Negotiating Environmental Sovereignty in Costa Rica

Abstract

This article analyses the linked histories and changing national discourses surrounding a transnational mining concession and subsequent plans for hydroelectric development in Costa Rica. The analysis shows how project framing shifted from un-environmental to green, paralleling a change in public debate from defence against a transnational threat to support of national sovereignty. Dissenters questioned an imperial project that would preclude the state and its citizens from the benefits of industrial development; now the problem is recalled as extractive development itself. Thus popular protests against the mine have come to be remembered as a defence of the nation's environment. This article defines environmental sovereignty as a relational concept that decentres human dominion. In addition, it argues for increased scholarly attention to unimplemented development. This case demonstrates how land deals transcend their own boundaries in time, space and imagination.

Facing the Future: The Legacies of Post‐Neoliberalism in Latin America

“…It is interesting to note in the light of this that, although the initiatives adopted by politicians once in office have also been explored in depth by some authors in this virtual issue, comparative analysis between policy domains and between governments remains incomplete. Some contributions here, such as those by Fletcher (2012), Graef (2013), Grandia (2013), Hillenkamp (2015) and Vos and Boelens (2014), argue that governments have been more successful in putting in motion policies to reduce socioeconomic inequalities than in addressing cultural and identity-based forms of discrimination. Vos and Boelens (ibid.)…”

“…The result -what Fletcher (2012: 313) calls a gap between 'vision' and 'execution' in terms of inclusive and socially responsive governance -became almost inevitable, even for progressive governments committed to change. So, as Graef (2013) and Fletcher (2012) both show in the case of Costa Rica, environmental interventions that were aimed at poorer communities dependent on natural resources were quite limited in scope. They argue that government initiatives have tended to overlook the consequences of industrial resource extraction operations and land use alteration as a consequence.…”

“…Meanwhile, Graef (2013) explores how environmentalism and environmental sovereignty can be framed in public debates to change outcomes in land use from proposed investments. Taking a longer historical frame than other papers in this collection, and focusing on state responses to land deals in Costa Rica, Graef argues that we can learn from projects that have been stopped or stalled in the past, as well as from current experiences.…”

‘Aerial Silk Roads’: Airport Infrastructures in China's Belt and Road Initiative

“…Such a propensity is well-rehearsed in critical development studies, which, too, has sought to sketch out the purposes and pernicious effects of 'grand' visions in 'Western' development and modernization efforts (Escobar, 1984;Silvey and Rankin, 2011). While scholars have elaborated on these views with attention to alternative developmental trajectories and subversive social movements (Graef, 2013;Rao, 2018;Sen and Grown, 2013), the inclination has remained to draw a clear distinction between development as planned and development as suffered. Pieterse (2000: 183) has problematized this 'dichotomic thinking' by arguing that dividing up society into pro-and antidevelopment camps 'underrates the dialectics and the complexity of motives and motions in modernity and development'.…”

“…This article extends this argument by positing that the centrality of infrastructure in the BRI-or, better, BRIs-constitutes an important key to explaining the uncertainties of modernday developmental agendas like the above. Literatures on development have often concentrated on the discursive effects of globalist (read: Western-centric) developmental norms (Silvey and Rankin, 2011), and, dialectically, the opposition that these same norms tend to elicit (Graef, 2013;Rao, 2018;Sen and Grown, 2013). But little sustained research exists to account for the fraught ways in which development nowadays is often, itself, actualized through highly practical and contingent infrastructural processes.…”