Book Description
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.
This open book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY). You can download Environmental Governance in Latin America ebook for free in PDF format (3.6 MB).
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
Chapter 1
Origins and Perspectives of Latin American Environmentalism
Chapter 2
Social Metabolism and Conflicts over Extractivism
Chapter 3
Indigenous Knowledge in Mexico: Between Environmentalism and Rural Development
Part II
New Politics of Natural Resources
Chapter 4
The Government of Nature: Post-Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Bolivia and Ecuador
Chapter 5
Changing Elites, Institutions and Environmental Governance
Chapter 6
Water-Energy-Mining and Sustainable Consumption: Views of South American Strategic Actors
Chapter 7
Overcoming Poverty Through Sustainable Development
Part III
New Projects of Environmental Governance
Chapter 8
Forest Governance in Latin America: Strategies for Implementing REDD
Chapter 9
Rights, Pressures and Conservation in Forest Regions of Mexico
Chapter 10
Local Solutions for Environmental Justice
Chapter 11
Community Consultations: Local Responses to Large-Scale Mining in Latin America
Afterword
From Sustainable Development to Environmental Governance
Index