out of reach, which shifted to delivering development projects that met the immediate needs of Ecuadorian citizens. Neoliberal developmentalism operates on the future horizon – utilizing deferrals as a primary mechanism of delaying the promised benefits of development. The premise of neoliberalism is that freedom for all human beings will trickle down through the classes, via the unhindered, self-regulating market. To this extent, Tania Li's (2007) The Will to Improve and Penelope Harvey's (2005) Promise of Transformation both highlight that improvements are aspirational – to be enjoyed in the future. Roads are a type of infrastructure onto which this future-oriented metaphor is easily mapped, as roads provide the potential for economic growth by facilitating the movement of people and goods between places. Following this metaphor, mobility is the avenue to the modernist ideals of prosperity, progress, and ultimately freedom (Larkin, 2013). As can be seen in other contexts, however, this promised improvement will always be out of reach for many people, delayed to the future (Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012; Harvey and Knox, 2012; Hetherington and Campbell, 2014). In their work in South Sudan, for example, Bachmann et al. (2022) demonstrate the political value of ongoing infrastructure projects, what they refer to as “unending incompletion” as this allows governments to maintain political presence. This, in turn, comes to structure short-term political orientations for people living near such projects.

Postneoliberal developmentalism broke from this unending incompletion by shining a light on completed projects, delivered in the now. By shifting away from a future temporal mode, postneoliberal infrastructures have come to represent a decentering of economic progress that was the cornerstone of neoliberal development. Instead, postneoliberal infrastructures put front and center livability: how to provide for the immediate needs of citizens and the conditions necessary to sustain life. Going back to the tragedy described at the beginning of this article, the description of the landslide on the road is devoid of future temporality, and rather captures how infrastructure interfaces with life -both human and nature. In this case, encounters between people and infrastructure hinge on keeping death at bay. The breakdown of roads, such as in cases of landslides, highlights the edge of state control, and instances where citizens can negotiate dominant political values through their interactions with roads (Schouten et al., 2022).

What makes the case in Intag so interesting is the collision of real, material experiences of roads with the spectral threat of extraction. Both visible/present and invisible/spectral infrastructures are constitutive of social relations. These become sites via which people come together and negotiate what it means to belong (Amin, 2014) in the era of buen vivir. Carse and Kneas (2019) demonstrate the analytical fruit of approaching the study of infrastructure as constitutive of nonlinear relations. Our analysis is in step with this approach, taking as a baseline the examination of infrastructure as pluralistic - although it is tempting to isolate analysis to a specific infrastructure project such as the building of a road or the after-effects of a mine, this does not adequately capture the empirical world of infrastructure, where built spaces bring together multiple infrastructures, co-existing at different stages of development (imagined, under construction, finished, in decay).

In what follows, we demonstrate how multiple infrastructures, both built and unbuilt, function not merely as a physical entity but rather as a conduit through which the state facilitates infrastructure projects and where citizens negotiate state projects and development more broadly. Development is transposed into multiple temporalities, that amalgamate the immediacy of life, memories of the past, and aspirations and fears for the future. Our research in postneoliberal Ecuador demonstrates how changing approaches to infrastructure improvement were rolled out by the state and how citizens responded and negotiated road development. We pay attention to interactions between the state and Inteños in order to better understand the gap between official state plans and projects and the everyday experience of a road improvement project (Appel et al., 2018; Uribe, 2019). Much of literature on buen vivir has focused on this scale -the buen vivir state (see, for example, Walsh, 2010), but the state does not have a monopoly on meaning-making. By juxtaposing state narratives to grounded experiences in situ, we follow other social scientists such as Lindberg and Biddulph (2021) who focus on grounded political understandings of infrastructure, embedded in specificities of the environment and lived experience. Before turning to our empirical narratives, we provide some context to researching the Intag Valley and the broader project design.

