Alternautas

Knowledge politics around water, development and ecosystem services in Ecuador: creative encounters and resistances

2022-05-17T22:35:00+01:00

A vast amount of literature has investigated the conflicts between different ways of conceiving development in Latin America. Particular attention has been paid to power differentials among knowledge systems when it comes to decision-making, values and practices over water resources. The Ecosystem Services framework or Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) are often analysed as examples of technical and scientific tools typically produced by multilateral organizations, cooperation agencies and international experts. They are presented as discourses competing with environmental and water justice claims, or local and traditional knowledge, although they can sometimes support them and/or try to incorporate them. The question that arises is whether such incorporation depoliticises local understandings of sustainability and development. This paper aims to examine both the synergies and tensions among different forms of knowledge around development through one empirical case study in the Ecuadorian highlands. It focuses on the efforts of the Kayambi indigenous communities to create, negotiate and scale-up a water conservation funding scheme based on reciprocity and solidarity values. This contribution highlights the creative engagement of diverse actors in designing, cocreating and diffusing a diversity of perspectives on development. It challenges the frontiers between technoscientific and grassroots knowledge by paying attention to the situated practices of different actors. It argues that the coproduction of water and development knowledge between various actors is the result of negotiating worldviews possibly in tension and moving beyond traditional resistance.

The Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA)

2022-11-10T15:53:33+00:00

With the transformations that have taken place in recent decades, due to the expansion of global production chains, physical infrastructure has begun to occupy a central place in the development of global capitalism, as a key element in the proliferation, insertion and consolidation of national economies in the international economy. In this context, at the beginning of the new century, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) was created, with the aim of promoting mega-projects such as highways, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, waterways, sea and river ports, hydroelectric dams, electricity and fibre optic cables. At the same time, this Initiative proposed the development of bioceanic corridors connecting the Pacific and Atlantic ports, favouring the transit of export flows.

Thus, the aim of this article is to analyse, from a critical perspective, the IIRSA and the development of infrastructure in South America from the beginning of the new century to the present day. We will focus on the transversal axes into which IIRSA divided the subcontinent, the flows that were considered a priority and the bioceanic corridors that were proposed.

In order to address the proposed objective, we carried out a bibliographical and documentary review technique (Valles, 1999). Within the framework of this tool, we used three main sources. Firstly, reports and studies carried out by financial and international institutions, and from the IIRSA initiative itself, which were contrasted and compared with hard data and maps. Secondly, newspaper articles, which provide information in relation to the context and the debates that existed. Thirdly, academic literature and articles by specialists in the field.

Digital farming, invisible farmers

2022-11-23T09:52:53+00:00

Digital technologies have been gradually penetrating agricultural production systems; specially, in the last two decades, generating both expectations and concerns because of the unknown technological scope and the speed of the transformations. While some sectors are enthusiastic on the potential of digital tools have to contribute efficiently in food production, to achieve agri-food sustainability and to mitigate climate change, others are concerned about the challenges digital technologic will produce on political, social and cultural fields. The embeddedness, conditions, and usage of digital technologies in the agriculture sector raise questions on how and who participates on Global Production Networks and shape governance structures and policies orientation underpinning them. In the current landscape, just some few Global Networks with different forms of economic and political power are dominating digitalisation worldwide. They have the control of technologies to implement digital agriculture at the global scale. Governmental institutions both at international and national level foster financial and market policies to invest and promote in digitalisation what has impacts on the shifting of food systems. This article examines the dynamics of power concentration wielded by the Global Networks that, through large transnational corporations, have managed to dominate different sectors of the food chain by implementing digital systems for agriculture. It also presents an analysis of land concentration and big data and the possible implications for small producers and traditional food systems in Latin America. It suggests that while some digital services can contribute to improving and alleviating the challenges facing agricultural production, others could increase the concentration of power in a few hands by appropriating sensitive information from Big Data and adapting it to industrial food production and food value chains and posing fundamental challenges to governance structures.

The spaces in between

2022-12-13T20:39:00+00:00

In recent years, the Latin American left has achieved important electoral and social successes. Meanwhile, far-right movements across the continent have also come back from the brink, transformed from fringe political phenomena to powerful political vehicles capable of dictating political discourse and policies. In his article Harnessing the Storm: Constitutive moments and taypi in Latin America, Angus McNelly (2022) proposes to search for and to create openings for different futures and political alternatives out of the contradictions of capitalism on a regional scale with a focus on transformative movements. Connecting to McNelly’s reading of Rivera and Zavaleta, I put forward the concept of taypi by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Taypi is the centre of a woven pattern, which she uses as a metaphor for a site of friction in between ch’ixi spaces and societies. Taypi allows us to interrogate both the creative as well as destructive potential that results from lo abigarrado and ch’ixi formations in Latin America – including authoritarian and far-right tendencies as part of the constitutive moments. I argue that focussing on taypi—regardless of the scope we seek to analyse—draws attention to the organisation that takes place on the ground in both its productive and destructive potential. I conclude that seeking constitutive moments, ch’ixi spaces and taypi across Latin America makes for a fruitful research agenda.

Why the Far-Right Will Continue to Radicalise in Brazil

2022-12-21T16:27:58+00:00

“Brazil is back on the world stage” – this was the main message Lula delivered as honorary guest at the UN Climate Summit in Egypt, less than a month after beating Bolsonaro in the runoff of Brazil’s presidential elections with a narrow margin of 50.9% against 49.1%. Lula’s high-strung victory in a divided country has attracted global media and political attention, reflecting not only concerns about the fate of Brazilian democracy after a long cycle of authoritarianism (2016-2022), but of how the election could point to a change in the correlation of forces in a number of consequential themes that resonate on the international agenda: the urgency of environmental protection and regulation, the resumption of the South American integration process, the possibility of a more assertive BRICS coalition pushing for a transition in economic development policies, the attention to social inclusion, the need to reverse neoliberal reforms related to labour market and public spending mechanisms, the hopes of re-organising international left-wing solidarity, among others.