Introduction: Quo Vadis , Latin America? Human Rights, Environmental Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

As Latin America emerges scathed from the COVID-19 pandemic, the political pendulum appears to turn once again towards its longstanding calls for greater social inclusion. Inequality, inflation and continuous resource extraction without sufficient inclusiveness – in the forms of mining, expanding export-oriented agriculture or, increasingly, exclusionary approaches to sustainable development through renewable energy projects or the bioeconomy – have all driven social discontent. The region saw remarkable socio-economic progress during the 2000s, but those achievements largely relied on extensive natural resource exploitation in a development strategy sometimes dubbed neo-extractivism. Unequal access to decision-making and skewed distribution of benefits and burdens then fostered significant discontent as well as counter-reactions in many Latin American countries. The end of the so-called pink tide of more progressive governments and the emergence of right-wing populism have only made things tenser in the past years. It might be too early to speak of a new tide of socio-economic progress for the region, but rising commodity prices and the election of various left-leaning presidents since 2020 do give out signals reminiscent of the start of the century. However, it remains to be seen what this new political and economic cycle of Latin America entails for the environment, inclusiveness, and human rights. This special section assesses some of the latest developments in that field in different parts of Latin America. One relative novelty is the international institutional setting now in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The special section builds on the discussions of a double panel on the SDGs in Latin America at the annual conference of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) held at the University of Leicester in 2019. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, countries formally embraced the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its pledge to ‘leave no one behind’ and seventeen SDGs as its key framework. Meanwhile, sparked by increasing concerns about climate change, particularly industrialised countries of the global North have increasingly pushed for decarbonisation, circular economies and energy transitions, with implications also for Latin America. Renewable energy and the bioeconomy, for instance, have been presented as two key elements for such transitions away from fossil fuels. The SDGs are supposed to reconcile economic, environmental and social aims in such transitioning towards sustainability, thus ensuring inclusiveness, equality, peace, justice, and accountability. Yet, there has been little empirical research on how those efforts play out in Latin America's current context of social and political change. As the 2030 Agenda reaches the midpoint of its 15-year implementation period, the five papers in this interdisciplinary special section offer a fresh and much-needed in-depth assessment of how such socio-environmental issues have been playing out across Latin America and the role of the SDGs. Three papers examine human rights and environmental issues while assessing the effects of the SDGs in different Latin American countries. Bastos Lima and Da Costa show how, in Brazil, the SDGs have become an ambivalent framework that has strengthened civil society scrutiny of the Bolsonaro government but also allowed environmental malgovernance to go unchecked. Jofré exposes the gap between Chile's official reporting on progress towards the SDGs and the perceptions of inclusion amongst civil society actors. There, grassroots organisations with fewer financial resources and who remain critical of the dominant neo-extractivist development model have felt routinely excluded from policy processes. Finally, Christel and Möhle examine a case of large-scale mining operations and resource conflict in Argentina. They note the cherry-picking of SDGs and analyse the unresolved tensions stemming from contrasting visions of what sustainable development means for different actors. Together, the three articles provide a sobering assessment on the much-hailed transformative potential of the SDGs. Their findings suggest, instead, that the SDGs' voluntary targets are broadly insufficient. In practice, long-standing inequalities within the domestic political contexts, alongside practices of cherry-picking and selective reporting, often trump the lip service paid to human rights or the environment. The two other articles look at broader processes of sustainability politics and histories in Latin America, focussing on renewable energy and the role of new ‘green’ technologies. Tracing the history of property relations in southern Mexico back to European colonisation, McClure shows how the shift to ‘sustainable development’, despite its emphasis on protecting local communities and their natural resources, has not changed the historic tension between indigenous property rights and the expansion of commercial interests. Thus far, recent developments in wind energy promotion have instead perpetuated under new disguises the poverty and exclusion of indigenous communities. Siegel et al. in turn examine how emerging bioeconomy policy agendas, often promoted also by European actors, are taken up by different actors in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Although there are differences in their strategies and the constellation of actors involved in the three countries, it is clear that bioeconomy policies raise as many opportunities as new challenges and do not automatically lead to more sustainability or to inclusiveness. The two articles indicate that new technologies have mostly reproduced existing inequality patterns, whereas long-standing and deep-rooted concerns over access rights and fair distribution remain. Overall, the future of environmental and human rights issues in Latin America remains unclear. The SDGs may, in some contexts, have provided civil society actors with tools to hold governments to account, a common language for accessing international funding, and in some cases the institutional space for discussing what sustainability means to different people. Yet, the current global sustainability agenda has sometimes also condoned malpractices and aggravated socio-environmental risks in Latin America. These issues now are perhaps more exposed than ever, and they remain increasingly urgent. The current institutional setting thus is not in itself conducive to transformation; this will have to come from elsewhere, be it further mobilisation, the political turn the continent is again taking, or from other global institutional shifts. As ever, Latin America's future remains to be seen. We would like to acknowledge funding by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) (grant number 2219NR291) and the University of Münster through the research project “Transformation and Sustainability Governance in South American Bioeconomies”.