Environmental Governance in Latin America

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.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Environment and Society in Contemporary Latin America -- Part I Setting the Stage -- 1 Origins and Perspectives of Latin American Environmentalism -- 2 Social Metabolism and Conflicts over Extractivism -- 3 Indigenous Knowledge in Mexico: Between Environmentalism and Rural Development -- Part II New Politics of Natural Resources -- 4 The Government of Nature: Post-Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Bolivia and Ecuador -- 5 Changing Elites, Institutions and Environmental Governance -- 6 Water-Energy-Mining and Sustainable Consumption: Views of South American Strategic Actors -- 7 Overcoming Poverty Through Sustainable Development -- Part III New Projects of Environmental Governance -- 8 Forest Governance in Latin America: Strategies for Implementing REDD -- 9 Rights, Pressures and Conservation in Forest Regions of Mexico -- 10 Local Solutions for Environmental Justice -- 11 Community Consultations: Local Responses to Large-Scale Mining in Latin America -- Afterword: From Sustainable Development to Environmental Governance -- Index.