Environmental Politics in Latin America

Elite dynamics, the left tide and sustainable development

Benedicte Bull, Mariel Aguilar-Stoen, Benedicte Bull, Mariel Aguilar-Stoen, Benedicte Bull, Mariel Cristina Aguilar-Stoen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138790261
• eBook ISBN: 9781317653783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Since colonial times the position of the social, political and economic elites in Latin America has been intimately connected to their control over natural resources. Consequently, struggles to protect the environment from over-exploitation and contamination have been related to marginalized groups' struggles against local, national and transnational elites. The recent rise of progressive, left-leaning governments – often supported by groups struggling for environmental justice – has challenged the established elites and raised expectations about new regimes for natural resource management.

Based on case-studies in eight Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, El Salvador and Guatemala), this book investigates the extent to which there have been elite shifts, how new governments have related to old elites, and how that has impacted on environmental governance and the management of natural resources. It examines the rise of new cadres of technocrats and the old economic and political elites' struggle to remain influential. The book also discusses the challenges faced in trying to overcome structural inequalities to ensure a more sustainable and equitable governance of natural resources.

This timely book will be of great interest to researchers and masters students in development studies, environmental management and governance, geography, political science and Latin American area studies.

1 Environmental governance and sustainable development in Latin America

Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar–Støen Elites

Elites and natural resources in Latin America: the main arguments

Since colonial times, the differentiation of the social, political and economic elites from the rest of the population in Latin America has been built, in part, on the control over natural resources that the elite has secured through history. Securing control over land, minerals, water, oil, gas and forests has been equally as important as their control over labor in order to be able to dominate societies and state apparatus, as for example shown by Coronil (1997) accounting for the role of oil in the evolution of the Venezuelan state. A further historical characteristic of Latin America is that this elite control has been intimately linked to the insertion of Latin America into the global economy as exporters of raw materials, and to the elite’s cultural, ethnic and economic ties to foreign countries, companies and organizations, as well as to the racialized patterns of social domination prevalent in most Latin American countries (Quijano, 2000).

Consequently, socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America often involve disputes over the distribution of economic resources and goods, access to and control over natural resources, as well as representation and subjective meanings (Escobar, 2011). They are often traversed by political, social, ethnic and economic claims; they have involved struggles against local, national and transnational elites by indigenous peoples, small farmers and other marginalized groups as well as middle-class actors sympathizing with their cause (Carruthers, 2008).

There also exists an elitist environmental movement in Latin America, and it has exerted considerable influence on environmental policy making and in the framing of environmental problems in the region. This elitist environmental movement has often had an urban base and has been inspired by global conservationist movements and ideas. This is reflected for instance in the early instauration of natural parks and other forms of “fortress conservation” in the region, the development of market-based incentives for water and forest conservation and the institutionalization of environmental management. The ideas and initiatives have been brought to the national agenda by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academic and official research institutes, or policy makers often linked to international organizations and more attuned to international intellectual currents than to the needs of the local populations (see e.g. Mumme et al., 1988; Nugent, 2002). Consequently, this form of conservation has been criticized for failing to understand environmental issues in the context of the creation of livelihoods for marginalized groups (Holmes, 2010). In fact, this type of conservation has often been opposed by local populations dependent on the use of biological reserves for small-scale agriculture and grasslands.

Recently, Latin America has seen new groups rise to political power and old economic elites being challenged by multifaceted economic and political processes. Many of the left-leaning governments that came to power in this period were supported by indigenous organizations, peasants associations and other movements pursuing environmental justice and a more equitable and sustainable use of natural resources. Thus, there were great expectations regarding their willingness and ability to shift development strategies towards more sustainable and equitable policies that pay more attention to the concerns of local populations and indigenous peoples than to the exigencies of global capital and domestic elites.

However, apparent contradictions in policies related to environmental governance soon appeared in many countries: in Bolivia the government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) led by indigenous labor unionist, Evo Morales, launched plans to construct highways through indigenous territories and protected areas (PAs) while pursuing the good life in harmony with “Pachamama” in official discourse; in Brazil the expansion of hydroelectric dams threatened biodiversity and indigenous livelihoods at the same time as the government made major efforts to reduce deforestation; and in Ecuador mining concessions expanded while efforts were made to restrict oil extraction. Thus, doubts arose about the sustainability of the development strategies pursued during Latin America’s “pink tide” (Gudynas, 2010).

