Asphalt Dreams: Road Construction and Environmental

Citizenship in Peru

Sonja K. Pieck

ABSTRACT

Peru today is one of the main staging grounds for a continent-wide integra-
tion effort. Launched in 2000, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional
Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) calls for an enormous expansion of
the continent’s transport and energy networks and an effort to increase the
region’s economic competitiveness. Among its most controversial projects
is the Interoceanic Highway linking western Brazil with the Pacific coast of
Peru. The highway has attracted fierce criticism from NGOs who point to
major environmental impacts, an inadequate mitigation process, and a lack
of transparency in funding flows and decision making. In an effort to voice
their concerns, these groups engage the idea of ‘environmental governance’
to increase public participation in the development process and promote eco-
logical sustainability. This alternative framework in turn opens up space for
‘environmental citizenship’. This article takes a closer look at how Peruvian
NGOs employ this idea and suggests that while the group’s advocacy of
governance has had success, the building of environmental citizenship will
require a move beyond urban Peruvian NGOs as technical experts.

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after decades of crisis, stagnation

and uncertainty, Latin America is undergoing a major economic boom. GDP
increased by 4.5 per cent in 2011 and by 3 per cent in 2012 (compared to
1.2 per cent in the developed world) (IMF, 2012a, 2013). Peru has shown
some of the highest growth rates in the region and, despite the recent election
of a leftist president, Ollanta Humala, posted a robust 6 per cent increase
in GDP in 2012.1 Yet this growth is also uneven, expressed in persistent

I would like to thank the individuals who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this study, and in
particular Dr Ernesto Raez for his generosity and help. I also wish to thank the editors of the
journal and the article reviewers for their helpful suggestions on a previous draft of this essay.
Additional thanks to the Bates College Imaging Center and Camille Parrish for their assistance
in developing the two maps.
1. For more information, see http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/peru-economy-gdp-
idUSL1E8SB5OI20120511 (accessed 17 May 2012).
Development and Change 44(5): 1039–1163. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12056

C 2013 International Institute of Social Studies.

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA
1040 Sonja K. Pieck

rural poverty on the one hand, and an influx of wealth to major urban areas
on the other. Much of Peru’s progress has been fuelled by China’s demand
for raw materials, so much so that roughly 33 per cent of Peru’s exports
are destined for China, compared to only 13 per cent going to the United
States (World Bank, 2011). Also responding to the Chinese market is Peru’s
neighbour, Brazil. As South America’s rising power and the world’s sixth
largest economy, Brazil is leading the attempt to physically integrate all
twelve South American countries to increase exports to East Asia.
Launched in 2000, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infras-
tructure in South America (IIRSA) calls for an enormous expansion of the
continent’s transport and energy networks in an effort to create greater com-
petitiveness. Peru is one of IIRSA’s main staging grounds. Here, IIRSA is
being advanced through several controversial projects, including the Intero-
ceanic Highway, a road linking western Brazilian cities with their counter-
parts in the Peruvian Amazon, and on to the Peruvian Andes and coast. The
project is funded in large part by the Peruvian government, regional and inter-
national development banks, and private investors. Now nearing completion,
the highway has attracted fierce criticism from non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGOs) who point to troubling environmental impacts, an inadequate
mitigation process surrounding construction, and a lack of transparency in
funding flows and decision making. In an effort to voice their concerns, these
activists employ the discourses of environmental governance and citizenship
to force state and corporate accountability and increase public participation
in the definition of development in Peru.
In the context of the region’s leftward turn, their work raises broader
questions about the distribution of the benefits and the costs of economic
growth (Escobar, 2010; Macdonald and Ruckert, 2009). Can the enormous
investments in infrastructure be transformed into a better quality of life for
those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale and if so, how? This article
takes a closer look at the response of Peruvian NGOs as they confront a
challenge that is unprecedented in scope and power.

