Geography

Title

The infrastructure-extractives-resource governance complex in the Pan-Amazon: Roll backs and contestations

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Large-scale access and energy infrastructure projects, together with expanding investments in natural resource extraction, pose significant challenges to biodiversity conservation, forest cover, and the defence of forest peoples' rights and livelihoods across the wider Amazon region. Following a period in which safeguards and forest dwellers' territorial rights were strengthened under more permissive political opportunity structures, the current period has been characterized by efforts to weaken these protections and to facilitate large-scale private investment in previously protected lands. We describe these investment-based threats to forests and rights, and the nature of regulatory rollbacks in the region. We then discuss some of the ways in which social movement actors have responded to these pressures and the extent to which they have affected the policies driving these pressures on forests and rights. While in prior decades movements were able to exercise mediated influence on policy, at present the channels open to them are mostly indirect, though opportunities for collaboration between movements organizations and rights-defending government agencies do emerge periodically offering channels for mediated influence.

Publication Title

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Publication Date

1-2018

Issue

106

First Page

183

Last Page

208

ISSN

0924-0608

DOI

10.32992/erlacs.10414

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