Transformations in Environmental Politics in the Era of Climate Change: Eco-Populism in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Alex Barnard*University of California, Berkeley

Department of Sociology**

Abstract

How are environmental politics in the developing world transforming as attention and resources shift towards climate mitigation and environmental governance becomes a central but contested state function? Drawing on a case study of the Yasuní-ITT initiative, an innovative but ultimately unsuccessful climate mitigation project in Ecuador, I identify limits to the capacity of the existing literature on environmental politics to analyze these shifts. I suggest that the national and sub-national political dynamics around Yasuní might be better conceptualized in terms of “eco-populism.” I focus on four dimensions of “eco-populist” environmental politics: competition between different agencies of the state in environmental conflicts, the use of environmental issues by non-traditional actors as tools for populist mobilization, the emergence of new framings of environmental issues centered on national identity and ethnic exclusion, and contestation over the scientific and technical tools used to attach monetary value to the natural environment. “Eco-populism” provides one way to interpret broader shifts in environmental conflicts in countries where climate change is salient and states have assumed a greater and more complex role in environmental politics.

Key Words: environmentalism, developing world, climate change, oil, Ecuador, populism, Latin America

* The author is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on the local politics of climate change.** The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Laura Enriquez, Manuel Rosaldo, Laura Rival, Rebecca Tarlau, and the Latin American Studies Working Group. Direct correspondence to Alex V. Barnard / Sociology Department / University of California-Berkeley / Barrows Hall / Berkeley, CA 94702-1980 / Tel: (510) 642-4766 / Fax: (510) 642-0659 / E-mail: avbarnard@berkeley.edu.

Introduction

Nueva Roca Fuerte is an unlikely site to find significant concern for the environment.

Situated on the Ecuadorian border with Peru, the Amazonian town of nearly six-hundred had

strategic importance when the two countries were at war. Now, though, in the words of most

residents, it is “abandoned”.1 Economic options for residents are limited: it is too distant to bring

agricultural products to market and too remote for tourism. Moreover, because it is populated

not by indigenous Amazonians but by mestizo (mixed-race) “colonists”—migrants from

Ecuador’s highlands—the town has attracted little attention from the environmental non-

governmental organizations (NGOs) creating integrated conservation-and-development projects

across the Amazon. In recent years, the few jobs available in Nueva Roca Fuerte (NRF) have all

been in a single industry: oil. NRF is perched just outside the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini

(ITT) bloc of Yasuní National Park, a 200,000-hectare stretch of rainforest that is purported to be

one of the most bio-diverse places in the world.2 In a predictably tragic twist, the block also

holds 20% of Ecuador’s remaining oil reserves. In the past, the economic calculus for an export-

dependent country like Ecuador was simple: expand oil development with little consideration of

the ecological consequences.3

In 2007, however, Ecuador’s newly-elected leftist President, Rafael Correa, offered what

he called a “pioneering initiative in the history of an oil-producing country”.4 Ecuador would

leave the oil in the ITT block underground in exchange for half the projected revenues from

extraction—$3.6 billion—to be deposited in a United Nations Development Program trust fund

and used to finance renewable energy and sustainable development.5 In addition to protecting

the park, the initiative would avert the production of 407 million tons of CO2, or approximately

the yearly emissions of France.6 The mechanism Yasuní-ITT proposed—payments for leaving

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fossil fuels underground—had no precedent in existing climate treaties. As one Ecuadorian

official proudly exclaimed: “This is an entirely new model for fighting climate change that we

have devised, which is paying for non-emissions. It doesn’t exist in the world. It’s not in Kyoto;

it’s not anywhere.”7

The Yasuní-ITT initiative received enthusiastic support from world civil society,8 and in

a 2009 poll, 77% of Ecuadorians claimed they wanted the oil left underground.9 Nonetheless,

environmentalists in the Ecuadorian capital assured me that the people of NRF desired oil

exploitation and the jobs it would bring. In interviews and informal discussions, though,

residents of NRF stated the contrary: that they preferred their town without the petroleum

industry, even though few believed money from the international donors to leave the oil

underground would ever reach them.10 While some explained their opposition to exploitation in

terms of concerns over local pollution, others evoked global narratives of the Amazon as the

“lungs of the world.” The previous mayor had even been chased out of town when residents

discovered that he was secretly negotiating with oil companies.

In August of 2013, the Ecuadorian government announced that, because only a tiny

fraction of the hoped-for international compensation had been forthcoming, the Yasuní-ITT

initiative would end and drilling would go forward. From one perspective, the Yasuní proposal’s

failure looks like one more example of the “dysfunctional North-South politics”11 that have

plagued global climate negotiations and been examined in-depth elsewhere.12 Yet while the

international politics of the ITT initiative may adhere to a familiar script, the national and sub-

national politics surrounding the initiative bear further examination. How do we explain pro-

environmental politics in such an unlikely place as NRF, especially when the costs of

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environmental protection—lost economic opportunities—are so immediate, and the benefits—

averted carbon emissions—so abstract?

This paper uses the short life of the Yasuní-ITT initiative to explore how such

international proposals create openings and opportunities for more local transformations in

environmental politics. Even absent concerted global action to address climate change, I suggest

that the potential resources for climate mitigation,13 the increasingly proactive role of states like

Ecuador’s in environmental governance, and the growing legitimacy attached to environmental

claims are changing the dynamics of environmental politics in the developing world. As I show,

however, the main existing paradigms, which I group as “post-materialist environmentalism”, the

“environmentalism of the poor”, and “cultural ecologism”, do not adequately capture these shifts

as they played out between state agencies, municipal governments, international NGOs, popular

movements, and indigenous organizations in and around Yasuní Park.

In this paper, I offer an alternative framework, which I call “eco-populism”, and elaborate

four dimensions of this approach. First, in contrast to a historical portrait of the developing-

world state as an outright foe of environmental movements, I show how Ecuador’s state has

become a fragmented terrain of environmental struggle, providing new norms and agencies for

environmental protection (even though it ultimately adhered to an extractive agenda). Second, I

demonstrate that the increasing stakes of environmental conflicts led new, non-traditional actors

—in particular, municipal governments run by colonists—to incorporate environmental claims

into populist politics. Third, I explore how, at the local level, actors connected ecological themes

to populist mobilizing frames that drew on nationalist, anti-elite, and anti-indigenous discourses.

Finally, I show how these actors engaged with new mechanisms for marketizing and

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commoditizing environmental services by offering their own quantifications of the value of oil

and the environment, drawing on folk and popular scientific understandings.

Although other scholars have made similar observations about shifts in environmental

politics, my aim is to show how they are interconnected in a single case. While the findings are

drawn from Yasuní, an “eco-populist” framework offers some general predictions about the

kinds of political actors, cleavages, and framings we might expect to see in response to the

opportunities created by similar circumstances, which lays the groundwork for more comparative

work.

Environmentalism(s) in the Developing World

The formal environmental movement that emerged in the United States and Western

Europe in the 1960s was identified by sociologists as engaged in a “post-materialist” brand of

politics.14 The label signified that participants were largely middle-class and that the

movement’s primary concern was with the aesthetic, spiritual, or intrinsic value of nature. As

world-society scholars have shown, this post-materialist approach was transferred to the

developing world through the expertise, influence, and financial support of Western conservation

organizations15 and norms and policies promulgated by international treaties and organizations.16

Consistent with this framework, both national case-studies and cross-national comparisons

demonstrate that the self-identified environmental groups that emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s in

Latin America were staffed by urban elites, played a peripheral role in national politics, and had

limited public support.17

This “post-materialist” perspective on environmental politics directs our attention to a

relatively small set of professional environmental NGOs concerned primarily with establishing

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parks and protected areas. It offers little analytic leverage, however, for understanding the

involvement of a broader range of popular actors in pro-environmental claims making. A wider

lens on environmentalism would note that a host of social movements in the developing world—

such as Brazilian rubber-tappers seeking control of their forests, urban slum-dwellers demanding

access to clear water and air, peasants defending smallholder agriculture, or fishermen asserting

their right to common resources—make demands for environmental goods and represent

themselves as environmental stewards.

Martinez-Alier18 argues that, despite their diverse origins and demands, these movements

reflect a common “environmentalism of the poor” (EotP) focused on defending the natural

resources on which marginal populations depend for their survival.19 A plethora of case studies

and theoretical syntheses support the claim that many instances of popular environmentalism in

the developing world emerge as direct responses to threats to traditional livelihoods that rely on

the natural environment.20 An “environmentalist” identity among movement participants stems

directly from shared conditions of subsistence, not an “imagined” national or ethnic community.