OUTLINE OF METHODS AND CASE STUDY

I am interested in how civic actors respond to the processes of political

and economic transformation that are reshaping Peru, a country in which
civic activism has historically been troubled by authoritarian regimes, in-
surgency and civil war. Environmental and social justice movements are
relatively new here and have been quite weak when compared to other Latin
American countries (Bebbington et al., 2008), which partly explains why
so little has been written about them. This case study discusses the emer-
gence of a country-wide network of NGOs and activists concerned about
the economic, social and environmental impacts of the Interoceanic High-
way. These activists are responding to IIRSA and the road by engaging the
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1041

notion of environmental governance to open up the possibility of environ-

mental citizenship. This strategy has both strengths and, I suggest, critical
shortcomings.
Research for this article spans several years. I have worked on IIRSA
since 2008, when I began conducting reviews of publically available de-
velopment, government and civil society documents. I also made several
trips to Washington DC where I spoke with staff members at the Bank In-
formation Center, the Inter-American Bank and several large conservation
organizations. I visited Ecuador in 2010 and Peru in 2010, 2011 and 2012,
where I spoke with over two dozen NGO staff as well as members of a
non-NGO working group, including its three regional coordinators and the
national coordinator. In addition, I conducted an online survey of the civil
society working group which, together with the results from my interviews,
was the basis for a report that I developed and submitted to the group to
assist in their organizational process. Parts of this article draw heavily on
the contributions (both written and oral) of key members of the working
group: DAR, SPDA, SER and ProNaturaleza.2 To ensure the confidentiality
of participants’ information, individuals are identified only by organizational
affiliation, not by name.
In the following section, I sketch the place of governance and citizenship
under neoliberalism and then contrast this with ‘environmental’ governance
and citizenship. ‘Environmental citizenship’ in particular has received in-
creased scholarly attention because its use by social movements and NGOs
can secure concessions from the state and allow for the politicization of
environmental questions (Latta, 2007; Latta and Wittman, 2010). And yet,
in the Peruvian context, the concept is also clearly limited. I explore this
with the help of my case study, discussing how and where the Interoceanic
Highway fits into a larger neoliberal idea of development through regional
integration and the kinds of impacts this road is already having on Peru’s
natures and peoples. Document, survey and interview data are then used to
develop the argument and provide evidence of alternative discourses and
practices in Peru. The civil society working group, on which this discussion
is centred, connects the technical and the normative as it makes claims on the
state, forces elite decisions into the realm of public concern, and advances
a politics of knowledge through information dissemination. I conclude with
some critical reflections on these developments. What is the broader mean-
ing of citizenship talk in Peru? Can this kind of NGO activism facilitate a
movement beyond asphalt development, to a new politics in Peru?

2. DAR (Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales; Rights, Environment and Natural Re-
sources), SPDA (Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental; Peruvian Society for Envi-
ronmental Rights), SER (Asociación Servicios Educativos Rurales; Association for Rural
Educational Services), ProNaturaleza (Fundación Peruana para la Conservación de la Nat-
uraleza; Peruvian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature).
1042 Sonja K. Pieck

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Neoliberal Governance and Citizenship

Neoliberalism is most often used in its economic sense where it refers to

policies that aim to create free market conditions. These usually focus on
deregulation, trade liberalization, privatization and reductions in tariffs and
other trade barriers (Harvey, 2005). In Peck and Tickell’s (2002) well-known
formulation, this ‘roll-back’ neoliberalism of reduced state intervention is
increasingly complemented by ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism: a political project
in which institutions that are perceived as obstacles to the invisible hand
of the market (like trade unions) are weakened or removed in favour of
institutions that promote it (like decentralization programmes or expanded
export facilities). More recently, part of neoliberalism’s political project has
been the spreading of procedural democracy and transparency in the form
of ‘good governance’.
Governance describes a political system in which power has become more
diffuse across many actors beyond the nation state. These include interna-
tional financial institutions (IFIs), international organizations, NGOs and
local communities. In this sense, governance ‘encompasses the activities
of governments, but also includes the many other channels through which
“commands” flow in the form of goals framed, directives issued, and policies
pursued’ (Rosenau, 1995: 14). For IFIs like the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank, ‘good governance’ implies the absence of corruption,
adherence to the rule of law and fiscal transparency (IMF, 2012b). It also
usually implies decentralized state functions, and a civil society that partic-
ipates in decision making and thus forces the state to be accountable and
fiscally responsible. For its critics, good governance is part of a larger effort
to establish the ideal conditions for expanding capitalism globally (Kiely,
1998).
In the neoliberal view, one of the pillars of good governance is citizenship
‘as the legal and social framework for individual autonomy and political
democracy’ (Schafir, 1998: 2). For neoliberals, only an independent citi-
zenry, assured of its civil, political and social rights,3 has the capacity to
check the power of the (often corrupt) state and thus maintain an investor-
friendly climate. Yet in actuality, neoliberal reforms often do not realize
the liberal ideal. In its drive to create free-market conditions, neoliberalism
cannot provide the citizenship rights that so many in Latin America have
called for. For Molyneux (2008: 780), even revised neoliberal policies in