The Intag valley

The Intag valley sits in the northern Ecuadorian Andes, in the province of Imbabura. It is a geographic rather than a political region defined by the chain of mountains, the Cordillera Toisan. Travel into the Intag valley can be a challenge, as the dirt roads twisting through the face of the mountain can be treacherous due to rain and fog. Travel is possible by personal vehicle or buses which run sparingly and connect only to the denser communities. These circumstances create a sense of remoteness and isolation for people living in the valley. The remoteness of the region serves as part of the appeal but also as an obstacle to life in Intag. Settlement in the region began in the early 1900s, as people moved from nearby regions in search of land. The settlers, referred to today as Inteños, developed sugarcane and penca ¹ crops, both of which served as principal cash crops for decades. By the 1990s, changes in consumers’ tastes combined with market volatility and state-driven changes, such as adopting the US dollar, contributed to the decline of both cash crops. Today, the economy remains largely agrarian-based. Agriculture is predominated by small- and medium-sized landowners and subsistence-based farmers. This period of cash-crop decline also prompted a period of out-migration, both on a short-term and long-term basis (Falconer, 2019). Inteños migrated to urban centers and international destinations, mirroring the national trend of an exodus of Ecuadorians in search of work in other countries such as Spain and the United States. In addition to these economic shifts, weather posed a challenge for Inteños. As most farmers use non-mechanized methods, including no irrigation, they are susceptible to changes in rainfall patterns. Inteños were noting rainfall was becoming harder to predict, both in terms of when it would begin to rain, as well as quantity and they were experiencing increased intensity of droughts and flooding (Falconer, 2019).

In line with these changes, the Intag valley was identified through a national geological survey as a site with mining potential (Shade, 2015). Shortly thereafter, the Japanese mining company Bitshimetals began exploration to assess the potential of developing an open-pit copper mine in the valley. In response, local residents protested the exploration, which would effectively turn their valley into an inhabitable crater, and successfully ousted the exploration company from the region. Inteños’ resolve with the anti-mining campaign has continued to stave off extractive development to this day, despite persistent interest by international mining companies and the Ecuadorian government. In an effort to assure the viability of life and livelihoods in Intag, and to counter the enticement of potential jobs stemming from extractive development, Inteños have developed diverse livelihood strategies such as organic farming and eco-tourism.

We use an anthropological approach to the study of roads as an object of ethnographic inquiry in order to show the layered and contradictory meanings attached to roads and buen vivir (Anand et al., 2018; Uribe, 2019). Intag was chosen as a place to study buen vivir at the beginning of the postneoliberal period precisely because of this tension between life, agrarian livelihoods, and (anti)mining. In the absence of a physical mine, the road became a proxy via which research participants negotiated neoextrativism, whereas roads facilitate the movement of trucks, machinery, and skilled labor. Using ethnography, we investigated the layered meanings of infrastructure, as well as what Hirsch (2019) refers to as the role of micropolitics in determining outcomes. Buen vivir can be thought of as a “window of opportunity” during which it became especially possible for micropolitics to be impactful and we show how Inteños were able to put pressure on state initiatives based on their situated experiences and knowledge of lived environment (Beling et al., 2021). Ethnography, as both a methodology and epistemological stance, enables a situated analysis of people's experiences, social relations, and political practices (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). By focusing on two road improvement projects, we heard accounts about what it means to live well and how to secure a livelihood in an agrarian context. In previous work, Gupta et al. (2018) noted how ethnographic work was used to “help redeem the promise of infrastructure by making more visible, and indeed more political, the formative role of infrastructures in the ways we think, build, and inhabit our shared futures” (p. 20). While some of the accounts we gathered were about hopes and dreams for the future, the accounts were always entangled with immediate, pressing concerns, steeped in past experiences and relations with the natural environment.

The ethnographic data we collected probed different meanings attached to roads. The two road improvement projects we followed included one completed, and one promised project for the future. Following Dalakoglou and Harvey (2012) we focus on the temporal meanings attached to these two projects. We complicate the conventional temporal frames that locate infrastructures on the future horizon, characterized by hopes and forthcoming promises. Through ethnographic data collected during political events, we show how temporalities are skewed under buen vivir, pulling past failures and future promises into the present moment. Moreover, by contrasting the state-led approach to infrastructure with people's everyday experiences, we show how roads are much more than dirt and concrete. They are a site via which research participants negotiate state development and make sense of their everyday lives.

The data used in this article is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Ecuador conducted by Falconer, predominantly in the Intag Valley, between 2009–2010, and 2012. Falconer lived and conducted participant observation in one of the parishes in the valley, with a population of just under 700 residents, and roughly 150 households. Fieldwork included partaking in community gatherings, both formal and informal, such as nightly volleyball matches, town meetings, and festivals. Falconer spent time visiting people's farms, spending time in their homes, and accompanying them on trips to the city. She would also observe and when possible support the activities of local organizations such as the health center, government offices, and small grassroots NGOs. Some of the data was collected at a political event in the city of Cuenca and in the Intag Valley. The latter location is where the Falconer resided during the ethnographic data collection phase of this project. The specific parish where the Falconer resided was chosen based on advice from Inteños themselves: its centralized population, history of mining resistance, and the presence of projects and organizations developed as a response to mining exploration would provide a rich context for the study.