As a result, these movements often appear to be, at root, “motivated by basic and immediate

material interest.”21 Yet precisely because this reliance on land, trees, or water is tied to these

groups’ very survival, they invariably resist attempts to reduce nature to a monetary value.22

While the EotP framework of Martinez-Alier is recurrent in the anthropological and

geographical literature, it is an easy target for criticism because it misses one of the most basic

insights of social movement theory: that grievances alone are insufficient to explain political

engagement.23 Precisely because these groups are poor, they lack many of the material and

organizational resources usually identified as necessary for mobilization. In response, scholars

such as Escobar24 and Baviskar25 have argued that strong cultural identities rooted in a

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connection to the natural world can facilitate environmental claims-making. As Escobar argues,

this means that environmental struggles in the developing world are not just over access to

resources, but also “cultural meanings, production paradigms, and environmental rationalities”.26

From this perspective, understanding environmental politics requires considering the different

“lifeworlds”, “cosmovisions”, or “ontologies” that create irreconcilable modes of constructing

and valuing the natural environment.27

This “cultural ecologist” framework has been fruitfully used to understand indigenous

actors that have used claims of traditional environmental stewardship to bolster demands for

territorial rights and cultural recognition.28 Studies of indigenous environmentalism in the

Amazon, in particular, have juxtaposed the “essential commitment”29 of indigenous people to

ecological preservation against the non-participation in environmental movements of mixed-race

non-indigenous “colonists” like those found in Nueva Roca Fuerte.30 As this perspective

assumes, a deeply-rooted “ecological identity”, founded in a long-standing relationship to the

land and alternative cultural conception of nature, is one crucial determinant of whether a group

will support environmental preservation.31

These three literatures each provide a useful framework for interpreting some cases of

environmental politics in the developing world. Nonetheless, there are important lacunae that

cut across them. Within the EotP framework, the state is depicted as an agent of environmental

degradation, obeying a “common Southern pattern of cooperation between the upper levels of the

state and foreign private corporations for the use of natural resources.”32 Similarly, authors

working within a “cultural ecologist” framework have argued that, compared to the deep-seeded

commitment of indigenous groups to sustainability, government-sponsored conservation

programs reflect little more than an “aestheticized, non-politicized discourse closely tied to a

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broader official discourse of development.”33 At most, state environmental action is portrayed in

each framework as an anemic response to outside pressure, rather than an embrace of

environmental protection from within the state apparatus.

A related point is that each of these three literatures contains strong assumptions about

the scale at which environmental politics emerge and claims are made. The livelihood-centered

movements described by Martinez-Alier almost always emerge from and are confined to a

particular locality, even if they receive assistance from external activist networks or NGOs.

Mobilizations to defend community land management or traditional patterns of resource use are

thus almost invariably “a defence [sic] of the locality against the nation”34—leaving little space

to discuss multi-scalar issues like climate change. “Cultural ecologists”, similarly, place

significant emphasis on the linkages between grassroots movements and transnational

organizations, to the extent that such movements are neither local nor global, but “glocal.”35 For

their part, scholars analyzing more formal transnational environmental movements have

emphasized how such movements largely jump over both the state and the nation as objects of

political contention.36

Additionally, each literature is organized around a presumption of whom those groups

most likely to make pro-environmental claims actually are. Whether the primary actors are

professional NGOs, grassroots producer organizations, or indigenous groups, as in the post-

materialist, EotP, and cultural ecologist frameworks respectively, certain groups are presumed to

be prone to make environmental demands while others are not.37 Comparatively less attention

has been given to the practices, tactics, and issue framings by which new constituencies for

environmental protection are constructed. Finally, in each case, there is an explicit or implicit

assumption that these same environmental actors view nature as “incommensurable”: that is to

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say, whether valued in post-materialist, livelihood, or cultural terms, it must be protected from

market commoditization.

A schematic comparison of these different paradigms can be found in Table 1.

Climate Change, the State, and Eco-Populism

Each of the above literatures provides predictions about the role of the state in

environmental politics, the types of actors we would (and would not) expect to see participating

in environmental conflicts, the ways these actors would present their claims, and how those

claims are underpinned by different modes of valuing the environment. These predictions derive

from underlying assumptions about environmental politics that need to be reconsidered in light

of the fluctuating shape of the international climate mitigation regime, the partial

institutionalization of environmental protection within developing-world states, and the growing

resources, incentives, and legitimacy for environmental projects.

In part, the emergence of “eco-populism” can be traced to the inexorable “rise and rise”38

of conservation in the developing world. As recently as the 1992 Rio Conference, developing

countries like India and Brazil acted as if international pressure for environmental protection

were a “neo-imperialist plot”39 to stunt modernization and industrialization. Such a position is

now increasingly rare. In their account of the “greening” of the Brazilian state, Hochstetler and

Keck40 argue that while individual environmental campaigns may succeed or fail, the overall

trajectory has been one of gradual institutionalization of policies for and expectations of

environmental protection.41 In light of this, theories of environmental politics need to address the

developing-world state as a strengthened, yet deeply contradictory, independent environmental

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actor, rather than assuming that it is little more than a proxy for the interests of Northern actors

or an outright foe of grassroots mobilization.

Growing capacity for environmental action within the state has been coupled with new

pressures from outside of it. Cross-national surveys show that pro-environmental beliefs have

now diffused widely across the developing world.42 Membership in post-materialist classes,

grassroots producer organizations, or indigenous groups cannot, in and of itself, explain this

breadth of support. Although the linkage between environmental values and behaviors is

notoriously tenuous, these surveys suggest that the latent constituency for environmental

movements has expanded considerably. Indeed, according to one study, many Latin Americans

now see themselves as “environmental citizens”43, for whom the provisioning of environmental

goods and services is a core—if often unfulfilled—state function.

These bottom-up changes in environmental politics are coupled with top-down changes

in the nascent international climate regime. The “common but differentiated responsibilities”

framework of the Kyoto Protocol, which assumed that climate mitigation was a task for the

developed-world, reflected an era in which developing countries resisted the assertion that they

had any part to play in reducing emissions.44 Yet despite their limited historical contribution to

greenhouse gases, in more recent climate conferences, various blocs of developing countries

have aggressively advocated both for serious action on climate change and significant transfers

of resources from North to South to pay for mitigation.45 Little attention has been given,

however, to how the shifting promises, raised-expectations, and failed follow-through of the

international climate regime have translated into changes in national and local environmental

politics.

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As the failure of the ITT initiative attests, the international climate regime has thus far

failed to deliver, both in terms of serious action on climate change and promised funds.

Nonetheless, the initiative shows how the prospect of international action on climate change can

provide new incentives for environmental policies and movements at a sub-global scale. To

offer one well-publicized example, much vaunted “Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation

and Degradation” (REDD) projects have failed to attract anticipated resources from rich-world

carbon markets, because these markets have largely failed to come into existence. Nonetheless,

across Latin America, governments and civil society organizations are “getting REDD-y”46 by

setting up programs designed to attract mitigation funds if and when they appear. Such programs

have provided a vehicle for the ongoing commodification of environmental goods through

payments for ecological services and monetary valuations of nature.47 While Ecuador’s ITT

initiative was designed as an alternative to market-based approaches, Ecuadorian officials

admitted that it was only thanks to their (mistaken) perception of the availability of international

resources for climate mitigation that the initiative was possible.48

In the end, the very lack of clarity about the shape the international climate regime will

take may itself broaden the scope of environmental politics, as new actors and projects position

themselves to benefit from or resist it. Indeed, the stakes of climate change—manifested in the

well-publicized existential threat it poses to populations in select areas and the prospect of

conservation interventions on an unprecedented scale—are so large that we can no longer

assume that environmental politics in the developing world will be the purview of a relatively

narrow range of NGOs, grassroots organizations, and indigenous groups. Instead, within a

context in which environmentalist discourses have become “ambient”49, a wide range of political

actors are now obligated to make some claims around the environment.

