Infrastructure & Latin American Environmental Geographies: An Introduction to our Special Issue

Abstract

Infrastructure & Latin American Environmental Geographies: An Introduction to our Special Issue Jessica Hope University of St. Andrews Murat Arsel International Institute of Social Studies Erasmus University Rotterdam Latin America’s contested environmental geographies remain globally significant , in particular for the negotiation and analysis of predatory extractive frontiers and for fertile decolonising agendas that include claims for territory, plurality, and ontological multiplicity. Yet contemporary commitments to new infrastructure connect and complicate both extractive and decolonising agendas, with implications for Latin American environmental geographies and their analysis. Plans for new infrastructure include new highways, waterways, railways, ports,dams,andpowerstations,includingin the Amazon basin (Bebbington et al., 2020). These plans support the region’s extractive imperative(Arseletal.,2016)butalsoextend a wider turn to infrastructure-led development (Dodson 2017; Alami et al., 2021) and, somewhat surprisingly, are entangled with global agendas for sustainable development (Hope 2022, this issue). In this special issue, we bring together fertilegeographicaldebatesoninfrastructure with debates on Latin American environmental geographies. Specifically, researchers are examining how new energy, transport, and water infrastructures (including incomplete projects) co-constitute environmental geographies and trajectories. In so doing, the papers pay close attention to several interrelated dynamics. First, juxtaposing the renewed emphasis on infrastructural development with previous waves of similar investments, they interrogate the function contemporary infrastructural projects serve for nation-states and policy makers. Second, the papers tease out societal responses to infrastructural projects at and around the sites where they are implemented, paying particular attention to dynamics of conflict (with outside actors as well as within communities), co-operation (with projects and/or implementors), and co-optation (of stakeholders as well as infrastructural projects ). Finally, they theorise the environmental geographies of Latin America by tracing thelocal,national,regional,andglobalspaces (re)created and connected by infrastructural developments. In this introductory paper, we set out the rationale for the special issue, its collective JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), 1–14 contributions, and our core arguments—that although infrastructure can be important for inclusion, citizenship, and participatory development (Bayer, this issue; Bauman & Zimmerer, this issue), much new hard infrastructure is proving top-down and hard to negotiate. It is tied to wider economic and political agendas and constitutes yet another environmental injustice for many communities .Thesepapersshowtheimportanceofwho drives decision-making about infrastructure and what this might mean for more emancipatoryenvironmentalgeographies (Werner& PimenteldeOliveira,thisissue;Guarnos-Meza & Torres Wong, this issue; Post, this issue). We further argue that hard, built infrastructure is not simply a connecting device. It constitutes a new object and political agent in particular environmental geographies—one that has consequencesforhowenvironmentsareexperienced and known (Hope, this issue). This is crucial for assessing what ambitious plans for new infrastructure mean for the regions’ environmental geographies and for wider trajectories of sustainability. This introduction is structured as follows: first, we summarise key debates on infrastructure and how they extend contemporary work on environmental geographies. Second, we argue for the continuing importance of Latin American environmental geographies, focusing on demands to settle Indigenous land claims, recognise plural natures, and implement non-extractive and non-growth-focused trajectories of development as well as on the ways such demands have been appropriated by an extractive imperative (Arsel et al., 2016) and commodities consensus (Svampa, 2015). Third, we introduce the papers in this issue and how they individually extend current work on infrastructure and environmental geography, focusing on overlaps, continuities, power, choice, and reassembly. Finally, we set out our conclusions. Turns to Infrastructure In urban geography, infrastructure has become a central lens for understanding how state-society relations and infrastructures are being analysed as co-constitutive of social worlds (Graham & Marvin, 2002). Going beyond treatments of hard infrastructure (electricity, roads) as purely physical objects, urban geographers have drawn from anthropology (see Larkin, 2013) to argue that physical infrastructure is implicated in the making of social worlds. This includes research on the ways that infrastructures co-constitute citizenship (Lemanski, 2020), act as a political intermediary (Amin, 2014), and determine rights to the city, amongst other dynamics. However, despite many hard infrastructures reaching into rural and conservation areas (such as roads or energy infrastructure), there is less attention to how infrastructures co-constitute socio-environmental worlds. Emerging work in geography and political ecology is arguing for an...