Socio-environmental conflicts in South American regionalism

MARCELO I. SAGUIER

Canberra

Conferencia; Regional Reactions to the Rise of Brazil - Latin America and the Shifting Sands of Global Power; 2012

Australian National University

The argument put forward is that regional integration in natural resources are causing and exacerbating socio-environmental conflicts in ways that undermine on-going efforts to build more cohesive regional governance. Socio-environmental conflicts present new sources of development tensions related to the asymmetrical distribution of benefits and liabilities of natural resource extraction often at the expense of poor rural communities. In many ways this dimension regionalism contradicts the significant advancement reached in terms of political coordination, raising important questions about current limits to the transformative potential of regionalism in South America.