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How can we analyze the ways these global shifts impact national and local environmental

politics? In this paper, I am proposing “eco-populism” as one way to understand how new

groups are constructed and mobilized to make claims on the environment. The label “eco-

populism” was coined by Szasz50, who used it to describe diverse grassroots coalitions that

emerged in the 1980s in the United States to demand both environmental and social justice. I

approach “eco-populism” in a less rosy light, grounding it within the long history of populist

mobilization by national and local governments in the developing world (and, particularly, Latin

America).51 As Jansen argues, populism is one way of creating new cross-class political

cleavages through practices that “mobilize ordinarily marginalized social sectors into publicly

visible and contentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite nationalist rhetoric that

valorizes ordinary people”.52 An “eco-populist” approach emphasizes how contentious

mobilization within civil society can be tied to institutional politics and the state. Indeed, in

populist politics, state bureaucracies and institutions are not static opportunity structures, but

some of the actors to be “mobilized”, often by demagogic public officials.

The “us” and “them” structure of populist discourse is extremely flexible. As Jansen

notes, “precisely which groups get tarred with the elite brush can vary significantly from one

case to another.”53 Populist mobilization engages groups traditionally left out of environmental

movements (such as, in the Amazon, non-indigenous mestizo colonists) by using ecological

conflicts to draw distinctions and mark group boundaries. As such, an eco-populist approach

suggests that environmental claims can be advanced through a much wider range of framings

than typically identified54, including demands based on national pride, ethnic resentment, or

regional solidarity. Moreover, because the pro-environmental actors in eco-populist politics do

not necessarily have a traditional connection to nature as a source of cultural reproduction or

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livelihood, they may not reject all attempts to commodify or marketize nature. Instead, they

challenge elite scientific valuations of ecological services and offer their own schemes for

rendering environmental goods “commensurable” in ways that reflect popular experience and

folk wisdom.

“Eco-populism” thus presents an alternative way to think about environmental politics

within a shifting structural context. My goal is not to discard other approaches, but to propose an

additional framework to stand alongside them. In the remainder of this paper, I flesh out this

concept of “eco-populism” using the case of Yasuní, describing the changing role of the state,

the actors engaging in populist mobilization, the framings of environmental issues they deployed,

and the valuations of nature they adopted.

Data and Methods

This paper draws on three months of fieldwork in Ecuador during the summer of 2010—

when prospects for the initiative seemed bright—and a six-week follow-up visit in 2013, shortly

before it was terminated. The goal of this research was to test, challenge, and ultimately

reconstruct theories of popular environmentalism in the developing world in light of empirical

evidence. In keeping with the precepts of the extended case method55, I used popular

environmental politics around the Yasuní-ITT initiative to examine the local and national

transformations wrought by shifting international climate politics. Rather than trying to bracket

context, history, and structure, I embraced them as constitutive of what I observed on the ground,

and tried to trace action at the local level upward and outward to understand how it was both

shaped by and responded to external forces.

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During my time in Ecuador, I conducted sixty-five in-depth interviews and three focus

group discussions with state officials, municipal politicians, indigenous leaders, park

administrators, local businessmen, foreign conservationists, oil workers, and Yasuní-area

residents. Interviewees were selected based on their knowledge of the local and national politics

of the initiative, rather than the international negotiations surrounding it. I complemented my

interviews with “go-alongs”56: focused periods of participant-observation at key research sites. I

attended meetings of the Yasuní-ITT Proposal Technical Committee and the Management

Committee of the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. I travelled extensively in the park and surrounding

environs. I shadowed park employees engaged in environmental management as well as visiting

communities surrounding the ITT Bloc, Huaorani indigenous villages in the interior of the park,

and the municipalities of Francisco de Orellana (Coca)—the region’s commercial and transport

hub—Tena, Sacha, and Nueva Roca Fuerte. I also monitored both domestic and international

media coverage of the Yasuní initiative from 2009 to the present.

Although these different qualitative data sources allow me to triangulate my findings,

they do not shield me from the standard criticisms about the representativeness and

generalizability of ethnographic research. In truth, I did not select the Yasuní-ITT initiative

because I saw it as a middling or average case: in fact, quite the opposite! Ecuador is an apt site

to examine transformations in environmental politics precisely because they appear there in an

accentuated, and therefore particularly visible, form. My approach allows me to identify some of

the key dynamics of what I am calling “eco-populism” and to connect them to structural and

historical factors. While I cannot speak to the broader presence of eco-populism in the

developing world, I do identify what might lead to eco-populism in other contexts.

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Petro State, Green State, Fragmented State

The shift of the Ecuadorian state from all-out proponent of extraction to temporary

advocate for the Yasuní-ITT initiative is emblematic of the need to rethink the role of

developing-world states in environmental politics. Ecuador has long been a classic case of an

export-dependent petro-state, complete with the weak institutions, clientelism, and corruption

that the “resource curse” usually entails.57 From the first advance of the oil frontier into the

Amazon during the 1970s, the state has displayed a consistent lack of political will, human and

technical capacity, and monetary resources to mitigate the environmental impacts of extraction.58

Yasuní National Park captured this failure in microcosm: despite its nominally protected status,

the vast majority of the park outside the ITT block has already been subject to oil exploitation.59

Indeed, by the turn of the century, illegal logging and animal poaching had pushed the park’s

ecosystem to the “border of collapse”.60

In the last decade, though, environmental governance in Ecuador has undergone a

dramatic transformation. As in Bolivia, a powerful indigenous movement, backed by

international civil society, has injected a new environmental discourse into national politics.61 At

international climate conferences, Correa and Bolivian President Evo Morales have deployed

populist rhetoric of “us and them” to advocate for developing-world interests, noting that “On a

global level, environmental goods are generated by the Third World and consumed for free by

the first.”62 Subsequently, the Correa regime has invested significantly in renewable energy

projects, presided over a new constitution that is the “greenest in the world”, and introduced a

plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the Galapagos Islands.63 As an official in the national

planning ministry explained, “We are thinking on the level of the entire country about how we

can change the base of production away from oil.”64 Even at a purely discursive level, this is a

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major change for a country where the first barrels of oil produced were paraded through the

streets of the capital city and in which oil has long been a bulwark of national identity.65

The initiative to leave the oil of the ITT bloc of Yasuní Park underground originated with

Acción Ecológica, a radical Ecuadorian environmental group with a longstanding antagonism

towards the state. But it was the embrace of the initiative by Correa’s party in the election of

2007 that turned it from a dream of radical environmentalists to a credible piece of public

policy.66 In the context of growing national legitimacy for environmental claims, explained one

Ecuadorian researcher, “The President realized that this initiative was an important political tool,

and he took it away from civil society.”67 From 2007 to 2013, then, the primary driver of the

proposal was not grassroots environmental movements, indigenous groups, or professional

conservation NGOs, but actors within the state itself.

Indeed, as part of a general push towards strengthening state institutions, the Correa

regime has pulled environmental professionals from civil society into the state, creating for the

first time a dedicated environmental ministry.68 After years languishing as a “paper park”,

Yasuní now has a management plan and resources to hire appropriately qualified Ecuadorian

conservation professionals. At the same time, other ministries—like that for Non-Renewable

Resources—are staffed by individuals who hold a deeply-engrained notion that natural resources

exist to be exploited.69 Outside of Yasuní, the Correa government has aggressively moved to

regain control of foreign oil companies, with the goal of maximizing revenues gained by the state

from extraction—not limiting exploitation.70 Like other governments of Latin America’s “left

turn”, the Correa regime has made substantial commitments to build state capacity and increase

social spending, which it insists can presently be paid for only through resource extraction.

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An eco-populist approach argues that the Ecuadorian state is not just an old-style

extractivist government masquerading as a green regime, but is, itself, an increasingly

contentious field of environmental struggle. From the start, the government threatened a “Plan

B” to exploit the oil if the money for “Plan A” to leave the oil underground was not

forthcoming.71 Conflicts between environmentalists and extractivists within the state were so

intense that, in late 2009, the negotiating team for the ITT initiative resigned en masse when

Correa denounced the deal they had struck with the UN as an affront to Ecuadorian sovereignty.

