Environmental Governance in Latin America

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 recourse-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.
Environmental governance in Latin America studies the nature and background of contemporary environmental governance in the region as well as the possibilities for more sustainability and socio-environmental justice. In eleven chapters by an international team of experts, important contemporary political changes in environmental governance are discussed, and new initiatives are analyzed.