Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: A New Paradigm for Theory and Practice

Abstract

As a reflection of the ecological pressures associated with rapid modernization and globaliza- tion, the environment has become an enduring theme of public debate and protest in Latin America. Over the past decade, scholars have made increasing connections between such debate and a range of questions related to citizenship. Meanwhile, a discourse of 'environmental citizenship' has a growing prevalence in policy across the region. While these developments echo similar political and academic trends in the Global North, the Latin American context demands a unique set of theoretical and meth- odological approaches to studying the intersection of ecology and citizenship, sensitive to the specific historical, cultural, and ecological character of the region. We outline a research agenda spanning ques- tions of land, identity and citizenship; environmental justice and de-colonization; social subjectivity and the state; urban natures and citizens; and the materiality/subjectivity of nature. This array of approaches points to a more acute conceptualization of citizenship, both in terms of its understanding of politics and its treatment of ecology; it also offers a point of view that recognizes citizens and natures as dynamic realities, which mutually condition each other in a sphere of ongoing contest. Keywords: environmental citizenship, environmental policy, ecology, nature, social subjectivity. During the latter part of the twentieth century Latin American societies emerged from an era of authoritarian regimes and began processes of democratic renewal, with the environment becoming one of the first issues around which civil society movements coalesced. As a reflection of the ecological pressures associated with rapid modernization and globalization, based largely on the export of agricultural products and natural resources, the environment has remained an enduring theme of public debate and popular protest. This political ferment around environmental issues has made important contributions to new characterizations of the rights, re- sponsibilities and relations of citizenship in Latin America. Constitutional changes in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela have variously reconsidered rights related to access to land and a healthy environment (Gudynas 2009), while Ecuador's 2008 constitution goes so far as to provide rights to nature itself. Articu- lating these changes to the global scale, in 2004 the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) launched a Latin America Global Environmental Citizenship Project (Unep/Pnuma 2006). This has been followed by other formal recognitions of the relationship between environment and citizenship, including the Peruvian Ministry of Environment's 2009 Environmental Citizenship Prize, Brazil's Secre- tariat of Institutional Articulation and Environmental Citizenship and Chile's Youth National Environmental Citizenship Day. Reflecting these trends, scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has increasingly incorporated themes related to citizenship. Researchers working with rural and indigenous peoples have probed relationships that link the politics of land, livelihood and identity, often in the context of struggles for politi-