In response to public outcry, however, Correa created a new team and formed a “political

committee” to prevent the Ministries of Environment and Non-Renewable Natural Resources

from acting in completely contradictory fashion with respect to the initiative.72

Even when, by 2013, it was clear that international funds would not arrive, there was still

significant uncertainty within Ecuadorian civil society about whether the President would

approve oil drilling.73 The fact that the President’s ultimate decision to cancel the initiative

relentlessly blamed the international community and emphasized the limited environmental

impacts of drilling suggests his keen awareness of the political consequences of backtracking on

a popular proposal.74 At the time of this papers’ writing, supporters of leaving the oil

underground had gathered half of the signatures they needed to force a national referendum on

the issue, suggesting the degree to which the Ecuadorian population now expected the state to be

engaged in environmental protection.75

As such, even despite the initiative’s failure, a complete dismissal of the environmental

advances in the Ecuadorian state would be analytically simplistic. As one conservation

professional explained: “It has changed…I think to say that nothing has changed would be an

error…when I analyze what has happened, it’s clear that we have advanced a lot.”76 The very

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fact that there was a debate at all over whether to exploit ITT in a country where as much as 50%

of government revenues come from petroleum is a striking example of environmentalism

working its way into the state.77 This is especially notable when we compare Ecuador to Peru,

where plans to exploit an oil field adjacent to ITT have gone forward with little debate.78

A “stronger” state in Ecuador has not necessarily meant a more unified one. This is, of

course, not a new observation: others have theorized the state in the developing world as a

potentially fragmented entity.79 With respect to environmental politics, though, an eco-populist

perspective requires that we consider how these contradictions make the state into more than just

an external opportunity structure against which movements mobilize. Instead, as Hochstetler,

Keck, and Abers argue in their work on Brazil, environmental contestation can take place as

much within the state as against it.80 In Ecuador, a fragmented state has allowed social

movements, civil society organizations, and sub-national governments to selectively appropriate,

ally with, and challenge state norms, institutions, and agencies around the ITT initiative.

Local Governments and Eco-Populist Mobilization

In the summer of 2010, the residents of the largest metropolitan area near Yasuní park—

Coca—were inundated with messages about the dangers of exploitation in ITT. The local

television channel played advertisements urging residents to say “No to a slow death, no to

exploitation in ITT”, store windows displayed posters advocating leaving the oil underground,

and Yasuní was repeatedly mentioned in local fairs and festivals. This publicity was paid for

neither by the central government nor Western or Ecuadorian NGOs: these entities had decided

to by-pass the mostly-colonist residents of Coca in favor of the park’s indigenous residents.81

Surprisingly, it was the municipal and provincial governments that were promoting the

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conservation of Yasuní at the local level. Why would a municipality like Coca—with a rapidly

growing population, significant dependence on petroleum for employment, and urgent needs for

infrastructure and services traditionally funded by oil companies—promote the non-exploitation

of oil?

An eco-populist framework interprets this involvement in terms of the use of

environmental issues to mobilize popular support as part of ongoing regional political

contestation. Ecuador’s Amazon has long been economically isolated and politically

marginalized, which has contributed to the development of strong and autonomous municipal

and provincial governments.82 When Correa was elected in 2007, though, he promised to fully

incorporate the Amazon into the Ecuadorian nation as part of a broader project of state

centralization. What followed was a typical pattern of populist contention, in which local

governments used a discourse of anti-elitism and regional solidarity to mobilize their colonist

populations for strikes, occupations of oil wells, and road blockages.83 Initially, however, these

demonstrations centered on gaining access to the benefits of oil extraction, rather than mitigating

its environmental impacts.

With the increasing legitimacy given to environmental claims at the national level,

though, municipal governments began to use charges of environmental mismanagement as part

of their ongoing critique of the central government. Despite the government’s well-publicized

insistence that it had improved the management of oil, for example, one municipal employee

explained that “The petroleum situation has not changed for anything…When there are spills, the

practices are the same: cover it, hide it, and threaten and persecute the people who try to defend

themselves.”84 Municipal functionaries argued that, because the Ecuadorian state had failed to

live up to the constitution’s guarantees of a clean environment, local governments had to fill the

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gap. Commenting on the growing role of the local government in environmental issues, one civil

society leader noted, “The local governments here are trying to take every capacity from the

[national] Ministry of the Environment for themselves.”85

Following this pattern of political appropriation of environmental issues, regional

governments in Coca, Sacha, and NRF presented themselves as the true defenders of Yasuní.

Explained the head of Coca’s Department of the Environment:

Nobody [in the national government] is looking with a perspective of twenty to thirty

years out, as to what will happen when the petroleum is gone. If we don’t do this [prevent

exploitation], we’re going to be a ghost town. The only thing we have left is Yasuní;

that’s what we have, our rainforest.86

Indeed, many claimed that the proposal to leave the oil underground actually originated in Coca,

but that the government changed it by adding a “Plan B” to drill if international money was not

forthcoming.87 Yasuní-ITT was thus one more example of a corrupt and disconnected national

elite that neglected the needs of “ordinary” mestizo colonists—needs which were now defined at

least partly in the language of ecological protection.

In fact, the Mayor of Coca had come up with her own initiative for the park, Yasuní Oro

Verde [Yasuní Green Gold], and promoted it both domestically and internationally. Rather than

encouraging donations for the ITT trust fund, the Oro Verde website urged concerned parties to

pressure the Ecuadorian government directly to leave the oil underground. The municipality

followed this same anti-governmental approach in organizing public demonstrations in favor of

preserving Yasuní. The confusing result, one reporter explained, was that:

We have heard about lots of proposals…In this [ITT] initiative, the national government

is trying to acquire funds so that they don’t exploit Yasuní. But here, lots of people still

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believe that the government wants to exploit Yasuní. Why do they have this idea?

Because this is the idea that the regional governor is leaving in the communities.88

In effect, regional governments around Yasuní took both environmental norms and policies from

within the Ecuadorian state and claimed them as their own, turning them against the very state

that originated them.

These environmental actions by the municipal government had a clear instrumental

dimension: galvanizing support for the regional party, Pachakutik, against Correa’s ruling

Alianza Pais. In an interview, the Mayor of Coca insisted, “In our [electoral] campaigns in the

pueblos, Yasuní is our central theme.”89 In my own research, I found that most residents of Coca

and the surrounding towns perceived their local governments as more credible protectors of the

environment than the national government, the latter of which they associated with a long history

of ecologically-destructive oil exploitation that had contaminated their air, water, and land.

There would thus seem to be some truth to the conclusion of one local civil society member that

“The environment is a positive aspect for our government…this can win them votes.”90

By contrast, in nearby Tena, a town controlled by the President’s party, I encountered far

less environmental rhetoric and mobilization.91 Moreover, when I revisited Coca in 2013, shortly

after Correa had won re-election by a wide margin, I learned that the local and national

governments had reconciled their political differences. Municipal officials, in turn, announced

that they would follow the government’s lead in supporting exploitation. These shifts suggest

how electoral competition drove municipal governments’ participation in eco-populist politics,

and how the changing international prospects and national salience of the ITT initiative both

enabled and subsequently disabled this form of ecological mobilization.

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Nonetheless, I still saw signs that attempts to mobilize support for protecting Yasuní in

2010 were reflective of less reversible trends. Through their opportunistic deployment of

environmental claims as part of ongoing populist mobilizations, local governments had

progressively taken on environmental protection as part of their core institutional mission. Even

as local governments continued to build roads and infrastructure that facilitated deforestation,

they also were engaged in projects to clean up oil spills, improve management of Yasuní, and

educate their populations about environmental issues. As with the Ecuadorian state, their actions

were contradictory but significant. An eco-populist framework must remain open to how, in

other contexts, similar processes of political competition might lead to environmental claims by

non-traditional groups that are responding to increases in the resources, legitimacy, and popular

support at stake in environmental politics.

Eco-Populist Frames: Nationalism, Regional Identity, and Ethnic Exclusion

Data on local opinions of the prospect of further oil exploitation in the park supported

local politicians’ belief that campaigns to protect Yasuní were an effective way to garner

electoral support. Existing work on environmentalism in the developing world posits a close

connection between environmental values and various demographic characteristics, like source

of livelihood or membership in an indigenous group. Yet support for the ITT initiative cut

across these categories: in one poll conducted by an Ecuadorian civil society organization, 94%

of respondents in the Yasuní region claimed they wanted the oil to be left underground.92 In my

own interviews, I found profound distrust of the initiative’s international donors and the central

government—but substantial desire for the preservation of Yasuní. Few of the people I talked to

were rich or educated enough to be “post-materialist” environmentalists, most were non-

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indigenous mestizos with no long-term connection to the Amazon, and almost none had

livelihoods directly dependent on the careful use of natural resources. Through what discursive

framings was this support garnered and articulated?