Research data is comprised of interview transcripts, field notes, and documents. A total of 49 semi-structured interviews were recorded. Participant observation included speaking with neighbors, leaders of local organizations, elected and appointed political leaders, activists, health care workers, schoolteachers, and business owners. This also included events outside of Intag, such as political rallies and national anti-mining gatherings. Documents such as newspapers, political pamphlets, and official documents used by organizations in political protests, such as statements and legal filings, were collected and analyzed. After fieldwork, contact with research participants continued via social media, which was used not only to follow developments in Intag, but also to use a source of confirmation or clarification during data analysis. Preliminary data analysis consisted of NVivo word frequencies to identify patterns and meanings. Further analysis was conducted to draw out narratives and piece together events and programs across data sources. All interview excepts used in this article were translated from Spanish to English by Falconer. In the results section, we focus on a subset of data that pertains to roads and infrastructure development. It draws predominantly on political events and public meetings, which were documented in field notes.

Results

Computers for today, development debt for tomorrow

During fieldwork, research participants who were critical of the buen vivir regime under President Rafael Correa's leadership (2007–2017), raised suspicions that many of the state-led development projects, be it infrastructure, education, or health care programs, came with strings attached. Their suspicions usually stemmed back to their concerns that the government, via mining and prospecting ² companies continued to express interest in developing the underground copper reserve. As Inteños witnessed the government announce one large, capital-intensive development project after another, they were concerned that an increase in extractive development would also be needed to fund these projects. In other words, some Inteños were concerned that enjoying the benefits of state-led development today would leave them on the hook for extractive development tomorrow – a type of development debt. This means that as Inteños accept government-funded programs, such as cash transfers, school uniforms, and newly paved roads, it will become harder to stave off the interests in extractive development in Intag. If the proposed copper mine were developed in Intag, it would effectively render the valley uninhabitable – an open-pit copper mine looks like a crater, which would displace people from their homes and agrarian land. Additionally, copper mining is water-intensive, so even areas of Intag untouched by the mine itself would no longer have access to potable water.

Inteños’ concerns were verbalized in a speech made by President Correa himself, where he announced a new program in public schools as a bid to build popular consent for extractivism. In January 2012, the Andean city of Cuenca was host to the national government's fifth anniversary celebration of The Citizen Revolution ³ . The celebration included an assembly at an urban public school, where President Rafael Correa was going to announce a pilot program. The gymnasium had a peaked roof like a warehouse with rows of bleachers filled with students dressed in their formal school uniforms. Some of the students waved green balloons – the color of Correa's political party - and others bounced up and down, giving the gymnasium a celebratory feel. There was additional seating on the floor, with black plastic chairs arranged in rows, and divided into two sections, with a middle aisle running between them. Photographers stood in the middle aisle, readying their shots of the stage. The stage was set up with a podium, a long table with vacant chairs, and a larger-than-life poster as a backdrop. The poster featured two cartoon children, each one holding a computer. “Project My Computer” was written across the bottom, “The Citizen Revolution Advances” at the top.

After a procession and several introductions, President Correa stood up, and rather than standing at the podium like those who spoke before him, walked to the center of the stage and held the microphone in his hand. He looked out at the audience, “Youth are our hope” his face was lit up, “When we began, we didn't have libraries. Today we are giving out computers. This is the Citizen Revolution”. He smiled, like a proud father, as he spoke about the pilot project in which students in public schools would be given laptop computers. Correa began explaining the costs of delivering this new project, throwing numbers out, before coming to the grand total of $500 million as an initial investment to give every child in public school a computer. “How are we going to pay for these computers?” he asked. His voice intensified and his face scrunched. He yelled into the microphone, “We have to know how to take advantage of our natural resources! We have to end this ‘no to mining’, ‘no to petroleum'! Enough!” Silence settled over the gymnasium, as he continued, explaining that resources cannot be left sitting under ground when there is a need for health care, education, and development. He described the road recently finished in a rural region of Azuay, a region he described as forgotten. “When we deliver a road, the same as those in the first world, we aren't just delivering a road. We are delivering hope”. His excitement building, his voice boomed “We are not inferior to anyone! We have all the possibilities to move ahead!”