3. Civil rights refer to people’s physical integrity and safety; political rights include procedural
fairness in the application of law and the right to vote; and social rights include economic
welfare and security and the right to a certain quality of life permitting full participation in
society (Marshall, 1992).
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1043

Latin America (from the austerity programmes of the 1980s to neoliberalism

‘with a human face’ after 2000) have been disappointing: ‘they did not greatly
alter the broader outline of macro-economic policy. The new democracies
presented the positive face of political liberalism, while economic manage-
ment remained committed to fiscal discipline and market-led growth, based
on low wages and primary exports’. Meanwhile, social rights, like access
to clean air and water or land tenure security for indigenous and traditional
peoples, have been eroded in an effort to open up natural resources to extrac-
tion and commodification. In this climate, political participation — beyond
the process of voting — is limited and ‘good governance’ remains vacuous.

Environmental Governance and Citizenship

Depending on the ideological point of view, environmental governance de-

rives from or challenges good governance. In basic terms, environmental
governance is about ‘how we make decisions about the environment and
who participates in these decisions’ (WRI, 2003: 2). For some, environmen-
tal governance may simply mean developing environmental regulations to
ease corporate claims on resources. For others, the term means the opposite:
developing the political, legal and/or economic infrastructure to stop over-
exploitation and guarantee ecological ‘sustainability’ (itself a notoriously
vague term). These differences are quite clear in the Peruvian case discussed
here, as the concept becomes a site of struggle around which IIRSA’s advo-
cates and NGO critics engage.
Central to the NGOs’ conception of environmental governance is the
notion of ‘environmental citizenship’ (Dobson, 2003; Gudynas, 2009). Al-
though it borrows from liberal understandings of state–society relations
mentioned above, it also introduces new dimensions. As has been noted
by others, communitarian understandings of citizenship often inform social
and environmental justice discourses. In contrast to liberal citizenship, in
which autonomous individuals exist in relation to a state and enjoy certain
rights (like freedom of expression) in an ‘abstract space devoid of social
context’ (Kurtz, 2005: 82), the communitarian tradition sees ‘emancipation
and self-realization as a collective rather than an individualistic concern’
(Harvey, 1996: 125). Through this lens, ‘[c]itizens are who they are by
virtue of participating in the life of their political community, and by iden-
tifying with its characteristics’ (Shafir, 1998: 11). Similarly, environmental
citizenship ‘encompasses the ability of people around the world to inhabit a
shared imaginary community where global issues . . . are, first of all, visible
in their interconnectedness, and secondly, in part as a consequence of this
experience of sharedness, amenable to common regulation’ (Luque, 2005:
212). In Latin America, environmental citizenship is connected to liberal
ideas of equal treatment before the law, but is also infused with a strong
1044 Sonja K. Pieck