During my interviews in Quito, both national state officials and international

conservationists argued that park residents would back the preservation of Yasuní only if it was

closely coupled with economic development programs. In contrast, what I found in focus groups

within the Yasuní area—even in areas lacking in basic services or economic opportunities—was

a pragmatic willingness to separate the two. While respondents repeatedly emphasized the area’s

need for development, most were skeptical that this could come through “sustainable

development” like eco-tourism, handicrafts production, or agroforestry. The discourse among

colonists was instead to “conserve, but not conserve everything.”93 For example, one farmer told

me that what the government really needed to do was to put in a road all the way to NRF, so that

farmers could more easily sell their produce. He paused for a few seconds, and added, “But the

road would have to go around the park [Yasuní].”94

If mestizo colonists did not support protecting Yasuní on the basis of individual

livelihood interest, as theories of EotP might protect, neither did they do so based on “post-

materialist” concerns for the park’s universal value for humanity. In informal conversations with

residents of Coca ranging from taxi-drivers to street-vendors, I frequently heard repeated the

common trope in international conservation circles that the Amazon is the “lung of the world”.95

Yet even this seemingly post-materialist discourse was reframed in Manichean populist terms:

respondents invariably underlined that “we”, as “Ecuadorians” or “Amazonians”, were

producing oxygen for “them”, the rest of the world. As such, colonists interpreted the need to

preserve Yasuní within the context of its value to the Ecuadorian nation and as an affirmation of

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the Amazon’s central place within it. Similarly, locals readily made reference to an oft-cited

study that found that one-hectare of Yasuní Park contained more species of vascular plants than

the United States and Canada combined.96 When translated into colloquial interchange, though,

the study took on new dimensions: I was informed that Yasuní had more species of everything

than the United States, or that there were more individual trees in Yasuní than in all of North

America. The one constant was a favorable comparison of tiny Ecuador with the other nations of

the world.

Past work has described Ecuadorians as “petro-citizens”97 for whom oil and national

identity are closely connected. In claiming concern for Yasuní, though, locals rejected this

conflation, noting “It has been like a template or letterhead for us that we are petroleros. But we

are not really petroleros because there aren’t opportunities for the local people in the industry.”98

At public events and speeches in favor of preserving Yasuní, politicians argued that, because

Ecuador’s oil reserves were finite and dwindling99, true Ecuadorians supported preserving the

country’s real distinguishing feature: its immense natural wealth. National survey data supports

the notion that the environment is an increasingly central fount of national pride.100 As such,

although frequently overlooked in studies that oscillate between attention to the local and global

dimensions of environmentalism101, Yasuní suggests that nationalism may be a crucial basis of

mobilization for environmental projects. It may be especially potent for constituencies

historically outside of environmental politics, for whom discourses about sustainable

development or livelihoods protection may be less relevant or appealing.

Nationalism in Ecuador has long been organized around “mestizaje”, the belief that

indigenous cultures will eventually disappear in a process of whitening and national

unification.102 In recent years, though, the inevitability of mestizaje has been challenged by

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Ecuador’s powerful indigenous movement, which has won significant territorial autonomy in the

Amazon. These successes were based partly on the assertion that indigenous people, by merit of

their cultural identity and long-standing connection to the land, are superior environmental

stewards.103 One indigenous community leader framed his opposition to drilling in Yasuní in

precisely these “cultural ecologist” terms:

We have seen this penetration since the time of the conquistadors, but it continues with

petroleum…As a nationality, we have existed from the creation of the world, and we

have not come from anywhere else. We are owners, and defenders, and guardians of the

environment.104

Even though the group he represented—the Shuar—are recent arrivals in the Yasuní area, his

indigenous status nonetheless facilitated a linkage between environmental protection, cultural

identity, and territory that would be perceived as credible by external actors.

Given Ecuador’s history of racial stratification and exclusion, I was not surprised to find

substantial resentment among mestizo colonists directed against indigenous people. More

interestingly, mestizos directed their complaints towards a key source of indigenous power: the

notion that these groups are intrinsically environmentalist. Thanks to recognition granted by the

Ecuadorian government, indigenous groups now have the right to negotiate with oil companies to

derive certain benefits (like infrastructure projects or support for tribal governments) in exchange

for allowing exploitation on their territory. According to many mestizos, though, this meant

indigenous people could not be trusted to preserve oil-rich sites like Yasuní. Contrary to

academic and activist wisdom, mestizos claimed their activities were less environmentally

destructive than those of their indigenous counterparts. Explained one mestizo employee of

Yasuní park:

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Based on my experience, the colonists are those who impact less. You know that the

colonists deforest, but deforest in order to plant. He cuts the trees but he will leave [tree]

cover. He’ll change the crops, but the cover is still there. In the case of the Kichwa

communities, they only gather, they want to live by hunting, but they don’t plant much.

So they exhaust what there is in the forest…If I had to say who is doing more damage,

it’s the [indigenous] communities.105

The quote combined a longstanding pattern of indigenous scapegoating with a newer

unwillingness of mestizos to concede the mantle of environmentalism—and the legitimacy and

resources tied to it—to indigenous people. As the mayor of Sacha, another colonist city near

Coca, told me, “Indigenous communities have been great predators on the environment. They

have sold the very best parts of their territory for little money. They throw dynamite and

chemicals into the river to catch a few fish…They need other people to teach them about

nature.”106

Eco-populist framings deployed around Yasuní thus linked claims over environmental

stewardship to who should be excluded from the imagined national community. In so doing,

colonists asserted their unique place in the Ecuadorian nation and their legitimacy as Amazonian

residents. They did so through a populist discourse that celebrated the nation’s environmental

wealth, demonized the governing elite and indigenous peoples, and celebrated ordinary mestizo

colonists as superior environmental stewards. While “cultural ecologists” like Escobar have

already theorized the linkages between collective identity and environmentalism, in this case, the

relationship between the two was reversed: pro-environmental claims flowed not from pre-

existing cultural connections to territory, but were used to allege such a relationship. This was

made possible by a national milieu within which struggles for control and political power were

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increasingly couched in environmental terms, but also entailed the re-appropriation and re-

framing of these themes by local actors.

Valuing Oil Above and Under Ground

In theorizing popular environmentalism in the developing world, scholars have

emphasized how environmental conflicts are often rooted in irreconcilably distinct modes of

valuing the natural environment: as a “commensurable” market good or as an

“incommensurable” and irreplaceable source of biodiversity, livelihoods, or cultural

reproduction.107 In keeping with the predictions of these theoretical perspectives, some actors

have deployed this notion of the “incommensurable” value of nature to agitate for preserving

Yasuní. As one of the ITT proposal’s authors argued: “We believe that protecting life cannot be

done through market forces.  Putting a monetary value on nature…is not the most adequate

measurement, it seems to us.”108 Consistent with the notion of Yasuní as a sacred place with

incommensurable worth, brochures and press releases about the ecological riches of Yasuní Park

produced by international conservation organizations “systematically avoid monetary

calculations of environmental services”109 provided by the park.

Of course, the heart of the initiative—international compensation for leaving oil

underground and averting emissions—always required some means for calculating how much

the oil or carbon was worth in dollar terms. Existing theories of popular environmentalism

would suggest that this vulgar attachment of a cash value to an incommensurably valuable park

might be a major sticking point for grassroots environmental actors. But when I raised the

notion of Yasuní’s “sacredness” with the colonists living near the park, even avowed supporters

of the initiative were dismissive. Residents of Coca I talked with were surprisingly disinterested

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in using or even visiting the park to view its natural wonders, even thought it was right at their

doorstep. When one woman vented, “Tourists keep coming wanting to know about Yasuní, but

we Ecuadorians can’t even afford to go,” I asked her if Ecuadorians should have a subsidy to

help them visit the park. She replied, “No, we can damage the park as much as anyone else.”110

In fact, most mestizos were highly skeptical of the notion that anyone would want to

preserve Yasuní for its intrinsic value. As one businessman explained:

I think that they [the donors] are tricking us. For the best intentions that this government

has, I don’t think other countries will say, ‘Take this [money].’ Instead, they are going to

ask ‘What are you going to give me in exchange?’ And this country has one of the

greatest reserves of freshwater in the world.111

In effect, most people accepted the basic idea of affixing a price tag to the park. Where they

differed was over how they thought the monetary valuation should take place, and what exactly it

was for. One respondent explained that the value of Yasuní stemmed not from its oil reserves,

but its oxygen-producing trees. Invoking the nationalist framings described in the previous

section, he pointed out that other countries had cut their own forests and were now reliant on air

from Ecuador. As a result, “someone needs to pay…We are not selling the park, but we need a

policy of compensation.”112 Others focused on the potential medical products that could come

from the park’s unique species.

