Latin American Environmental Policy In International Perspective

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.

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.

This volume discusses the challenges of Latin America in global environmental geopolitics. Written by leading experts, this book brings together Latin American research on global environmental change. They cover a range of topics such as climate change, water, forest and biodiversity conservation connected with science policies, public opinion, priorities of international funds, and international politics of Latin American countries. The book describes the discrepancy between the international priorities and the regional needs or country interests. It includes several case studies and analyses the cooperation in multilateral negotiations on climate change. It also offers a synthesis of debates around global environmental changes and Latin American politics, which the authors have previously promoted in different academic events in South America, including in Santiago de Chile in Chile, and Buenos Aires and Ushuaia in Argentina. This book assesses the environmental problems from different perspectives, highlights the scientific development in the environmental changes affecting Latin America and offers a new view on geopolitics to help face those issues. Specialist readers in international relations, political sciences, environmental sciences, geography and geopolitics will appreciate this up-to-date examination of Latin America and the global environmental change.

Although the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to address global climate change, has been regarded by many as an unsuccessful treaty both politically and environmentally, it stands as one of the world’s few truly global agreements. Why did such a diverse group of countries decide to sign and/or ratify the treaty? Why did they choose to do so at different times and in different ways? What explains their foreign policy behavior? Amy Below’s book builds off the increasing significance of climate change and uses the Kyoto Protocol as a case study to analyze foreign policy decision making in Latin America. Below’s study takes a regional perspective in order to examine why countries in Latin America made disparate foreign policy choices when they were faced with the same decision. The book looks at the decisions in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela via a process-tracing method. Below uses information obtained from primary and secondary documents and elite interviews to help reconstruct the processes, and augments her reconstruction with a content analysis of Conference of the Parties speeches by presidents and country delegates. The book complies with convention in the field by arguing that systemic, national and individual-level factors simultaneously impact foreign policy decisions, but makes the additional claim that role theory most accurately accounts for relationships between variables. Environmental Politics and Foreign Policy Decision Making in Latin America considers a variety of factors on individual, national, and international levels of analysis, and show that the foreign policy decisions are best viewed through the prism of role theory. The book also draws conclusions about the value of role theory in general and about environmental foreign policy decisions in developing countries, which will be of value to both policy-makers and academics.

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.

This book is a collection of readings that explore environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean using natural science and social science methods. These papers demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and solve environmental problems. The essays are organized into five parts: conservation challenges; national policies, local communities, and rural development; market mechanisms for protecting public goods; public participation and environmental justice; and the effects of development policies on the environment.

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.

This collected volume deals with emerging issues related to climate variation, climate change and adaptation technologies, with a special focus on Latin American countries. Presenting a variety of adaptation strategies and projects currently being undertaken and implemented, the book showcases how Latin American nations are struggling to meet the challenges of climate change. Latin America as a whole and Central America in particular is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world and is severely affected by recurrent extreme climate-related events. This volume documents and analyzes the main challenges and lessons learned, serving to disseminate knowledge beyond the region and enhance international research and policy cooperation.