Climate action and populism of the left in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

There is little reason to expect developing countries to take costly local actions for global climate benefits. This is less so when populist governments of the left – who claim to speak for the poorest sectors of the population – must negotiate environmental protection and development. This article examines climate action in Ecuador, one of the poorest countries of Latin America, during a populist moment. We propose an analytical framework that explains how moments of institutional rupture create space to articulate ideational and material interests towards climate action. We explore this by analyzing an initiative that would have left oil underground in exchange for compensation by the international community. Beyond the rise of significant personalities, populist moments signal a rupture where power relations, norms, and development trajectories can be reconfigured. Populists are political entrepreneurs who articulate these conditions for personal gain, but populist moments also reveal space for climate action.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• climate action
• Yasuni
• Ecuador
• Rafael Correa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This differs from what Mark Beeson (2019) calls ‘environmental populism,’ which consists of an enlightened form of leadership that is primarily animated by ‘good’ pro-climate ends rather than swept up by ‘bad’ anti-democratic means of governing. For more on populist ruptures in Ecuador, see Kramarz and Kingsbury (2021).

2. Parts of this article appear in Chapter 5 of our book ‘Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People’s Oil?’ which explores these themes in greater depth.

3. Eisenstadt and West (2019) support and complicate this. In public opinion polls across Ecuador they found that people living in post-extractive zones like Lago Agrio are less apt to favor future non-extraction because the damage has already been done, whereas people living in proposed mining/drilling areas oppose it most strongly because they see themselves as having the most to lose, and they in particular refuse to differentiate between landscape and livelihood in their calculations.

4. Collier and Hoeffler (2005) suggests that domestic actors may not just stop at calculating costs and benefits. In cases where government institutions are particularly weak, the government is sufficiently detached from the people and rent seeking is acute, the resource curse may lead to rebellion and war.

5. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities legitimizes the position of developing countries that choose material over ideational incentives based on environmental justice. Governments of developing states argue that the ‘North’ has an ecological debt with the ‘South’ particularly in regards with pollution, and scientists have quantified this debt in the trillions of dollars. Scholars argue that states in the Global South are the creditors and not debtors in carbon budget calculations (Martinez-Alier, et al. 2011, p. 24). There is very little expectation that a developing country like Ecuador should thus propose an initiative like Yasuni ITT

6. All research was approved by the Ethics Review Board of the University of Toronto.

7. An exception is (Martin 2011)