Indeed, those living near the park appeared to be engaged in extensive cost-benefit

calculations around the value of oil.113 People were happy to accept benefits from petroleum

when they came, and, when pressed, would admit that extraction could have a value greater than

zero. On the other hand, repeatedly I was told that revenue from oil flowed to elites in Quito or

Western countries and that “barely 1% stays here”. Inhabitants of the Amazon contrasted the

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“wealth” that had been extracted with their own lack of basic services. In the eyes of most

locals, petroleum jobs went to highly educated outsiders who flew in from Quito during the week

and then disappeared, contributing little to the local economy. Positioned against these limited

benefits were the host of negative consequences residents associated with exploitation, ranging

from water pollution to incessant noise that scared off wildlife and destroyed the “tranquility” of

Amazonian life. Residents even understood “climate change”—experienced locally as hotter and

drier weather—as a direct result of contamination left by oil companies.

Based on these calculations, many respondents were profoundly skeptical of the

government’s insistence that if the full $3.6 billion it requested for the ITT initiative did not

come, exploitation was a necessity. Stated one editorial published in Coca:

So what will happen if the international community fails to compensate us with the $350

million [the yearly contribution requested]? And what if they give us only $200 million,

what will happen then? Are we so poor? Is the country in such a state of misery?...I have

many ideas as to how we could generate $750 million without touching the ITT oil,

without any foreign handout.114

In short, the accumulated collective experience of mestizo communities led them to believe that

the predictable harms of exploitation, coupled with its enrichment of a venal national elite, would

almost certainly outweigh its limited benefits.

Unsurprisingly, supporters of extraction countered with their own monetary figures.

When Correa announced his intention to move drilling forward in August 2013, he drastically

revised upward the anticipated revenues of extraction from $7.2 to $18 billion. At the same

time, during my re-visits to municipalities around Yasuní in 2013, I observed an aggressive state-

funded public relations campaign that asserted, as one poster assured, that “At last, the benefits

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of petroleum are for the Amazon.”115 In a paradoxical twist, some of the “benefits” asserted

included funding for environmental protection. Both sides of the extraction debate, then,

“valued” oil partly in terms of its environmental impacts, which could be understood either in

terms of the monetary costs of dealing with contamination or its financial benefits for

conservation.

Reformulations of the valuation schemes offered by international organizations and the

central government were one tool through which previously excluded actors injected themselves

into the debate over Yasuní. “Eco-populist” actors made claims that centered on how to quantify

the value of nature rather than whether to do so. In this respect, eco-populism represents a form

of popular environmentalism which “does not prevent social actors from putting a price tag on

what they wish to value.”116 These valuations engaged with and attempted to manipulate

processes of commensuration using a mix of popularized science, folk knowledge, and populist

discourse.

Conclusion

The political dynamics around Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT initiative do not conform to the

predictions of existing frameworks for environmental politics in the developing world. The state

did not play its historic role as a stalwart proponent of extraction or shill for Western

conservationists, but instead appeared as a site of conflict where, at least temporarily, advocates

for non-exploitation had the upper hand. Local environmental action was fostered not by

grassroots organizations or NGOs but by municipal governments drawing on the political

practices of populism to mobilize groups traditionally absent from environmental politics.

Among that population, support for the initiative was rooted not in a concern for the protection

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of natural resource-based livelihoods or the preservation of nature as a fount of cultural

reproduction, but nationalism, regionalism, and ethnic identity. These same actors ultimately

engaged with and embraced monetary valuations of nature.

While the political dynamics around Yasuní may seem like a single inconvenient case, I

have argued that Yasuní is emblematic of some broader transformations. Worldwide, potential

flows of tens of billions of dollars for climate mitigation, combined with the progressive creation

of national policies and institutions for environmental protection, are moving environmentalism

from a niche field occupied by professional NGOs, producer organizations, and indigenous

groups into a key arena for the distribution and contestation of political power. Of course, the

initiative’s ultimate failure is a reminder of the continuing institutional and political barriers to

environmental protection in the developing world. Still, the politics of “eco-populism”—visible

at the national and sub-national levels while the Yasuní-ITT initiative was floated between 2007

and 2013—have broader relevance.

First, a more nuanced approach to the state may be necessary to understand the evolving

role of the developing world in international climate politics. As other scholars have observed,

developing countries like Brazil that have historically resisted emissions reductions have now

adopted them voluntarily and pushed others to do the same.117 The abortive ITT initiative is

another example of this shifting dynamic: rather than responding to environmental schemes

originating in the Global North, countries like Ecuador are now offering their own alternative

approaches to climate change.118 An “eco-populist” perspective suggests that the origins of this

dramatic shift may be domestic, as environmental movements have gradually entered segments

of the state. But by emphasizing the fragmented and partial nature of this greening of the state,

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eco-populism argues that governments’ approaches to climate change may prove internally

contradictory and inconsistent, yet nonetheless be “real” in their ecological significance.

Second, “eco-populism” may offer insights into the actors and framings deployed in a

new wave of resource-related conflicts in the developing world, particularly in the left-leaning

regimes of Latin America.119 In some ways, recent protests against state-led extraction in

countries like Peru and Bolivia appear to follow a familiar script of local actors defending their

livelihoods against the state. Given the strength of environmental discourses in Latin America,

though, we might also expect to see novel claims-makers and environmental framings emerge.

Work from Peru has already noted, as in Yasuní, the growing involvement of municipal

governments in organizing anti-mining protests.120 Certainly, the example of Ecuador suggests

that notions of “hydrocarbon nationalism”121 around which such conflicts have traditionally

revolved may no longer be just about how to extract, but whether to do so at all.

Finally, “eco-populism” calls our attention to the complex popular contestation

surrounding new programs to attach monetary value to environmental services. As schemes like

“payments for environmental services” or carbon offset projects like REDD spread across the

developing world,122 some popular actors will certainly respond by denouncing the spread of the

market. Research on REDD-readiness activities in Brazil shows, however, that many grassroots

actors have recognized that the potential resources from programs like REDD are too large to

ignore.123 “Eco-populism” points to how popular actors can resist such schemes from within

through their own financial and cost-benefit calculations.

Admittedly, the account I have offered here entails a far less romantic perspective on

environmental conflicts in the developing world than much of the previous literature. Work

along the lines of EotP typically describes grassroots organizations mobilizing in order to defend

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their irreplaceable land and livelihoods by drawing on pre-existing ecological identities. Their

foes are usually painted in equally simple terms: rapacious multi-national corporations and their

allies within the state. Yet popular environmentalism around Yasuní was both exclusionary—in

its attitude towards indigenous people—and highly inconsistent—as evidenced by locals’

simultaneous desire to leave the oil of Yasuní underground and build roads right up to the

boundaries of the park.

These factors do not necessarily, however, preclude “eco-populism” from having a

positive impact on specific environmental challenges. Populations like that around Yasuní can

be hypocritical and unreliable advocates for environmental preservation and nonetheless play a

crucial role in pressuring political leaders to support conservation. Indeed, the surprising

capacity of enterprising political actors to cultivate support for environmental protection in such

unlikely places as Nueva Roca Fuerte should not be discounted. As the brief life of the Yasuní-

ITT initiative shows, support for climate mitigation may not be entirely about climate change,

but also complex desires for recognition, visibility, and political power.

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Table 1: Frameworks for Studying Environmentalism in the Developing WorldRole of the State Key Actors Framings Modes of

Environmental Valuation

Example

Post-Materialist Environmentalism

Bypassed by transnational activist networks or dependent on foreign expertise/funds for conservation.

“Post-materialist” upper-middle classes, professional environmental NGOs.

Need to preserve wilderness or biodiversity for future generations, interests of all humanity.

Incommensurable: aesthetic, spiritual, or scientific value of environment.

Professional NGOs organizing national park system in Costa Rica.

Environmentalism of the Poor

Agent of ecological. destruction; ally of multi-national corporations in extraction.

Local, organic social movements of traditional resource users.

Small-scale communities as best stewards of scarce resources.

