Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to delineate a fundamental aspect of resource politics in the Southern Cone: the consequences of resource politics to environmental governance at the regional level.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst most research on natural resource politics has focused on the extent to which Left governments have pushed for a post-neoliberal agenda or the degree upon which consultative mechanisms have deepened the quality of democracy in the region, our paper seeks to delineate a fundamental aspect of resource politics: the consequences of resource politics to environmental governance at the regional level. Despite the proliferation of regional cooperation and the successful re-election of 'post-neoliberal' governments, the underlying logic of 'neoextractivism' - the extensive and intensive exploitation of natural resources under a statist paradigm - has failed to reconcile apparent tensions between expansion of capitalist accumulation and environmental sustainability. At the national level, we find economic policies, which deploy a discourse of redistributive politics. Its principal concern is to ameliorate the poverty legacies of the past; development strategies were not coherently fashioned to resolve these contradictions in the growth model. At the regional level, we show how the timid results of regional environmental cooperation are principally derived from the formidable tasks of forging a counter discourse against the dominant neoextractivist logic in domestic politics. We draw examples from regional and national initiatives on resource exploitation and environmental cooperation arrangements in the Southern Cone to demonstrate our arguments.