President Correa claimed that the well-being of school children hinges on the government's ability to productively unearth the wealth of nature. His speech implied that the needs of children were a priority over the rights of nature, a pillar of buen vivir. As will become clearer, the deferred promise of transformation which characterized neoliberal development is no longer at play. Instead, the postneoliberal development model relies on incongruous temporality by celebrating present improvements – being delivered in that very moment (i.e., computers) – and mobilizes these improvements to move forward the much-contested extractive development economy (i.e., undermining mining protests). At the same time, this speech also shows how infrastructures involve a symbolic mimicry in order to evoke modernity. When Correa refers to the road being the same as the “first world”, he is making a narrative move that Larkin (2013) explains in the following way: “infrastructure projects are copies, funded and constructed so that cities or nations can take part in a contemporaneous modernity by repeating infrastructural projects from elsewhere to participate in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern” (333).

Although the speech evokes a future temporality, citing hope and using the language of “moving ahead”, even dismantling the shackles of being a country ‘in development’, this temporality is invoked to rationalize the continuation of the Citizen Revolution, inciting citizens to consent to the exploitation of natural resources. However, before arriving at this claim, Correa establishes how his government has been able to meet citizens’ immediate needs by prioritizing social welfare programming. Before he is able to make the claim of hope for a better tomorrow, Correa had to establish that immediate needs and the conditions necessary for the (re)production of human life had been met.

The way extraction is summoned in this speech is also worth noting. Extractive industries are based on future predictions: from the way capital is acquired on the stock market for exploration, which predicts the potential of a particular site, or the long-term market price of a specific commodity. The potential for extraction to generate state rents is a long-term endeavor (Riofrancos, 2017). For example, exploration in Intag began in 1995. As of the date of writing, there was still no mine. This is particularly the case in the era of responsible mining, which requires companies to complete additional steps such as community and environmental consultations, prior to beginning extraction (Kirsch, 2014). It is improbable that a newly explored site would have an immediate impact on the budget of a sitting government. Nonetheless, Correa justifies the need for extraction in terms of the immediate, basic needs of his citizens, and the projects he is already delivering.

Though in his speech he calculates the cost of the computer program, citing numbers while pacing the stage, it was already in the pilot stage. He uses these costs to justify his extractive agenda, but the temporality is askew. The computers sitting in the students’ laps have already been purchased, yet the proposed mines for which Correa seeks consent will take years to generate profits. Even though the apparent symbolism of the future evoked by using children as the subject and human capital as the end goal, the pilot program was delivered in that very moment, when he referred to the beginning of his time in government when schools had no libraries and juxtaposes with the present moment when children have laptops sitting on their laps. Correa's speech is illustrative of the move away from neoliberal rationales to a focus on human wellbeing, albeit in a limited sense. In the speech, Correa evokes a temporal incongruity where present/pressing needs are being met via programs and infrastructures, inaugurated that very day, then these same programs are used by the government in a bid for consent for future extractive development, leading to the aforementioned development debt, giving credence to Inteños concerns.

Correa's approach to buen vivir becomes linked to the extractive agenda, supplanting the rights of nature to the needs of human beings. Indeed, a major criticism of the Correa regime, both in popular protests and in the scholarly literature has been about the government's reliance on neoextractivism (Bebbington, 2009; Coronil, 2011; Veltmeyer, 2022). Veltmeyer (2012) has critiqued this model, saying “new extractivism boils down to nothing more than the state striking a better deal with global capital regarding its share of the plundered resources” (72), where “plundering natural resources” is done in the name of human wellbeing. One of the key mechanisms via which Correa links the seemingly incompatible project of buen vivir with extractivism is through incongruous temporalities, askewing the present with the future (Fierro, 2016). Postero's (2017) analysis of the Evo Morales regime in Bolivia points to a parallel linking of decolonialism with extractivism in Indigenous territories. In Bolivia, vivir bien, the Bolivian iteration of buen vivir, is positioned as part of a decolonial process, a “turning of the timetable,” because the Morales’ government uses the profits from extraction to invest in social programs. Postero notes “The majority of Bolivians, and that includes many indigenous people, are proud of the nationalization, and delighted that Morales and his associates reversed the unfair terms of the gas business. They want lithium to be developed, and they want their standards of living to improve. This is part of pachakuti, the turning of the timetable, the change of destiny. This is the time for the formerly poor to receive their fair share” (111). As such, concerns over environmental damage are displaced by concerns about poverty, making the temporal focus in Bolivia a righting of past injustices through the fair use of national resources. In Bolivia, the focus is on the past, as a type of inheritance from Pachamama, Mother Earth. Valladares and Boelens (2019) trace these political maneuvers, as the Ecuadorian government enshrined the rights of nature in the Constitution, while also pushing extractivism as foundational for building a prosperous future.

