Environmental capacities in Latin America: a comparison of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico

ABSTRACT

Ecological modernization (EM) is a contested idea. Most accounts agree EM entails significant state commitment to environmental protection that accommodates environmental values to neoliberal economic growth, emphasizing the use of market mechanisms rather than command-and-control policies. Most analysts believe that less industrialized countries (LICs) have fewer capacities and incentives to adopt and pursue EM policies. We examine this assumption with a focus on the Latin American region and an emphasis on domestic efforts to increase environmental governance capacities. As mostly upper-middle and middle-income resource extractive countries whose governments have acceded to multilateral environmental conventions and adopted some form of environmental governance, Latin America presents key cases of LICs attempting to incorporate environmental values in national governance while heavily invested in neoliberal approaches to economic development. We compare Chile, Brazil, and Mexico along six environmental capacity indicators to appraise domestic performance in the areas of economic development, environmental concern, and public participation, institutional development, and green production. We find that the region is gaining capacity to address environmental challenges, but deepening these environmental gains depends on addressing core problems of poverty and inequality. Environmental capacity is also constrained by trade dependency on a limited number of markets and reliance on the export of primary commodities.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental modernization
• Latin American environmental policies and institutions
• economic development

Notes

¹ Using the chi-square test for contingency tables, we find evidence of an association between country and survey response for this question (p < .001).

² Other years in parenthesis.

³ CEPAL calculates this measure to allow comparison. This indicator shows ‘the absolute number of certifications in relation to the size of the economy in the absence of statistics on the relevant reference framework i.e. the number of significant enterprises by economic sector or their annual turnover’ (CEPAL, 2019)

⁴ Argentina, Colombia, and Chile are third, fourth, and fifth.

⁵ Colombia joined the OECD in 2020.

⁶ A short list includes, 1) reducing national consumption and economic growth, thereby limiting public sector revenue generation and investment in environmental protection; 2) restricting national ability to use market based instruments in achieving environmental goals owing to lower social capacity to pay fees; 3) amplifying societal exposure to public health risks; 3) restricting capacity to comply with international standards and protocols to monitor and assess environmental conditions; 4) restricting investment in research and development aimed at improving technological capacity for achieving environmental objectives; 5) restricting the scope of the beneficiaries of environmentally friendly policies, and 6) limiting social capacity to engage in public participation and policy development on environmental protection.