Socio-Environmental Regionalism in South America: Tensions in New Development Models

Abstract

The argument put forward is that regional integration in natural resources are causing and exacerbating socio-environmental conflicts in ways that undermine on-going efforts to build more cohesive regional governance. Socio-environmental conflicts present new sources of development tensions related to the asymmetrical distribution of benefits and liabilities of natural resource extraction often at the expense of poor rural communities. In many ways this dimension regionalism contradicts the significant advancement reached in terms of political coordination, raising important questions about current limits to the transformative potential of regionalism in South America.