Environmental Politics in Latin America

Environmental Politics in Latin America
Author: Benedicte Bull
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317653785

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.

Environment and Development in Latin America

Environment and Development in Latin America
Author: David Goodman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1991
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780719033803

An examination of how Latin America, originally viewed by outsiders as a storehouse of natural resources which could be translated into wealth, was not "sustained" in developmental terms in the colonial period. Her ambivalent relationship with the developed world is analyzed to the present day.

Environmental Governance in Latin America

Environmental Governance in Latin America
Author: Fabio De Castro
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2016-03-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137505729

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.

A Living Past

A Living Past
Author: John Soluri
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785333917

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.

Environment and Citizenship in Latin America

Environment and Citizenship in Latin America
Author: Alex Latta
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-07-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0857457489

Scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has only recently begun to coalesce around citizenship as both an empirical site of inquiry and an analytical frame of reference. This has led to a series of new insights and perspectives, but few efforts have been made to bring these various approaches into a sustained conversation across different social, temporal and geographic contexts. This volume is the result of a collaborative endeavour to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Providing a window onto leading scholarship in the field, the book also sets an ambitious agenda to spark further research.

The Distributive Politics of Environmental Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean

The Distributive Politics of Environmental Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Isabella Alcañiz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2022-08-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009263404

The study of environmental politics in Latin America and the Caribbean expands as conflicts stemming from the deterioration of the natural world increase. Yet this scholarship has not generated a broad research agenda similar to the ones that emerged around other key political phenomena. This Element seeks to address the lack of a comprehensive research agenda in Latin American and Caribbean environmental politics and helps integrate the existing, disparate literatures. Drawing from distributive politics, this Element asks who benefits from the appropriation and pollution of the environment, who pays the costs of climate change and environmental degradation, and who gains from the allocation of state protections.

Latin American Environmental Policy In International Perspective

Latin American Environmental Policy In International Perspective
Author: Gordon J Macdonald
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429700628

Starting from the stance that environmental policy has progressed from rhetoric to substance in Latin America, the editors’ proceed through a series of papers to show why, what difference it makes, and how it compares to other parts of the world. In doing so, the book touches on domestic and international factors including political institutions, international development institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and transboundary cooperation. Latin American Environmental Policy in International Perspective is one in a series of books that take a look at Latin America in Global Perspective. Previous titles have addressed politics, gender, regional integration, institutional design, and civil/military relations.

Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean

Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Gavin O'Toole
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Environmental policy
ISBN: 9781781380239

Green issues are rising rapidly up the agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean as governments struggle to reconcile the demands of globalization with the quest for equitable and sustainable growth. This second volume of Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean reveals how the region is becoming a laboratory of change - and a source of inspiration in global affairs - as states, multilateral agencies and the private sector seek sustainable solutions to its pressing problems. This volume explains the roles institutions, policies and political actors play in green policymaking and builds on the introduction to the historical, political and economic context in which they have evolved provided in Volume I. It examines how democratization in the 1980s gave new space to environmental and indigenous activists, and surveys the ideas inspiring them to forge a new kind of politics. As institutional change has become a defining feature of political development throughout this region, new environmental ministries and agencies have established new standards of regulation and enforcement. Policymakers are advancing innovative ways to tackle complex environmental problems and constitutions, laws and treaties are enshrining new green rights that increasingly assertive courts are upholding. Together, both volumes of Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean provide the framework for a modular course on this essential topic, with each chapter structured to be the basis of a single teaching unit. Using tables, boxes and maps to support the student, the two volumes offer an accessible way of understanding the background and context of environmental politics in the region as well as theoretical debates and key developments.

Environmental Justice in Latin America

Environmental Justice in Latin America
Author: David V. Carruthers
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2008
Genre: Environmental justice
ISBN: 0262033720

Scholars and activists investigate the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analysis and case studies that illustrate the connections between popular environmental mobilization and social justice in the region.

Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment

Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment
Author: Beatriz Bustos
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000869024

The Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment provides an in-depth and accessible analysis and theorization of environmental issues in the region. It will help readers make connections between Latin American and other regions’ perspectives, experiences, and environmental concerns. Latin America has seen an acceleration of environmental degradation due to the expansion of resource extraction and urban areas. This Handbook addresses Latin America not only as an object of study, but also as a region with a long and profound history of critical thinking on these themes. Furthermore, the Handbook departs from most treatments on the topic by studying the environment as a social issue inextricably linked to politics, economy, and culture. The Handbook will be an invaluable resource for those wanting not only to understand the issues, but also to engage with ideas about environmental politics and social-ecological transformation. The Handbook covers a broad range of topics organized according to three areas: physical geography, ecology, and crucial environmental problems of the region. These are key theoretical and methodological issues used to understand Latin America’s ecosocial contexts, and institutional and grassroots practices related to more just and ecologically sustainable worlds. The Handbook will set a research agenda for the near future and provide comprehensive research on most subregions relative to environmental transformations, challenges, struggles and political processes. It stands as a fresh and much needed state of the art introduction for researchers, scholars, post-graduates and academic audiences on Latin American contributions to theorization, empirical research and environmental practices.