Incommensurable; environment as an irreplaceable part of livelihoods.

Rubber-tappers attempting to set up “extractive reserves” in Brazil.

Cultural Ecologism Carrier of developmentalist ideology that displaces traditional human-nature relations with scientific/technical management.

Indigenous groups, other groups with an indigenous-like connection to nature, and transnational allies.

Alternative “cosmovisions” of human-nature relations; ecological identity that makes certain groups natural conservationists.

Incommensurable; environment as crucial for cultural reproduction.

Afro-Colombian groups demanding territorial autonomy and self-determination in Colombia.

Eco-Populism Fragmented entity; terrain of conflict between agencies working for preservation and exploitation.

Municipal and regional governments and other non-environmental actors.

Partial separation of conservation and development; environment used to assert regional, ethnic, or national identity.

Commensurable; dominant valuations contested using a combination of scientific and folk knowledge.

Populist mobilization of regional governments in Yasuní region to prevent oil extraction.

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1 Field Notes, NRF, 8/27/10-8/29/10.

2 Matt Finer et al., “Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve: A Brief Modern History and Conservation

Challenges,” Environmental Research Letters 4 (2009): 1–15.

3 Judith Kilmerling, Amazon Crude (New York: NRDC, 1991).

4 Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno, Keeping ITT Crude Underground: Concept Document (Quito,

Ecuador: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio, y Integración, 2007).

5 A more extensive discussion of the mechanics of the plan can be found in Pamela L. Martin, Oil in

the Soil: The Politics of Paying to Preserve the Amazon (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,

2011).

6 Kevin Koenig, “Ecuador’s Oil Change,” Multinational Monitor 28, no. 4 (September 2007): 10–14.

7 Interview, Quito, 7/13/10.

8 On the role of international civil society, see Martin, Oil in the Soil.

9 Accessed 7/31/13 at http://www.amazoniaporlavida.org/es/files/perfiles_opinion_Yasuní.PDF

10 Field Notes, NRF, 8/27/10-8/29/10.

11 Joanna Depledge and Gordon Yamin, “The Global Climate-Change Regime: A Defense,” in The

Economics and Politics of Climate Change, ed. D Helm and C Hepburn (Oxford, UK: Oxford

University Press, 2009), 443.

12 See Thomas Bernauer, “Climate Change Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 16, no. 1

(2013).

13 In recent climate conferences, developed nations have rhetorically commitmented to $100 billion a

year for mitigation and adaptation by 2020. World Bank, World Development Report 2010:

Development and Climate Change (Washington, DC, 2010), 9

14 Frederick Buttel, “New Directions in Environmental Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 13

(1987): 465–488; Klaus Eder, “The Rise of Counter-Culture Movements Against Modernity: Nature as

a New Field of Class Struggle,” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 4 (1990): 21–47; Ronald Inglehart,

“Public Support for Environmental Protection: Objective Problems and Subjective Values in 43

Societies,” Political Science and Politics 15 (1995): 57–71.

15 Wesley Longhofer and Evan Schofer, “National and Global Origins of Environmental Association,”

American Sociological Review 75, no. 4 (2010): 505–533; Tammy Lewis, “Transnational Conservation

Movement Organizations: Shaping the Protected Area Systems of Less Developed Countries,”

Mobilization 5, no. 1 (2000): 105–123; David Kaimowitz, “The Political Economy of Environmental

Policy Reform in Latin America,” Development and Change 27, no. 3 (1996): 433–452.

16 David John Frank, Ann Hironaka, and Evan Schofer, “The Nation-State and the Natural Environment

over the Twentieth Century,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 96–116; Michael

Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of

Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

17 Susan Berger, “Environmentalism in Guatemala: When Fish Have Ears,” Latin American Research

Review 32, no. 2 (1997): 99–116; David Carruthers, “Environmental Politics in Chile: Legacies of

Dictatorship and Democracy,” Third World Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2001): 343–358; Catherine Christen et

al., “Latin American Environmentalism: Comparative Views,” Studies in Comparative International

Development 33, no. 2 (1998): 58–87; María Pilar García, “The Venezuelan Ecology Movement:

Symbolic Effectiveness, Social Practices, and Political Strategies,” in The Making of Social Movements

in Latin America, ed. Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 150–

170; N. Patrick Peritore, Third World Environmentalism: Case Studies from the Global South

(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999); Marie Price, “Ecopolitics and Environmental

Nongovernmental Organizations in Latin America,” Geographical Review 84, no. 1 (1994): 42–58;

Carlos Reboratti, “Environmental Conflicts and Environmental Justice in Argentina,” in Environmental

Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice, ed. David Carruthers (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2008), 101–117.

18 The Environmentalism of the Poor (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002).

19 EotP represents a southern analogue to “environmental justice” movements of the global north. See

David Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2004); Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental

Justice (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

20 Anthony Bebbington, “Contesting Environmental Transformations: Political Ecologies and

Environmentalisms in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Latin American Research Review 44, no. 3

(2009): 177–186; David Carruthers, ed., Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise,

and Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 2000); Jeff Haynes, “Power, Politics, and Environmental

Movements in the Third World,” in Environmental Movements: Local, National, and Global, ed.

Christopher Rootes (London, UK: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999), 222–242; Bron Taylor, ed.,

Ecological Resistance Movements (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Nancy

Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

21 Helen Collinson, ed., Green Guerillas (Latin American Bureau, 1996), 2.

22 Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor.

23 See, e.g., Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-

1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald,

“Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82,

no. 6 (1977): 1212–1241.

24 “An Ecology of Difference: Equality and Conflict in a Glocalized World,” Focaal 47 (2006): 120–

137; Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2008).

25 In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, 2nd ed. (Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).

26 Territories of Difference, 105.

27 Mario Blaser, “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program,”

American Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (2009): 10–20; Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics

in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–

370; Rachel Schurman and William A. Munro, Fighting for the Future of Food: Activists Versus

Agribusiness in the Struggle over Biotechnology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

2010); Susanna B. Hecht, “The New Amazon Geographies: Insurgent Citizenship, ‘Amazon Nation’

and the Politics of Environmentalisms,” Journal of Cultural Geography 28, no. 1 (2011): 203–223.

28 David Schlosberg and David Carruthers, “Indigenous Struggles, Environmental Justice, and

Community Capabilities,” Global Environmental Politics 10, no. 4 (2010): 12–35; Beth Conklin and

Laura Graham, “The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics,” American

Anthropologist 97, no. 4, New Series (1995): 695–710; Lynn Horton, “Defenders of Nature and the

Comarca: Collective Identity and Frames in Panama,” Mobilization 15, no. 1 (2010): 63–80.

29 Michael Cepek, “Essential Commitments: Identity and the Politics of Cofán Conservation,” The

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 13, no. 1 (2008): 199.

30 Although Sawyer mentions mestizo participation in anti-oil mobilizations, for example, she portrays

these populations as latecomers to movements that were initiated by indigenous people. Crude

Chronicles (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004), 163.

31 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Mauro de Almeida, “Indigenous People, Traditional People, and

Conservation in the Amazon,” Daedalus 129, no. 2 (2000): 315–338; Ulrich Oslender, “‘The Logic of

the River’: A Spatial Approach to Ethnic-Territorial Mobilization in the Colombian Pacific Region,”

Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7, no. 2 (2002): 86–117.

32 Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor, 195.

33 Peter Brosius, “Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism,”

Current Anthropology 40, no. 3 (1999): 286.

34 Joan Martinez-Alier and Ramachandra Guha, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and

South (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18.

35 Escobar, “An Ecology of Difference,” 121.

36 Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1998); Tim Bartley, “Certifying Forests and Factories: States, Social Movements, and the Rise of

Private Regulation in the Apparel and Forest Products Fields,” Politics & Society 31, no. 3 (2003):

433–464.

37 Horton flatly concludes that colonists cannot credibly assert themselves as environmentalists; see

“Defenders of Nature and the Comarca” 73.

38 Anthony Hall, “Getting REDD-y: Conservation and Climate Change in Latin America,” Latin

American Research Review 46, no. 4 (2011): 187.

39 Baviskar, In the Belly of the River, 24.

40 Greening Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

41 See, also, Paola Perez-Aleman, “Regulation in the Process of Building Capabilities: Strengthening

Competitiveness While Improving Food Safety and Environmental Sustainability in Nicaragua,”

Politics & Society 41, no. 4 (2013): 589–620; Matthew Amengual, “Pollution in the Garden of the

Argentine Republic: Building State Capacity to Escape from Chaotic Regulation,” Politics & Society

41, no. 4 (2013): 527–560.

