Environmental Citizenship in Latin America: Climate, Intermediate Organizations, and Political Subjects

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, ! sheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming. We would like to thank a number of people for their assistance. Without the generous and patient cooperation of the staff of the Asociación Argentina de Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola, the Instituto del Mar del Perú, and the Companhia de Gestão de Recursos Hídricos, we could not have written this article. Our colleagues at the Center for Research in Environmental Decisions (CRED) and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), both at Columbia University, gave useful advice and direction during the research reported here and during the writing of this article. Fernando Ruiz Toranzo, João Lúcio de Oliveira, Francisco de Assis de Souza Filho, Eduardo Sávio Passos Rodrigues Martins, and Francisco Teixeira also provided valuable assistance. In addition, we bene! ted greatly from the thoughtful suggestions of the people who commented on earlier drafts of this article: the journal’s special issue editors José Jouve-Martín and Marianne Schmink, and Andrés Barragán, Elvira J. Bomsonne, Monique Borgerhoff, Marisol de la Cadena, Don Donham, Joe Dumit, Jelmer Eerkens, Cristiana Giordano, Laura Graham, Frank Hirtz, James Holston, Fabiana Li, Beth Rose Middleton, Suzana Sawyer, Kevin Welch, and Li Zhang. We are grateful to the U.S. National Science Foundation, which supported the research discussed in this article through Grants NSF SES-0345840 and CNH-0709681, as well as the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study (CIFAS), which assisted the Brazilian portion of the research. Additional P5560.indb 115 9/27/11 11:05:26 AM 116 Latin American Research Review