Greening Achilles heel sectors: Understanding environmental policy change in Latin American Primary industries

Latin America’s unique biodiversity and abundant natural resources make the region’s environmental politics indispensable for attaining global environmental targets. Both the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework emphasise states’ responsibility to adopt and govern according to climate and environmental strategies and plans. But the gap between needed environmental action and implemented policies is increasing. The coming “battles” of environmental politics will be in specific sectors where established actors stand to lose from stricter green regulations. Most countries have hard-to-abate “Achilles heel” sectors for domestic environmental action, in Latin America these are large export-oriented primary industries like fossil-fuel extraction, mining, and industrial agriculture. GreenLeAP will enhance the theoretical and empirical understanding of environmental policy making in primary industry sectors in Latin America, and thereby increase the knowledge on how the region can contribute to attaining global environmental targets. GreenLeAP will develop an analytical framework for understanding how the interaction between different elites and institutions enables or hinders greening of Achilles heel sectors in Latin America. We will employ this framework in systematic cross-country comparative analyses of sectors in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The project will combine expertise on Latin American comparative politics and environmental politics, two strong political science research traditions that rarely co-produce.

Latin America’s unique biodiversity and abundant natural resources make the region’s environmental politics indispensable for attaining global environmental targets. The Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework both emphasise states’ responsibility to adopt and govern according to climate and environmental strategies and plans, but the gap between needed environmental action and implemented policies is increasing. The coming “battles” of environmental politics will be in specific sectors where established actors stand to lose from stricter green regulations. Most countries have hard-to-abate “Achilles heel” sectors for domestic environmental action, in Latin America these are large export-oriented primary industries like fossil-fuel extraction, mining, and industrial agriculture. GreenLeAP will enhance the theoretical and empirical understanding of environmental policymaking in Achilles heel primary industry sectors in Latin America, and thereby increase the knowledge on how the region can contribute to attaining global environmental targets. GreenLeAP will develop an analytical framework for understanding how the interaction between different elites and institutions enables or hinders greening of Achilles heel sectors in Latin America, and employ this framework in systematic cross-country comparative analysis of sectors in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The project will combine expertise on Latin American comparative politics and environmental politics, two strong political science research traditions that rarely co-produce.