Natural Resource Extraction and Indigenous Livelihoods: Development Challenges in an Era of Globalization, edited by Emma Gilberthorpe and Gavin Hilson (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4094-3777-2, £65.60 (h/b), pp. 279)

This geographically wide-ranging edited collection, featuring 12 original contributions from anthropologists, legal scholars, geographers and management accountants, provides a much-needed critical response to the recent proliferation of extractive industry ‘best practice’ standards for interaction with indigenous people. As Andrew Barry notes in his erudite afterword, the World Bank’s own Operation Policy (OP 4.10), widely cited by the more progressive among mining, oil and gas firms, ‘serves to give Indigenous Peoples a particular form of transnational policy existence’ (page 275). Recent guidelines and position statements issued by the International Council on Mining and Metals (2013) and the oil industry’s equivalent body IPIECA (2012) have served to stabilize definitions of indigenous people as marginalized, culturally distinct groups with meaningful and particular attachments to place that predate colonialism—and as particular kinds of development beneficiaries or subjects who must be enrolled in ‘meaningful’ forms of participation ‘consistent with their traditional decision-making processes’ (International Council on Mining and Metals, 2013). So far so good. But polished participation policies are an eerily familiar phenomenon for most development scholars. Many will wonder about the actual encounters between resource-dependent indigenous people and large-scale extractive developments. These tend to take place, after all, at quite some distance from the metropolitan ‘theatres of virtue’ (Rajak, 2011) where congratulatory best practice guidelines are hammered out by corporate social responsibility professionals. It is precisely this relationship, between best practice and actual practice, with which Gilberthorpe and Hilson’s collection grapples. Whereas many studies of indigenous people and extractive industries have focused on social movements and rights claims (e.g. Sawyer & Gomez, 2012), this volume is organized around livelihood concerns. As such, the contributors refuse to treat indigenous people as ‘cartoon avatars always opposed to the existence and operation of the oil and gas industry’ (McNeish, 2012: 64). Martin, Trigger and Parmenter’s chapter locates their investigation of livelihood sustainability around the Century Mine in Queensland in terms of the anxieties produced by ostensible victories for Aboriginal rights, including the Native Title Act of 1993. These rights have created