Presentation short abstract

We analyse the Yasuni-ITT initiative's more than two-decade long history in four stages: utopian, mainstreamed, dismmised and resurrected. Our reading demonstrates the limits to supply-side policies by individual nation-states.

Presentation long abstract

This paper chronicles the still-evolving Yasuní-ITT initiative, an example of the increasingly prominent ‘supply-side’ responses to climate change. We analyze the initiative's more than two-decade long history in four stages. In its first stage, utopian, the initiative was the self-consciously idealistic proposal put forward during the early 2000s by radical environmental activists and ignored by institutional actors as unrealistic. The second stage, mainstreamed, following the election of President Correa, the proposal was mainstreamed into Ecuadorian development policy. The plan to leave the ITT oil blocks in the Yasuní National Park was widely celebrated as a hugely significant initiative. In the third stage, dismissed, marked by the failure to quickly secure compensation of lost income it was dismissed by the Ecuadorian state. The proposal was abandoned in 2013 and the Ecuadorian state-owned oil company started the extraction process. In the fourth stage, resurrected, the initiative was supported by a large popular majority in a national referendum (August 2023).

The paper looks at the institutional dynamics of the initiative at the local, national and international level. The necessity to replicate and upscale Yasuní like initiatives is matched with the political economy of extractivism and the risk of policy rollbacks. The key to understanding the challenges of the Yasuní initiative is that the strategy to neutralize rents through conditional compensation ultimately failed. Structural constraints are halting progress and implementation of the initiative demonstrating the limits to action by individual nation-states.