42 Riley Dunlap and Richard York, “The Globalization of Environmental Concern and the Limits of

Post-Materialist Values Explanation,” Sociological Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2008): 529–563.

43 Ben Orlove et al., “Environmental Citizenship in Latin America: Climate, Intermediate

Organizations, and Political Subjects,” Latin American Research Review 46, no. 4 (2011): 115–140.

44 Myanna Lahsen, “A Science–Policy Interface in the Global South: The Politics of Carbon Sinks and

Science in Brazil,” Climatic Change 97, no. 3 (2009): 339–372.

45 J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley Parks, A Climate of Injustice (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,

2007).

46 Hall, “Getting REDD-y.”

47 Pushpam Kumar and Roldan Muradian, eds., Payment for Ecosystem Services (Oxford, UK: Oxford

University Press, 2009); Kathleen McAfee and Elizabeth N. Shapiro, “Payments for Ecosystem

Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State,” Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 100, no. 3 (2010): 579–599; Arun Agrawal, Daniel Nepstad, and

Ashwini Chhatre, “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation,” Annual Review of

Environment and Resources 36, no. 1 (2011): 373–396.

48 Interview, Quito, 7/8/10.

49 Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch, and Tania Murray Li, Powers of Exclusion (Honolulu, HA: University of

Hawaii Press, 2011), 60.

50 EcoPopulism.

51 See Torre Populist Seduction in Latin America: The Ecuadorian Experience (Athens, Ohio: Ohio

University Center for International Studies, 2000).

52 “Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 2

(2011): 82.

53 Ibid., 84.

54 See Horton, “Defenders of Nature and the Comarca”; Franklin Rothman and Pamela Oliver, “From

Local to Global: The Anti-Dam Movement in Southern Brazil, 1979-1992,” Mobilization 4, no. 1

(1999): 41–57.

55 Michael Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 4–33.

56 Mararethe Kusenbach, “Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool,”

Ethnography 4, no. 3 (2003): 455–485.

57 See Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley, CA: University

of California Press, 1997).

58 Kilmerling, Amazon Crude; Sawyer, Crude Chronicles.

59 Finer et al., “Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve.”

60 Iván Narváez, “La Política Ambiental de Estado: ¿Hacia El Colapso Del Modelo de Conservación?,”

in Yasuní En El Siglo XXI, ed. Iván Narváez and Guillaume Fontaine (Quito, Ecuador: FLACSO,

2007), 35.

61 Allen Gerlach, Indians, Oil, and Politics: A Recent History of Ecuador (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly

Resources, 2003).

62 Rafael Correa, “Ecuador’s Path,” New Left Review 77, no. September-October (2012): 97.

63 Esperanza Martínez and Alberto Acosta, eds., ITT-Yasuní Entre El Petróleo y La Vida (Quito,

Ecuador: Abya-Yala, 2010).

64 Interview, Quito, 7/20/10.

65 Gabriela Valdivia, “Governing Relations Between People and Things: Citizenship, Territory, and the

Political Economy of Petroleum in Ecuador,” Political Geography 27, no. 4 (2008): 456–477.

66 Martínez and Acosta, ITT-Yasuní Entre El Petróleo y La Vida.

67 Interview, Quito, 7/13/13.

68 Interview, Quito, 7/16/10.

69 Laura Rival, “The Yasuní-ITT Initiative: Oil Development and Alternative Forms of Wealth-Making

in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” QEH Working Papers 180 (2009).

70 Gonzalo Escribano, “Ecuador’s Energy Policy Mix: Development Versus Conservation and

Nationalism with Chinese Loans,” Energy Policy 57 (June 2013): 152–159.

71 Interview, Quito, 7/27/10.

72 Interview, Quito, 7/27/10.

73 Interview, Quito, 7/18/10.

74 “Rafael Correa pone fin a la iniciativa Yasuní ITT,” El Universo, August 15, 2013,

http://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2013/08/15/nota/1294861/rafael-correa-pone-fin-iniciativa-yasuni-

itt.

75 Mercedes Alvaro, “Opponents of Ecuador Oil Plan Advance Toward Referendum,” Wall Street

Journal, December 10, 2013,

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303330204579250210237660486.

76 Interview, Quito, 7/13/10.

77 Escribano, “Ecuador’s Energy Policy Mix.”

78 Wilfredo Ardito Vega, “Un Yasuní Para El Perú,” in ITT-Yasuní Entre El Petróleo y La Vida, ed.

Esperanza Martínez and Alberto Acosta (Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala, 2010), 191–193.

79 Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1995); Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1988).

80 Greening Brazil; “Mobilizing the State: The Erratic Partner in Brazil’s Participatory Water Policy,”

Politics & Society 37, no. 2 (2009): 289–314.

81 Interview, Quito, 7/21/10.

82 James Keese and Marco Freire Argudo, “Decentralisation and NGO-Municipal Government

Collaboration in Ecuador,” Development in Practice 16, no. 2 (2006): 114–127.

83 Marc Becker, “Correa, Indigenous Movements, and the Writing of a New Constitution in Ecuador,”

Latin American Perspectives 38, no. 1 (2011): 58.

84 Interview, Sacha, 8/18/10.

85 Interview, Coca, 8/6/13.

86 Interview, Coca, 8/10/10.

87 Interview, Coca 8/15/10.

88 Interview, Coca, 8/16/10.

89 Interview, Coca, 8/18/10.

90 Interview, Coca, 8/15/10.

91 Field Notes, Tena, 7/20/13-8/1/13.

92 Interview, Quito, 7/15/10.

93 Interview, Coca, 8/15/10.

94 Field Notes, Coca, 8/6/10.

95 Field Notes, Coca, 8/1/10.

96 Margot Bass et al., “Global Conservation Significance of Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park,” Plos One

5, no. 1 (2010): 1–22.

97 Valdivia, “Governing Relations Between People and Things” 465.

98 Interview, Coca, 8/18/10.

99 One minister reported Ecuador only had fifteen years of oil left (Interview, Quito, 8/2/10).

100 Interview, Quito, 7/8/10.

101 For an exception, see Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National

Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1996).

102 Peter Wade, “Race and Nation in Latin America,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed.

Nancy Applebaum, Anne Macpherson, and Karin Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North

Carolina Press, 2003), 263–281.

103 Gerlach, Indians, Oil, and Politics; Sawyer, Crude Chronicles.

104 Interview, Coca, 8/3/10.

105 Interview, Coca, 8/15/10.

106 Interview, Sacha, 8/18/10.

107 See Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor.

108 Qtd. in Martin, Oil in the Soil, 66.

109 Laura Rival, “Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative: The Old and New Values of Petroleum,” Ecological

Economics 70, no. 2 (2010): 360.

110 Field Notes, Coca, 8/6/10.

111 Interview, Sacha, 7/29/10.

112 Interview, Coca, 8/7/10.

113 Field Notes, Coca, 8/1/10-8/15/10.

114 Qtd. in Rival, “Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative,” 362.

115 Field Notes, Coca, 8/6/13.

116 Rival, “Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative,” 364.

117 Kathryn Hochstetler and Eduardo Viola, “Brazil and the Politics of Climate Change: Beyond the

Global Commons,” Environmental Politics 21, no. 5 (2012): 753–771.

118 Oil in the Soil.

119 See Anthony Bebbington, Social Conflict, Economic Development and the Extractive Industry

(London; New York: Routledge, 2012).

120 Lewis Taylor, “Environmentalism and Social Protest: The Contemporary Anti-mining Mobilization

in the Province of San Marcos and the Condebamba Valley, Peru,” Journal of Agrarian Change 11, no.

3 (2011): 420–439.

121 Thomas Perreault and Gabriela Valdivia, “Hydrocarbons, Popular Protest and National Imaginaries:

Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Context,” Geoforum 41, no. 5 (2010): 695.

122 Hall, “Getting REDD-y”; Kumar and Muradian, Payment for Ecosystem Services; Agrawal,

Nepstad, and Chhatre, “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.”

123 Alex Shankland and Leonardo Hasenclever, “Indigenous Peoples and the Regulation of REDD+ in

Brazil: Beyond the War of the Worlds?,” IDS Bulletin 42, no. 3 (2011): 80–88.