Human Rights And Natural Resource Development In Latin America

This book offers multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary development discussions in Latin America, marked on the one hand by the pursuit of economic growth, technological improvement and poverty reduction, and on the other hand by the growing concern over the preservation of the environment and human rights. It analyses some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current development, environmental and human rights practices in Latin America. Taking a multi-level perspective that links the local, national, regional and transnational levels of inquiry, the collection approaches questions concerned with the interaction of state and non-state actors in the promotion and opposition to natural resource development and how development policies have impacted on communities in the region and the promotion and protection of human rights. By focusing on the different, though interrelated levels of interaction (local, national, transnational), as well as actors and roles, the book contemplates the complex panorama of competing visions, concepts and interests grounded in mutual influences and dependencies that are shaping the contemporary arena of social-environmental conflicts in Latin America. The multi-dimensional scope of the book demonstrates the complexity of socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America and the mutual influences and interdependencies that are shaping the contemporary arena of social-environmental conflicts in Latin America.

This book focuses on the issues of global environmental injustice and human rights violations and explores the scope and limits of the potential of human rights to influence environmental justice. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary development discussions, analysing some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current environmental and human rights practices in Latin America. The contributors examine how the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the further commodification of nature have affected local communities in the region and how these policies have impacted on the promotion and protection of human rights as communities struggle to defend their rights and territories. The book analyses the emergence of transnational activism in the context of collective action organised around socio-environmental conflicts, the infringement of basic human rights and the emergence of alternative and sometimes conflicting development models. Furthermore, it critically discusses why governments are often willing to override their commitments to sustainability and human rights to promote their development agenda. The chapters originally published as a special issue in The International Journal of Human Rights.

In 1989, the International Labor Organization stated that all indigenous peoples living in the postcolonial world were entitled to the right to prior consultation, over activities that could potentially impact their territories and traditional livelihoods. However, in many cases the economic importance of industries such as mining and oil condition the way that governments implement the right to prior consultation. This book explores extractive conflicts between indigenous populations, the government and oil and mining companies in Latin America, namely Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. Building on two years of research and drawing on the state-corporate and environmental crime literatures, this book examines the legal, extralegal, illegal as well as political strategies used by the state and extractive companies to avoid undesired results produced by the legalization of the right to prior consultation. It examines the ways in which prior consultation is utilized by powerful indigenous actors to negotiate economic resources with the state and extractive companies, while also showing the ways in which weaker indigenous groups are incapable of engaging in prior consultations in a meaningful way and are therefore left at the mercy of negative ecological impacts. It demonstrates how social mobilization—not prior consultation—is the most effective strategy in preventing extraction from moving forward within ecologically fragile indigenous territories.

Case studies written by anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists provide empirical detail and analytical insight into states' and communities' relations to natural resource sectors, and show how resource dependencies continue to shape their political spaces.

Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region. Exploring cases of resource contestation in Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, Sovereign Forces highlights the value of these relationships to the practice of environmental governance and peacebuilding in the region.

This book identifies a major problem facing developing nations and the countries and sources that fund them: the lack of attention and/or effective strategies available to prevent farmers in underdeveloped and poorly endowed regions from sinking still deeper into poverty while avoiding further degradation of marginal environments. The contributors propose an alliance of scientific knowledge with native skill as the best way to proceed, arguing that folk systems can often provide effective management solutions that are not only locally effective, but which may have the potential for spatial diffusion. While this has been said before, the volume makes one of the best articulated statements of how to implement such an approach.

In The Human Right to Water in Latin America, Anna Berti Suman investigates the development of the right to water and of water law in the Latin American context, illustrating the Latin American contribution in stimulating the social, political, and economic debate on the right to water, regionally and worldwide.

Assessment, based on statistical analysis, of the contribution of the natural resources sector to the economic development of Latin America - gives basic information on the evolution of production, consumption and export trade of natural resource commodities, and covers the copper industry, the iron and steel industry, the petroleum industry, coal mining, agricultural products (incl. Coffee, sugar, cotton, etc.), forestry and fishery products, etc. References and statistical tables.