This seminar, hold by Teresa Kramarz (Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto) analyses the reduced policy space for environmental governance in extractive states, and the impact of populist governments on opportunities for environmental action in Latin America. Although the phenomenon of populism is often portrayed as a driver of poor environmental governance, we identify it instead as an intervening variable at best – and one that emerges as a response to the democratic accountability deficits that characterize extractive states.  So-called populist governments in twenty first century Latin America have responded to this cleavage in their interventions on specific local economic, social, and political crises.

However, once in power, populist sequences have often intensified rather than reversed the technocracy, verticalism, and exclusion of extractive states in order to increase and more widely distribute resource rents. As a result, extractivism gains a powerful, popular, and legitimating mandate despite its negative social, environmental, and economic consequences. By examining the experience of oil extraction in Venezuela and Ecuador, we identify the constraints and opportunities for environmental action as peoples and states attempt to balance state-society-nature relations imposed by the extractive state.

Teresa Kramarz is the Director of Munk One, a program for first year undergraduate students at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab alongside Matthew Hoffmann and Steven Bernstein.