The politics of the ?project area?: patrimony, space and environmental risk in Argentina and Mexico

ANALIESE RICHARD ; ANA SPIVAK L'HOSTE

Congreso; Congreso IUAES; 2021

In recent decades in Latin America, a neo-extractivist boom has been accompanied by the creation of new governmental institutions and procedures aimed at estimating and managing the environmental risks associated with large-scale development projects such as energy, transportation, hydric and urban infrastructures, as well as extractive industries and tourism. In Argentina and Mexico, the environmental impact report is both an artefact of and a medium for these bureaucratic processes, which determine which projects will be permitted and under what circumstances. And, in both these countries, the delimiting of the ?project area?, (the zone in which a project is to be carried out and within which, in theory, environmental impacts are most likely to be felt) has emerged as a point of legal and political contention between project promoters and opposition movements . In this paper, we use cases derived from our respective ethnographic fieldwork to examine the role that the definition and delimitation of the ?project area? in the environmental impact reports filed by project developers plays in the the social construction of environmental risks. We seek to understand how aspects and senses of territory come to be constructed by different actors as a patrimonial objects at risk, and how these risks are objectified, embodied, represented, and interpreted. Further, we are interested in exploring what legal and political struggles over the proper delimitation of ?project areas? in Argentina and Mexico reveal about evolving notions of public and private, property and patrimony, and past and future landscapes