Temporal incongruence is a key feature of postneoliberal developmentalism in Bolivia and Ecuador. What is specific to Ecuador is the play between futures and present moments. In the next section, we shift our focus to Inteños and how they interact with a road paving project. We focus on the ways Inteños use temporality to negotiate state-led development projects and to think about what buen vivir means to them.

Infrastructures of Buen Vivir: Paving the road to Intag

In Intag, the struggle to define the temporality of buen vivir played out over a proposed road paving project. With the specter of the open-pit copper mine looming, Inteños interrogated this project through a lens of livability: would this road improvement provide for the immediate needs of all Inteños by making the road safer and faster? Or would this project jeopardize life in Intag by creating a type of development debt, paving the way for extractive development? Inteños worked through these uncertainties by drawing on their past experiences with government promises. Firstly, they questioned the ability of the state to competently build in the challenging sub-tropical environment of Intag. Secondly, they questioned the postneoliberal state's claim to improving the wellbeing of humans by bringing nature under its centralized control.

There are two roads leading to Intag, one is in a complete state of disrepair and more circuitous and the other is the preferred and most often used road traversed by motorcycles, private vehicles, buses, and small trucks. It is a 60 km long dirt road, with occasional short stretches of cobblestone. The road curves along the contours of the mountains, with the most harrowing passes barely wide enough for a single vehicle, with a steep cliff on one edge and blind turns. During the best conditions, daylight and during the dry season, it takes about two and a half to three hours to reach the city of Cotacachi or Otavalo, provided one is fortunate enough to be in a vehicle well-suited for the bumpy drive. Under more treacherous conditions, such as during the rainy season, or in the evening, when the fog reduces visibility to near zero, the drive can take upwards of six hours.

The road presented significant anxieties for Inteños, which they vocalized through concerns about their immediate or near-future use of the road. For example, one evening sitting on a bench overlooking the central park in Intag, Falconer was chatting with neighbors. One young woman started to express concerns about her need to travel to the city the next day. It has been raining for a few days and she was concerned about the condition of the road, but she could not miss her appointment in the city. As many others, she relied on sparsely scheduled buses to be able to reach the city, which could be delayed or cancelled due to the road conditions.

Given these challenging conditions, it is not surprising that promises to pave the road are enticing to Inteños. This was the case in the 2009 election for mayor, when Inteños were promised by the candidate representing Correa's political party, Alberto Anrango, that should they elect him, the road would be paved. Celina, one of the participants, explained why she supported Anrango: “That new one, I don’t know what the mayor's name is, he offered to give us the panamericana ⁴  . . . That is what he initially offered, the pana. The paved road would be so nice” (Celina 30/06/2009). As Celina's comment demonstrates, she knew little about the candidate, but did know he promised to pave the road, which, along with his affiliation with Correa, was enough to win her vote. A paved road would make travel to and from the city faster and safer.

This was not the first time a candidate made this promise during an election campaign, but this time around, many voters felt the promise held weight. Supporters of Anrango felt that, by having a mayor who belonged to the ruling party, the municipality would be more likely to receive funds to advance projects such as road paving. Further, they felt that during his brief time as president, Correa had been delivering on his promises and there were visible signs he would deliver where previous governments had failed. The election results showed citizens were conflicted. Anrango won with the most votes, but won less than 50% of the vote, meaning that a majority of voters supported other candidates.

As a rural region, removed from the more economically productive core, Intag had not been the focus of previous administrations. However, Correa's Road Revolution targeted regions precisely like Intag that had been historically marginalized. During a meeting in Intag, attended by the lead author, several months after the election, Diego Garcia, an elected official with the province of Imbabura, explained the importance of the paving project in fostering the goals of integration, equality, and solidarity:

We consider this road project to be of great importance, very extensive and logically a project which will cost much more than the other projects we are doing in the other counties. As I said before, our intention is to make several road rings, which will allow us to feed the economy in all sectors . . . If we have developed parishes, we will have developed counties, and if we have developed parishes and counties, we will also have a developed province. This goes hand in hand with equality. We can have equality by going forward in a logical, comprehensive manner. Amongst us we can make solidarity, lending a hand to build fellowship.