The purpose of this book is to better understand the dynamics of environmental politics of the so-called pink-tide governments in Latin America. The starting point is a view of the government as a body that controls a certain set of resources, including economic and political resources. However, it is not omnipotent. In most of Latin America governments have relatively weak state apparatuses at hand to implement their will, and much of societies’ economic, political, coercive, knowledge and organizational resources are controlled by elites—national and international—that do not necessarily share the government’s agenda. Thus, we approach the question of how to understand the dynamics of environmental politics from an elite perspective. We ask: To what extent has the “pink tide” involved a shift of elites? To what extent has that contributed to more sustainable policies and to what extent has it led to the opposite? How do the new governmental elites relate to old elites? Do they accommodate their interests? Do they pursue alliances with them? Do they try to undermine them? Do they compete with them? To what extent have new economic, knowledge or political elites emerged as a result of the rise of the center-left governments? Do they share the same visions of development and the environment or do they diverge? And how do they relate to non-elites or subaltern groups?

This book is the result of a four-year joint research project on environmental governance in Latin America and the Caribbean funded by the European Union’s FP7. Our strategy for researching the contradictions and dynamics of environmental governance in this project has been to study the governance of economic sectors of major importance in a number of different countries. As a result, in this book we deliver case studies of the soy sector in Bolivia and Argentina, agriculture in El Salvador, mining in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala, biotechnology in Ecuador, and forestry in Brazil. In addition, the book includes two chapters that cover several cases and countries: one on the new elites arising in connection with the global “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation” (REDD) program and one on shifting elites in the mining sector in several Andean countries. Although we explore different countries and sectors, across the cases, the focus is on how the incorporation of environment issues in the governance of economic activity depends on which groups that have come to power, how they relate to elites outside their own political projects and how they relate to subalterns.

The main argument of this book is that the new, leftist governments overall were faced with many constraints as they in fact controlled limited resources resulting from weak state institutions and strong societal elites. In that situation they had the choice of attempting to strengthen the states (depending on state revenues), grooming new elites, allying with outside elites (economic elites, international elites, knowledge elites, etc.) or confronting competing elites. All of these strategies had environmental implications. Moreover, the degree to which environmental considerations and governance mechanisms were incorporated in their development strategies depended not only on their own development priorities but also on their success in enrolling or competing with alternative elites. In what remains of this chapter, we will first give an introduction to the so-called “pink tide” in Latin America. Thereafter we will discuss the concepts of environmental governance and sustainable development as a basis for what follows in the subsequent chapters, before we detail our main argument and provide an overview of the book.

The “pink tide” in Latin America

Over the last ten years a number of governments that define themselves as belonging to the center-left entered power in Latin America. Out of 49 presidential elections in Latin America in the 2003–13 period, 22 were won by center-left candidates, and with the exception of Mexico and Colombia, all the large economies in Latin America were governed by center-left governments in most of this period.

However, there were significant differences among the center-left governments in Latin America. Early attempts to classify them in distinct categories of moderate and radical or contestatory¹ regimes (see e.g. Castaneda, 2006; Weyland, 2010) have been widely rejected (Beasley-Murray et al., 2010; Cameron and Hershberg, 2010; Lievesley and Ludlam, 2009; Levitsky and Roberts, 2011), because it became evident that there were significant differences in policy style and content among these governments. Yet a main distinction may be drawn between those who sought gradual socio-structural change (i.e. greater equality) within the framework of a liberal democracy, existing institutions and the market economy, and those who have sought alternatives for political economic inclusion that go beyond liberal democracy and a market economy, requiring constitutional and institutional changes.

