Alex Latta

Matter, politics and the sacred: insurgent ecologies of citizenship

In light of recent explorations into the interface between human agency and the agentic qualities of matter, the article revisits Michele Serres’ notion of a natural contract to explore the relationships between materiality, environmental politics and citizenship. In a break from conventional renderings of environmental citizenship, the article argues that nature enters into politics alongside human subjects, through insurgent socio-ecological assemblages. In a case study of the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution, with its organizing principle of buen vivir and provisions enshrining the rights of nature, the idea of a natural contract proves a useful heuristic device for probing the political intertwining of human and nonhuman. At the same time, it falls short in characterizing the dynamic socionatural insurgencies that transgress dominant orders and perform alternate modes of being, ultimately leading to such things as formal constitutional change. Moreover, the secular contractual language of the Ecuadorian constitution tends to efface the spiritual content of the indigenous cosmovisions that significantly inform its principles. In light of this, the second part of the analysis probes the way human actors attach meaning to their involvement in socionatural insurgence, with an emphasis on the sacred as an important and often overlooked dimension of political-ecological struggle. Taking the Latin American movement for water justice as its empirical referent, the article locates the spiritual dimension as a vital ontological and discursive bridge facilitating human actors’ embodied engagements with their ecological surroundings. In this way the sacred makes key contributions to assembling human and more-than-human elements within the insurgent ecologies of citizenship.

Testing the Limits Neoliberal Ecologies from Pinochet to Bachelet

Chile’s impressive record of economic growth over the past 20 years has come with significant impacts on the environment. Though Chile’s postdictatorship governments have embraced a discourse of sustainable development and created new institutions to address environmental issues, ecological degradation has largely continued unchecked. The government of Michelle Bachelet promised a series of institutional and regulatory changes that would substantially renew and advance the state’s commitment to greening Chile’s development model. As did her predecessors, however, Bachelet governed in a milieu in which the ideology of neoliberal modernization and elite power resisted interference in the cycle of capital investment and accumulation. Two case studies, one concerning the salmon farming industry and the other hydroelectricity, reveal the ways in which apparently “green” intentions were transformed into institutional support for the continued unsustainable exploitation of Chile’s social and ecological capital. Los impresionantes logros chilenos en materia de crecimiento en los últimos 20 años han tenido un impacto sustancial en el medio ambiente. Aunque los gobiernos posteriores a la dictadura han adoptado un discurso de desarrollo sustentable y creado nuevas instituciones para atender asuntos ambientales, la degradación ecológica ha continuado sin control alguno. El gobierno de Michelle Bachelet prometió una serie de cambios institucionales y de regulación que habrían de renovar y avanzar sustancialmente el compromiso gubernamental con un modelo de desarrollo más sustentable. Pero, al igual que sus predecesores, Bachelet ha gobernado en un medio dentro del cual la ideología neoliberal de la modernización y las élites en el poder han resistido cualquier interferencia en el ciclo de acumulación e inversión del capital. Dos estudios de caso, uno relacionado con la industria de granjas de salmón y otro con la producción hidroeléctrica, revelan las formas en las que las supuestas intenciones “ambientalistas” se transformaron en formas de apoyo institucional para la continuada e insustentable explotación del capital social y ecológico chileno.

Between Political Worlds: Indigenous Citizenship in Chile's Alto Bío Bío

The formation of a new municipality comprising the Mapuche–Pewenche communities of the Alto Bío Bío region in Chile offers a prime case for analysing the challenges involved in the exercise of meaningful indigenous citizenship at the local level. This work contributes to the literature on indigenous experiences with local government in Latin America, but its main goal is to re-examine notions of hybridization in the formation of indigenous subjects. While hybridity is often invoked as a successful reinvention of indigenous social and political agency, less attention has been paid to the ways in which hybridization can also be associated with less progressive outcomes. The exploration of ‘hybrid’ indigenous citizenship in the Alto Bío Bío focuses on four nested fields of institutions and socio-political cultures: property rights, community structure, economic development, and municipal government. Despite some counter-tendencies, significant agency in shaping the terms of their encounter with modernity has mostly eluded the Pewenche communities of the region.

Agro-Ecology and Food Sovereignty Movements in Chile: Sociospatial Practices for Alternative Peasant Futures

The agro-ecology and food sovereignty movements of southern Chile promote alternatives to the hegemonic agro-export regime that dominates the landscape. We explore these mobilizations and the strategies they employ, with a particular focus on a network of peasant women “seed curators.” The global agri-food complex relies on a flat and universalizing spatiality of land as resource and food as commodity, in which the character and fate of individual places is of little importance. This is paired with a hierarchical monopolization of knowledge, where producers become recipients rather than creators and custodians of agricultural inputs and know-how. In response, peasant movements have given birth to alternative spatial practices based on horizontal networks that join together interdependent producers and places. By sharing traditional and agro-ecological knowledge, cultivating alternate circuits of exchange, and building urban–rural partnerships, these movements seek to reshape the horizons of possibility both for peasant communities and for the broader agri-food system.

Locating nature's citizens: Latin American ecologies of political space

Scholars of environmental citizenship have often drawn attention to the spatial mismatch between ecological systems and nation-states, arguing that citizenship needs to be scaled up to meet global environmental challenges. I argue that rethinking the scale of ecopolitical engagement requires moving beyond a simple spatial hierarchy topped by ‘the global’. Debates in human geography lead us towards a relational conception of space, where densely networked interactions produce dynamic and multi-layered configurations of actors. Supplementing this perspective with political-ecological and post-humanist theories of human–nature interaction, citizenship can be understood as a process of political becoming within shifting assemblages of socio-ecological relationships. The second half of the analysis deploys this theoretical perspective to narrate three vignettes that locate natures citizens in a diversity of socio-ecological contexts, debates and conflicts in Latin America. Drawing on regional scholarship, these vignettes examine the political ecology of citizenship in relation to water, climate governance and the struggles of indigenous peoples.