communitarianism such as the demand for citizens to participate in the

governance of natural resources which would facilitate a more democratic
politics of nature.
Environmental citizenship is crucial to good environmental governance
since broad political participation beyond the ballot box should inform de-
velopment visions. The World Resources Institute, for instance, explains
that ‘[w]hen those affected by a decision can participate in the process, we
believe the result is likely to be fairer, more environmentally sound, and
more broadly accepted’ (WRI, 2003: 2). A strong, knowledgeable citizenry
would also inform the state whether it is acting effectively and fairly, and
would check corporate excess. To some, like the NGO network explored
here, development should be defined by the citizenry rather than imposed by
powerful elites and often against the collective interest. As will be discussed
below, this implies not so much public approval of government plans, but
the public’s direct involvement in setting the development agenda from the
start. Rather than lying only within the ambit of the state or other regulatory
bodies, environmental quality is thus a matter that directly concerns, and
should be influenced by, the social body.
In recent years, scholars of citizenship have tried to go beyond the con-
cept’s Eurocentrism to investigate how it ‘constitutes a dynamic space of
contest between classes, genders, racial groups, ethnic identities, and visions
of the good life’ and how the frame of citizenship can draw our attention
to emergent spaces and insurgent actors in environmental politics (Latta,
2007: 230). Yet, while much is made of environmental citizenship, and even
though we can see clear examples of it in the case of the NGO working
group in Peru, doubts remain about its actual impact on the lives of the many
affected communities living alongside the road.
This article is thus located at the intersection of environment, governance
and citizenship and aims to make a contribution to the new generation of
scholarship that widens the lens to include the global South, where state–
society relations do not mirror the European experience. Activism around
the Interoceanic Highway, one of IIRSA’s most emblematic projects, can
thus be understood as a struggle around much larger issues. Of course this
is about the road’s direct and indirect environmental and social impacts, but
what looms behind those points of critique is a much more profound desire
to reopen the terrain of participation, to demand accountability in the face of
increasingly diffuse power regimes, and to redefine the political, economic
and ecological landscape of Peru.
In the rest of this article, I provide a sketch of the Interoceanic Highway,
its impacts, and the activist network that has emerged in response. This is
followed by a discussion of the NGO working group’s alternative discourses
and practices. I show how the efforts of the group have produced political
openings in central and regional government for NGO professionals and
how they have helped to create a more participatory mitigation programme
for the highway. Conversely, however, I suggest that the group’s work at
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1045

the grassroots level remains inchoate and not yet able to produce the deeper
democracy that the notion of environmental citizenship evokes.

CASE BACKGROUND: IIRSA AND THE INTEROCEANIC HIGHWAY

The Interoceanic Highway forms part of a continent-wide regional integra-

tion scheme. It is funded by national governments, by the Inter-American
Development Bank and by a number of powerful banks, including the An-
dean Development Bank (CAF) and the Brazilian National Development
Bank (BNDES). The integration scheme is being executed by a mixture of
foreign investors (including Brazilian and Chinese construction companies)
and national government agencies. The initiative seeks to strengthen South
America’s (and especially Brazil’s) position in the global economy.
IIRSA manifests a deeply-rooted developmentalist mindset that is perva-
sive across the region. Heavy state spending on high-profile infrastructure
projects (from resettlement and colonization schemes to big dams) has oc-
curred throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin America
(Grindle, 1986; Schmink and Wood, 1984), and IIRSA further entrenches
these patterns. IIRSA can also be seen as the outcome of the neoliberal
reorientations the region experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. This means
that ‘the region’s prospects to improve the standard of living [have become]
more dependent on the capability of domestic producers [ . . . ] to supply
worldwide the required quantities and qualities in time. To support domestic
producers to meet this challenge, a broad array of measures is required to
facilitate trade and enhance trade-related capacity. IIRSA is a case in point’
(van Dijck and den Haak, 2006: 9). To do this, IIRSA promotes a massive
expansion of the continent’s energy, telecommunications and transportation
networks through hundreds of infrastructure projects. Through capital and
technology, IIRSA seeks to integrate markets and improve access to key re-
sources like hydrocarbons. Somewhat contradictorily, IIRSA now brings the
enduring developmentalist mentality of strong state presence and financing
into the service of free-market expansion.
IIRSA’s neoliberal language portrays South America’s people as a latent
productive force. The Inter-American Development Bank, in an effort to
attract investors to IIRSA’s development projects, points to the continent’s
‘young, entrepreneurial population’ and its ‘dynamic, creative cultures’,
describing them as an investment ‘opportunity’ (IDB, 2004: 4; Pieck, 2011).
Those populations that suffer from lack of access to markets, those inhabiting
the ‘hinterland’, are still untapped ‘potential’ (Interview, IDB staff member,
16 April 2010). The Peruvian government’s response to the ‘participation’ of
indigenous peoples in decisions affecting their lives was violence (Romero,
2009). While IIRSA architects seem to agree in theory on the importance
of civic participation (echoing a neoliberal tenet), their ambition to actually
operationalize it leaves much to be desired. For environmental and social
1046 Sonja K. Pieck