Garcia's attempt to sell a vision of integrated road rings was interrupted by audience members who began to probe at the inefficiencies of government and voice concerns that some communities would be further marginalized by the project, rather than integrated (Harvey and Knox, 2012). For example, the president of one parish took the floor, and rather than asking questions about the future paving plans, began to complain about the provincially owned heavy machinery used to maintain the already existing roads. She claimed they sat idle in her community or made road conditions worse rather than better. Garcia tried to bring the meeting back on track by acknowledging these problems and encouraging the audience to look beyond what he considered to be “small grievances.” He wanted them to focus on the plan to pave the main road, “the heart” which would have benefits far beyond one community. The audience refused. More audience members stood up and raised immediate concerns: neglected infrastructure, such as unsafe bridges and the poor state of telecommunications.

When the audience engaged with the proposed project, it was to raise skepticism and doubt about the government's ability to deliver such a project. Another audience member stated the meeting was a waste of time, claiming that a year had already passed and there was no visible difference. Given the track record of incomplete infrastructure, why would they expect things to be different this time around? Yet another audience member rejected the ring scheme altogether. They claimed that some communities were still inaccessible by car and shouldn’t that be the priority over improving a usable road?

The questions raised by audience members were focused on issues that were currently affecting their lives. Audience members refused to imagine the “rings” of roads that Garcia described, rings that would bring future development. In focusing on present conditions and past failures/inaction, rather than a vision of the future, Inteños refused to defer their concerns with the hope of future transformation. In other words, the immediacy of the here and now interrupted “the will to improve” or “the promise of transformation” put forward by Garcia. Some audience members wanted to ensure that all Inteños had basic access before improving the main “artery”. This insistence that the paving project would leave out those who were already on the margins of established infrastructure pointed to gaps in Garcia's promise of equality.

The concerns voiced at the meeting were also raised during casual conversations with Falconer during which Inteños asserted their knowledge of the landscape and their agency in past road building. These claims served to counter state claims of competency and control over infrastructure development. In making these assertions, Inteños called into question the role of the state in claiming sole competency in delivering infrastructure as development. As one research participant pointed out, “We can’t give all the credit to the government. Everything that happens is because of the people. Take for example the road between Otavalo and Ibarra. That was paid for with our taxes, made possible by our efforts.”

Another research participant inverted the widely-held belief that roads bring improvement by automatically stimulating economic development. The research participant noted that this was not the case in Intag. In his recollection, when the government decided to widen the road from a foot path to one for vehicles, it was because the government took note that Intag was a productive place, seeing the food commodities Inteños were bringing to the city. This recollection also repositions Intag from being a marginal space in need of more economic activity, to a place that produced commodities sought after by urban dwellers.

Further, Inteños noted that state efforts at road construction were limited by the natural landscape, a terrain Inteños knew how to navigate. When Inteños spoke about past efforts at road making, they highlighted their collective efforts, as opposed to the benevolence of a state agency. Roads were built and maintained by collective work parties or mingas. Mountains were opened without the use of machinery. Inteños literally had to break rock using manual instruments. This was necessary even in instances when the road project was supported by the government. For example, a past road opening to a small community was supported by the provincial government, but Inteños were the ones who had to manually open the path for the heavy machinery.

Inteños highlighted their knowledge of the terrain and weather and their collectively-held skills in manipulating the challenging landscape. For example, for several months, the provincial government was installing curbs on a relatively busy path to one parish. The curbs were meant to help minimize damage during the rainy season by directing flows of water and containing the dirt. Whenever Falconer drove past this section, her various travel companions would point out what they saw as being deficient in the construction. Inteños questioned government experts tasked with managing the project -experts such as project managers and consulting engineers who did not reside in the region. Inteños stated that the government experts were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the specific conditions in Intag. Though these comments sounded mundane, they pointed to a larger critique, or at least doubts about the government’s know-how and ability to deliver quality infrastructure in Intag. These anecdotes all reposition Inteños as experts on their natural environment and the government as incompetent. The state official's strategy to use a town meeting to engage citizens further cemented their differences and Inteños insisted on defining the need for intervention and how improvements should be made. This steadfast opposition contrasts with the work of Mills-Novoa et al. (2020) who describe this type of political meetings as a way of disciplining subjects, bringing citizens into the fold of state politics. Rather, they produced unintended effects (from the perspective of those convening the meeting), as people coalesced under alternative ways of thinking and acting that complicated the government's official enactment of buen vivir (Van Teijlingen, 2016).

