“The region is in need of a comprehensive research agenda on environmental politics”

Considering the impact of climate change already affecting the Latin American and Caribbean region (and the rest of the world), as it was described in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations, a research team concluded that the region still does not have a comprehensive research agenda on environmental protection politics.

After conducting an extensive review of the literature on environmental politics in Latin America and the Caribbean, scientists Ricardo Gutierrez, CONICET researcher at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM), and Isabella Alcañiz, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center of the University of Maryland (UMD), published their book The Distributive Politics of Environmental Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“To find a solution to environmental problems and conflicts that only promise to increase in the future, it is vital to understand both the origin of these problems and conflicts as well as the impact of the policies proposed to resolve them. For this reason, we need to develop a comprehensive research agenda on environmental politics (which refers not only to government policies but also to all forms of action and political conflict about environmental issues, such as protest or lobbying) in our region,” holds Gutierrez. He is a specialist in the study of environmental problems and policies from an interdisciplinary perspective and CONICET researcher at the Political Research Institute (IIP, CONICET-UNSAM).

Comprehensive research approach

The publication by Gutierrez and Alcañiz is the first one to offer a general overview of conflicts and environmental policies in the region. It also proposes a comprehensive approach for environmental politics studies in the context of global environmental degradation and climate change.

In the review of the literature, the authors identify two major perspectives that, in some way, interfere with a comprehensive approach: one focused on social mobilization and the other on state action.

“These perspectives are neither static nor exclusive but they tend to prioritize different aspects of environmental conflicts and policies. The social mobilization-centered literature focuses on the resistance of different civil society actors against certain economic activities or state polices,” explains Gutiérrez, who is also dean and professor at the UNSAM School of Politics and Government. He has a PhD in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

In contrast, the literature that focuses on the state pays more attention to environmental protection policies, the capacities the state has (or does not have) to carry out those policies and, very often, what is called the “implementation gap”, that is, the distance between the proposed policies and the results obtained. “This perspective views the state as the main actor in environmental politics,” says Gutiérrez.

“Our review and approach seek to bridge the gap between these two points of view in order to understand how environmental protection policies arise, how they are defined, and what effects they have. We have to pay attention simultaneously to the dynamics of social mobilization and to the variations in state action, together with the role of economic actors,” Gutiérrez stresses.

In the book, as a proposal for a comprehensive approach to environmental politics, the authors ask who benefits from the appropriation of natural resources, who pays the costs of environmental degradation and climate change, and who benefits from state protection. “Often, particularly in the literature focused on social mobilization, the answers to these three questions are: the powerful, the poor and the powerful again. Paraphrasing them: ‘It’s inequality, stupid.’ But within the constraints of inequality, there are opportunities to form winning coalitions,” Gutiérrez affirms.

According to the researcher, “In Latin America and the Caribbean, civil society actors have forged broad alliances with bureaucrats and experts (and sometimes with economic actors) with similar ideas on how to define and how to solve environmental problems. These coalitions that cut across the state-society divide help to explain how affected populations can sometimes build winning coalitions with the ability to reverse state decisions. I think this is the main finding of the book.”

Besides, for Gutiérrez the development of a comprehensive research agenda on environmental politics (which can go even beyond the Latin American region) requires assuming that what is at stake are the values, interests and strategies of a variety of social, economic and government actors that have different ways to understand the state-nature relationship and also different ideas on how to solve environmental problems and seek to forge (usually conflicting)alliances  to see their ideas and interests reflected.

“In other words, the solution to environmental problems can never be (exclusively) scientific or technological. Environmental problems are, above all, social problems. As experts have insisted since environmental thought took hold from 1960s onwards, what is at stake in environmental problems and conflicts is, ultimately, the confrontation between different values. For this reason, the solution will have to be, also or above all, political: understanding the confrontation of actors, values and interests that are at stake in each case is the starting point for combating environmental degradation and its intimate link with social injustice,” concludes the CONICET researcher at the UNSAM.