GREENLEAP

Latin America has a unique biodiversity and abundant natural resources, making the region’s environmental politics indispensable for attaining global environmental targets.

The Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework both emphasise states’ responsibility to adopt and govern according to climate and environmental strategies and plans, but the gap between needed environmental action and implemented policies is increasing. The coming “battles” of environmental politics will be in specific sectors where established actors stand to lose from stricter green regulations.

In the new research project GreenLeAP: Greening Achilles heel sectors: Understanding environmental policy change in Latin American Primary industries we will analyze and compare how these battles will play out, and how actors and institutions interact in such battles across four Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

Most countries have hard-to-abate “Achilles heel” sectors for domestic environmental action; in Latin America, these are large export-oriented primary industries like fossil-fuel extraction, mining, and industrial agriculture.

We have limited systematic knowledge of national environmental policymaking in these sectors in Latin America. GreenLeAP’s overall objective is to enhance the theoretical and empirical understanding of environmental policymaking in Latin American primary industry sectors, and thereby increase the knowledge on how the region can contribute to attaining global environmental targets.

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico have all been relatively ambitious in supporting global governance processes and targets on climate and environment, and in adopting domestic climate policies. However, all these four countries also gain substantial parts of their GDPs from export-oriented primary industry sectors with large environment-related conflicts over pollution, emissions, and the use of land and freshwater: industrial agriculture in Brazil, copper and lithium mining in Chile, and oil extraction in Colombia and Mexico. These four sectors represent the respective countries’ Achilles heels for ambitious environmental action.

GreenLeAP is led by Solveig Aamodt, Senior Researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research, collaborating with Benedicte Bull, Professor at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Yuri Kasahara, Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research at Oslo Metropolitan University, Matias Franchini, Associate Professor of International Relations at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá and Gunnell E. Sandanger, Senior Communication Adviser at CICERO.

The core research team also draws on the expertise of an international advisory board: Kathryn Hochstetler, Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Cristina Inoue Professor at Radboud University and Senior Researcher at the University of Brasilia, Guy Edwards, PhD scholar at the University of Sussex, Alejandra Elizondo Cordero, Researcher at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico and Aldo Madariaga, Professor at the School of Political Science, Diego Portales University in Santiago.

GreenLeAP is highly relevant for policymakers and stakeholders as it will contribute with insights on how states’ abilities to develop cross-sectorial environmental policies can be enhanced, and under what conditions environmental elites can influence sectorial policymaking.