The above examples illustrate instances when Inteños doubted the ability of the government to design a road that would meet the immediate needs of all Inteños and questioned the government's knowledge of the natural environment. Some Inteños took their critique of the road improvement project even further, undermining the assumption that a paved road was an improvement at all. During a conversation about the road paving project, two friends were both doubtful the project would come to fruition. Carla was particularly disdainful of the current government and refused to agree the road would be a social good. When her friend pressed her, noting she would use and thus benefit from the newly paved road, “It’ll be faster” he remarked and she responded “No way! I will use the other road,” refusing to agree the road would be of benefit to her. This was in line with Carla's more general opposition to the proposed mine and questioned the government's intentions with the road improvement project, as she viewed it as a potential inroad to extractive development.

Similar to Carla, other Inteños were skeptical about the road improvement and rejected the notion that roads were an objectively benevolent type of infrastructure. This group feared the well-known connection between infrastructure and extraction. They saw the improvement as a political game by government officials to both rally consent and to make Intag more amenable to exploratory activities. As noted previously, there were two roads that connected Intag to the city. In 2010, the less-travelled road received extensive work from provincial machinery, flattening and widening the surface. When passing by this road, Inteños pondered that it was an easier access point for the proposed mine. This skepticism that road improvements were not in service to Inteños’ needs but rather intended to ease access for mining companies. This was further reflected in the following reaction to the announcement of funding for the paving project in June 2012. As reported in La Hora, a daily newspaper published in the province on Imbabura, “The State Bank grants a loan of 13 million dollars to the Provincial Government of Imbabura.”

Shortly after the funding was announced, one of the research participants forwarded the main author a chain of emails, sent to a listserv with 369 recipients. Many of the recipients were anti-mining activists, who tended to approach official politics with skepticism. The subject of the email was “GOOD NEWS FOR INTAG.” Juan, writing from the email address of a local anti-mining organization, sent a one-line response “Very good news, and during election season”. Juan's sarcastic response pointed to the timing of the announcement, insinuating that perhaps the announcement was not just about funding a road project, but also about gaining popular support for the upcoming election. The one-line email was followed by a longer response from a research participant, who had forwarded the correspondence to the long list of recipients.

It isn’t to be “ill-omened” or always very pessimistic, but we have our doubts (and very serious ones) that with this amount (12 million) cannot do a good asphalt; we can simply reference that it is more than 60 km, which would mean with every 1 million we would asphalt 5 km, or 200,000 USD/Km . . . . .so with those unitary costs I don’t know what type of asphalt they will bring us. I am remembering the 4 km they asphalted in El Kinde 12 (and that lasted weeks) after the pompous inauguration . . . Anyway we need an update on unitary prices / Km.

So, as [name of someone else in email chain] says, more politicking (politiqueria) . ..

Leo not only called into question the intentions of the government (“more politicking”) but also their competencies by doubting the amount of investment and the quality of the pave the government was planning to deliver. In his article on road and food insecurity in the Himalaya, Gurung (2021) similarly notes that the road is a key site of electoral politics. We see this when Leo calls into question the government's competencies, intentions, and overall ability to deliver on the road paving project. Leo suggested that much of the state work was about putting on a show (“pompous inauguration”) rather than about delivering the materiality of buen vivir. His reference to being “always very pessimistic” located him in a group of people who distrusted the Correa government. This group tended to be either cautious supporters of the Correa government or, like Leo, a member of the political party Pachakutik, politically in opposition. Leo, and other like-minded Inteños, were concerned that consenting to road paving was a blanket consent for the brand of development touted by the state. As Correa's speech described earlier in this article exhibited, these concerns were not unfounded. The connection between infrastructure improvement and extractive development is documented in other places. For example, Postero (2017) notes that environmental damages are already of concern in a mining community in Bolivia, where extraction has not yet occurred, but damages have occurred during highway construction, done in preparation for mining (104).

The way Inteños responded to the paving project, whether in a meeting, in informal encounters, or through an email thread, asserted their competencies when it comes to navigating their challenging environmental milieu. The knowledge of weather and landscape allowed them to foresee consequences of road improvement projects. Further, they used past relationships with government officials to interrogate political promises. In so doing, the email conversation brought into question the government's authority and positioned this group of Inteños as vigilant citizens.

In the absence of a material mine, the road became a site through which Inteños negotiated their roles vis-à-vis the government, using the road to negotiate (future) development. Some participants, like Carla, questioned the motives of the government, concerned that the paving project was not about making the road safer for Inteños, but rather laying the infrastructure necessary for extraction -a valid concern given the prevailing logic of accumulation through extractivism (Laastad, 2022). Inteños questioned the ability of the government to deliver a project, which would have widespread benefits. Contrary to the state's claim to authority over the natural environment, Inteños established its autonomy over Intag as a place and their roles in bringing forward a way of life that would benefit all Inteños, aligned with buen vivir.