In attempting to explain such differences, most authors have focused on the type of social movements or political parties from which they emerge. For example, Roberts and Levitsky distinguish between leftist regimes based on their concentration of power and degree to which they are based on an established party or a new political movement (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011). Beyond that, the center-left governments were based on highly diverse coalitions, with groups ranging from indigenous movements (as in Ecuador and Bolivia), and labor unions (as in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia), to peasant and landless movements (as in Brazil and the Lugo government in Paraguay), and broad democracy movements (as in Chile and Brazil). Environmental issues played very different roles in the different cases. It was an integral part of the discourse of change in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, and a major issue for important actors in the government coalition in El Salvador and Brazil. In other cases, it has entered the stage at later points (such as in the case of Chile, where particularly socialist Michelle in her second presidential period (2014–18) will have to pay major attention to environmental issues).

It is difficult to characterize the diversity of development strategies that have resulted from the center-left governments in simple phrases. However, they may be considered as varieties of a regional developmental nationalism. This is characterized by an increasing direct state engagement in developmental policies, and increasing economic nationalism, but embedded in regional integration and open to trade and investments from abroad (Bull, 2015). While this has been pursued with the aim of filling state coffers to enable distribution and poverty reduction (among other aims), in many cases it has happened at the expense of relations with local populations and environmental considerations, as we will discuss in the chapters that follow.

However, whereas many authors have emphasized the support coalitions of different governments to explain their policies, much less attention has been paid to the obstacles that the regimes have met in power, and thus many studies have erroneously conflated a political phenomenon with the policy output (Luna, 2010, p. 29). The dilemmas and challenges that leftist governments encounter faced with opposition from socio-economic elites that control the means of production have provoked splits within the left for more than a century in Latin America as well as Europe. As will be further elaborated in Chapter 2, historically resource limitations and the opposition from socio-economic and political elites have presented particular obstacles to Latin American governments aiming for structural change (Weyland, 2010, p. 6). As shown by Buxton in the case of Venezuela, the choice of a certain strategy may not only be a result of ideologies and a pleasing support coalition, but equally of the elites’ opening or blocking the possibility for dialogue and reaching agreements (Buxton, 2009). Indeed, although the composition, ideology and strategy of the political movement in power is important for understanding the direction of the policy-making process and the policies proposed, the outcome cannot be understood without taking into account the interaction with the former elites and the institutional framework that they have left in place.

Environmental governance

Environmental governance is a concept that has gained much currency among scholars from a range of disciplines including geographers, sociologists, environmental managers and development scholars to analyze how decisions about the environment and nature are made (Bridge and Perreault, 2009). It involves a focus on systems of governing, means for the allocation of resources and the exercise of control and coordination in which state and non-state actors play various roles (Bulkeley, 2005).

The concept environmental governance emerged in the neoliberal era (Baud etal., 2011) and signaled an analytical focus that moved beyond the state. The perceived obsolescence of state-oriented analyses of environmental policies as a governmental affair had both empirical and ideological reasons. Thus, Lemos and Agrawal (2006) argue that environmental governance is used to analyze the globalization of environmental policy-making; the decentralization of environmental management; the role of market- and agent-focused incentives as regulatory mechanisms; and the challenges involved in the cross-scalar nature of environmental problems (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006).

As it has become associated with neoliberalism and a focus on management issues rather than power and inequalities, environmental governance has been criticized for engendering analyses “that flatten uneven relations of power, and which mask competing claims to, and about the environment” (Bridge and Perreault, 2009, p. 492).

We understand environmental governance in a broader sense, as the set of mechanisms, formal and informal institutions and practices by way of which social order is produced through controlling that which is related to the environment and natural resources. In other words, we are not only interested in the “management of nature” but in how, through governing nature and natural resources, the conditions of what is possible for actors in a given context, are established.

As such, environmental governance stands in no contrast to an approach based on political ecology for which inequalities and power are key concepts. In our use of the term, studying environmental governance deals with analyzing the re-scaling of environmental decision making; commodity chain coordination; the role of institutions in environmental policy making; the role of different nonstate actors and their participation in socio-environmental conflicts; as well as the role of the state in environmental regulation within the context of capitalist accumulation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Environmental governance and sustainable development in Latin America
• 2 Elites, classes and environmental governance Conceptual and theoretical challenges
• Part 1 Agriculture and biotechnology
• Part 2 Mining
• Part 3 Forestry
• Index