Exploring the Contradiction of Extractive Populism Between Domestic and International Politics in Ecuador

Chapter 6 focuses on polycentric pluralism, mostly at the international and national levels, sidelining vulnerability as a principal cause of environmental attitudes. After briefly introducing rationales behind the interaction between international and domestic policy positions, we show that while there is consensus among Ecuadorians that foreign extractive interests are threats to the Amazon, Ecuadorians are divided along party lines regarding the government’s pursuit of extraction, illustrating the political—rather than cultural—nature of the extractive debate in Ecuador. The upshot is that the Correa administration tried but failed to maintain both its international and domestic images as an environmental force, funding discretionary programs (including “green” ones) through oil drilling. Furthermore, consistent with our argument that polycentric pluralism has been the form that interest articulation takes, variations in approval of policies are more readily explained by cleavages defined by vulnerability and political party affiliation rather than by ethnic identity.

How to Effectively Speak for Nature?

Our conclusion strives to reconcile environmentalism as studied via survey responses with environmentalism as studied via social movements. We conclude that these two approaches may seem to yield different results to the question of Who Speaks for Nature? However, we argue, subject to further research, that movement leaders’ abstract and symbolic appeals may help improve bargaining positions to attain the concrete objectives individuals actually care about most. More broadly, we conclude with a summation of extensive evidence presented, that indigenous communities and other victims of some of extractivism’s excesses are best served by polycentric pluralist interest articulation, where individual interests can aggregate into a range of organizations and networks, rather than multiculturalism, where the interests represented are primordial, predictable, and static.

Beyond Multiculturalism

In this introductory chapter we discuss the assumption of post-materialism championed by Inglehart (1990, 1995): the idea that some groups, such as middle-class urban dwellers, are ideologically or politically predisposed toward environmentalism. We then consider an alternative, vulnerability politics, wherein peoples’ interest in protecting the environment may instead be conditioned by how directly vulnerable they are to the fragility of that environment. The national government’s failures to implement multicultural rights in Ecuadorian indigenous communities, combined with the failures of indigenous communities themselves to unify, open the way for polycentric pluralism to represent indigenous and other environmental interests. This chapter defines these terms and lays out its challenge to the post-materialist argument by showing that strong environmental attitudes can occur precisely where Inglehart says they should not, such as in poor rural areas rather than in affluent urban ones. We situate our study and explain that understanding environmentalism in Ecuador’s Amazon is a matter of realizing that non-Western cultural values, individual political struggles, and material vulnerabilities condition people’s attitudes. More specifically, concern for the environment may be linked to rational self-interest and political identities, rather than being entirely conditioned by the structural cause of material well-being. Once we have established the importance of rational environmentalism by individuals, we then evaluate attitudes in subsequent chapters through this lens.

How Science, Religion, and Politics Influence Indigenous Attitudes on Climate Change in Ecuador

To assess the influence of science and religion on climate change, in this chapter we analyze our national survey focused on climate change in Ecuador and find that with regard to climate change specifically, religiosity and indigenous cosmovision impact respondents’ belief in climate change. Contrary to the US-centered literature on religious beliefs and climate change in the West, religiosity and cosmovision have positive effects on climate change beliefs. Recognizing that possession of an indigenous cosmovision and a Catholic or Protestant religious identity are not incompatible, we also consider how these traits interact. In addition to being influenced by both science and religion, respondents adjust their beliefs in climate change depending on whether they were located on the nation’s extractive frontier. We also show with case studies that science, religion, and a history of extractivism all impact citizen beliefs in climate change.

Crude Bargaining

In chapter 4, we further explore how individual-level preferences relating to people’s willingness to mobilize in opposition to extraction also impacts collective action. We evaluate political activity by mobilized groups, particularly indigenous groups, addressing their internal divisions and efforts by the state to weaken opposition and win extraction. We further aggregate our unit of analysis in this chapter, focusing on indigenous groups within the extractive frontier of the Amazon region rather than on the individuals surveyed. Using a comparison of survey results from the northern, central, and southern “extractive frontiers,” we show that environmental attitudes are driven by the geopolitics of negotiating oil contracts. Much of the chapter explores differences in social movement strategies among groups in different areas of the Amazon. The northern part of the Amazon region has been extensively drilled for oil but with notorious environmental degradation along the way, the central part of the Amazon region is in the process of being leased in oil blocks for drilling, and the southern part of the territory is a pristine rainforest untouched as yet by oil extraction. We argue that different groups’ exposures to vulnerability affect how they view the environment and thus whether they will allow extraction on their lands.

Does Prior Consultation Diminish Extractive Conflict or Channel It to New Venues?

Extending the argument that individual political interests overrule structural identities based on ethnicities or social values, we argue in chapter 3 that mobilization against extraction has emerged because Ecuador’s government exploits institutional mechanisms meant to protect the environment to pursue extractive populism and maintain power. We define populism as putting short-term interests such as re-election and the provision of patronage and other goods ahead of long-term interests like balancing budgets and cleaning the environment after extractive projects generate revenue. Populist leaders like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa sought both to “speak for nature” as a leftist and pro-indigenous leader, while also needing to finance social programs through extractive royalties. Specifically, we show that the mechanism of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC, also referred to as consulta previa, prior consultation, or CP), which was designed to protect indigenous communities from unwanted extraction by requiring their explicit permission for extractive activities, has become a political tool of the Ecuadorian government. As such, the factors that influence public support for prior consultation are largely political, and individuals who hope to protect the environment are less supportive of the process. Prior consultation is neither explicitly individual nor explicitly collective, and thus we consider it as an individual practice and analyze survey findings, and as an interest group process, for which we evaluate group decisions relating to prior consultation.

Multiculturalism Versus Polycentric Pluralism

In this chapter we analyze data from our original nationwide survey in Ecuador and find that respondents do not express concern for the environment in accordance with predictions of post-materialist norms. In fact, our evidence indicates that the poor who live off the land—those on the front lines of experiencing environmental degradation as a result of oil and mineral extraction—have even stronger perceptions of the importance of environmental problems. This chapter offers the core argument from which succeeding chapters part. After operationalizing our hypotheses and discussing our statistical findings, we utilize extensive interviews with leaders to further illustrate how vulnerability and extraction affect environmental attitudes.