Social Environmental Conflicts Extractivism And Human Rights 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.

This Element analyses the political dynamics of neo-extractivism in Latin America. It discusses the critical concepts of neo-extractivism and the commodity consensus and the various phases of socio-environmental conflict, proposing an eco-territorial approach that uncovers the escalation of extractive violence. It also presents horizontal concepts and debates theories that explore the language of Latin American socio-environmental movements, such as Buen Vivir and Derechos de la Naturaleza. In concluding, it proposes an explanation for the end of the progressive era, analyzing its ambiguities and limitations in the dawn of a new political cycle marked by the strengthening of the political rights.

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.

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.

Combining perspectives from media studies and political ecology, this book analyses socially constructed news regarding three environmental conflicts in South America. In recent decades, South American political administrations have tied national economies to neo-extractive development strategies, creating not only vulnerabilities to global commodity boom and bust pricing cycles, but also to conflict regarding environmental and cultural degradation from extraction activities. Environmental contestations among indigenous peoples, environmental and social NGOs, state actors, and extraction industries receive media attention, but how these disputes are covered has implications for understandings of media performance in democratizing nations. The authors examine three case studies of environmental contestation in a region that is simultaneously vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and yet has become once again dependent on commodity exportation to industrializing and industrialized nations for economic benefit and social development strategies.

What are the political economic conditions that have given rise to increasing numbers of social environmental conflicts in Mexico? Why do these conflicts arise in some local and regional contexts and not in others? How are social environmental movements constructed and sustained? And what are the alternatives? These are the questions that this book seeks to address. It is organized into three parts. The first provides a panoramic view of social environmental conflicts in Mexico and of alternatives that are being constructed from below in rural areas. It also provides an analysis of the recent reforms to open the country’s energy sector to private and foreign investment. The second is comprised of local-level case studies of conflict (and no conflict) in diverse geographic locations and cultural settings, particularly in relation to the construction of wind farms, hydraulic infrastructure, industrial water pollution, and groundwater overdraft. The third explores alternatives from below in the form of community-based ecotourism and traditional mezcal production. A concluding chapter engages comparative and global analysis.

This book reflects on the continuing expansion of extractive forms of capitalist development into new territories in Latin America, and the resistance movements that are trying to combat the ecological and social destruction that follows. Latin American development models continue to prioritise extractivism: the intensive exploitation and exportation of nature in its primary commodity form. This constant expansion of the extractive frontier into new territories leads to a continuing process and dialectic of colonization, de-colonization and re-colonization which the authors describe as ‘territorialities in dispute’. This book uncovers the underlying trends and dynamics of these territorialities in dispute, and the socio-ecological resistance movements that are emerging as marginalised communities struggle to reclaim their territorial rights and defend and protect their right of access to the global commons. A focus on territorialities in dispute renders visible the unsustainable expansion of extractivist territories and opens up new horizons to learn from these processes and to consider post-extractivist/post-development imaginings of another world and alternate futures. This book will be of interest to both students and researchers in the fields of international development, political ecology, critical geography, social anthropology, as well as to activists engaged in socio-ecological/eco-territorial movements.

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.