Discussion and conclusion

Our paper explores the dynamics between the lived experience of infrastructure projects and government narratives of enacting good living during the postneoliberal era. We followed state-led road projects, an emblematic feature of postneoliberal Ecuador. Our analysis emphasized the importance of buen vivir, and the specter of extractivism in shaping how people engaged with the state's proposed infrastructure changes. We used the concept of temporal incongruence to theorize the disjuncture between different temporal logics that shape the region's development landscape and people's responses. The study provides a valuable perspective on how people negotiate their roles, rights, and well-being within the context of development.

We have demonstrated a shift in the temporality of development between the neoliberal and the postneoliberal periods. Under neoliberalism, development was often portrayed as a future-oriented promise, focusing on economic progress and market-driven growth. However, during postneoliberalism, the dominate political value, buen vivir, brought to the forefront relationality between humans and nature. This meant that the temporality of development shifted to the immediate needs of people, over future-oriented economic goals.

At the same time, extractivism was used by the Ecuadorian government to propel program delivery and the construction of economic mega-projects. The state delivery of buen vivir entailed a contradiction, whereby human wellbeing required the exploitation of nature. This was done through a skewing of temporalities, where the government implemented programs in the present, but pushed forward an obligation to fund said programs through future extractive development – creating a development debt where immediate needs could only be serviced through a future commitment to bring nature into the realm of productivity. This is a core instance of temporal incongruence, in which developmental claims are stretched across incompatible timelines.

Gupta et al. (2018) argue for the decentering of humans in order “to think about other time spans, the lifetimes of other things that shape life on the planet, and infrastructure is one important element in such a rethinking” (19). The decentering of humans places an emphasis on sustaining life in the future, but in this instance, the extractive industries’ potential environmental damage is displaced by concerns about poverty. The state asserts this damage can be mitigated through extractive profits. This shifts the temporal focus from a deferred promise of transformation to addressing past injustices through fair resource use. This form of development is seen as a way to right historical wrongs by delivering resources, benefits, and standards of living to the formerly marginalized.

This shift in temporal orientation from deferred promises of prosperity to immediate needs matters because it reconfigures the legitimacy of state-led development. When development is framed around the urgency of life itself, it becomes harder to defer accountability. Inteños are no longer asked to wait for future benefits; instead, they demand tangible improvements now. This immediacy challenges the state's ability to rely on extractive futures to justify present interventions.

For Inteños, this meant that government-led programs were often met with skepticism. Even when the programs promised improvement – a safer, faster road for example – Inteños questioned whether this would bring upon them the development of the open-pit copper mine which would render Intag uninhabitable. Inteños’ responses to government-led projects were shaped by past experiences. They recalled undelivered promises, failed projects, and in general called into question the ability of the government, removed from place, to understand and meet their needs and those of their environment. Recognizing familiar pattern of temporal incongruence, Inteños draw on their extensive knowledge of the environment, emphasizing weather patterns and challenging terrain, to anticipate the consequences of proposed infrastructure projects. This local knowledge gives them an advantage in assessing the viability and implications of government initiatives. Like the Ecuadorian government, Inteños skepticism about the road project is grounded in a fear of development debt. This juxtaposition of future-oriented extractive projects and the immediate needs of the people highlights the complex interplay between development agendas.

The postneoliberal moment is crucial because it introduces a new moral and political vocabulary centered on buen vivir, reorienting development toward relational well-being. Yet, this reorientation is fraught with contradictions, as the state continues to rely on extractive practices. The temporal contradictions of postneoliberalism, promising immediate well-being while deferring the cost to the future, illustrate the unresolved contradictions at the heart of postneoliberal development.

This research expands beyond the specific context of the Intag Valley but also contributes to broader discussions on development, environmental justice, and the negotiation of economic megaprojects such as roads and mines. It contributes to the literature on the temporalities of infrastructure, which to date has emphasized the future orientation of projects. In the postneoliberal era, the emphasis on life itself sets the stage for a more urgent, immediate temporality of development. We expect to continue seeing this temporal shift as governments and communities negotiate models of development that foster the wellbeing of people and nature. Understanding these temporal dynamics is essential to grasping how development is legitimized, contested, and ultimately lived.