Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: Environment and Society in Contemporary Latin America; Fabio de Castro, Barbara Hogenboom and Michiel Baud
PART I: SETTING THE STAGE
1. Origins and Perspectives of Latin American Environmentalism; Joan Martinez-Alier, Michiel Baud and Héctor Sejenovich
2. Social Metabolism and Conflicts over Extractivism; Joan Martinez-Alier and Mariana Walter
3. Indigenous Knowledge in Mexico: Between Environmentalism and Rural Development; Mina Kleiche-Dray and Roland Waast
PART II: NEW POLITICS OF NATURAL RESOURCES
4. The Government of Nature: Post-Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Bolivia and Ecuador; Pablo Andrade A.
5. Changing Elites, Institutions and Environmental Governance; Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar-Støen
6. Water-Energy-Mining and Sustainable Consumption: Views of South American Strategic Actors; Cristián Parker, Gloria Baigorrotegui and Fernando Estenssoro
7. Overcoming Poverty through Sustainable Development; Héctor Sejenovich
PART III: NEW PROJECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
8. Forest Governance in Latin America: Strategies for Implementing REDD; Mariel Aguilar-Støen, Fabiano Toni and Cecilie Hirsh
9. Rights, Pressures and Conservation in Forest Regions of Mexico; Leticia Merino
10. Local Solutions for Environmental Justice; David Barkin and Blanca Lemus
11. Community Consultations: Local Responses to Large-Scale Mining in Latin America; Mariana Walter and Leire Urkidi
Afterword: From Sustainable Development to Environmental Governance; Eduardo Silva