justice activists, mechanisms for participation are unsatisfactory. Citizenship

under IIRSA is a matter of becoming a productive individual, engaging in
market-based economic activities for the good of the larger population.
IIRSA’s founding visionary was the Cardoso government of Brazil (In-
terview, IDB staff member, 16 April 2010). As the continent’s economic
powerhouse, Brazil has steadily advanced IIRSA in an attempt to secure its
claim on resources and connection to new markets, especially those in East
Asia. China’s rapidly rising demand for food and food products (such as
soybeans), strategic resources (including oil and minerals) and new com-
modities (such as biofuels) has intensified its ties to South America and
increased the stakes for countries like Brazil to respond (van Dijck and den
Haak, 2006: 13–14). High transaction costs related to poor transportation
infrastructure lower potential economic gain. In this context, the rationale
behind IIRSA is clearly spelled out in official documents:
Viewing infrastructure as a key element of integration is based on the idea that the syner-
getic development of transport, energy and telecommunications can generate the necessary
final momentum to overcome geographical barriers, bringing markets closer and promoting
new economic opportunities, provided the process takes place in a context of trade opening
and investments, regulatory harmonization and convergence and growing political cohesion.
Infrastructure integration will allow the articulation of the territory to facilitate market ac-
cess along two dimensions: access of raw material . . . to production centers and access of
production to consumption centers. (IIRSA, 2004: 4)

While paying lip service to ‘sustainable development’, the documents

clearly subordinate it to economic growth, defining sustainability in terms
of maintaining the conditions for expanding capitalism. In pursuit of this
goal, South America has been divided into ten ‘integration and development
hubs’, including the Peru–Brazil–Bolivia hub (IIRSA, 2004, 2009; see also
Figure 1).4 In total, IIRSA hopes to complete over 500 separate infrastructure
projects across the continent. Peru is located at the intersection of four
different hubs; within the framework of IIRSA, the Interoceanic Highway is
a priority project of the Peru–Brazil–Bolivia development hub.
Because of its long coastline, Peru fulfils a strategically important role for
Brazil in allowing it access to the Pacific. The Interoceanic Highway, acting
as a principal artery through which Brazil gains access to Pacific ports (see
Figure 2), will make it possible to export Brazilian products to China. But
before this can happen, infrastructure ‘deficiencies’ need to be addressed.
Specifically regarding the Peru–Brazil–Bolivia hub, IIRSA officials write
that: ‘the hub’s integration infrastructure is in general not only limited but
also deficient. This region has very isolated areas, with important natural
barriers and very low population density, although such circumstances can
be overcome because there is potential for development and reconditioning’
(IIRSA, 2009: 228).

4. Strategic economic and geographical factors determine how these hubs were demarcated
(for more information, see the IIRSA website at www.iirsa.org).
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1047

Figure 1. IIRSA’s Ten Integration and Development Hubs

Source: Adapted from IIRSA (2004: 17).

1048 Sonja K. Pieck

Figure 2. The Interoceanic Highway

Source: Generated by author based on information from the Peruvian Ministry of Trans-
portation and Communication. The highway is highlighted in black.

While the Interoceanic Highway in Peru, both as a dream and as a reality,

pre-dates IIRSA by at least eighty years (Llosa, 2003; Wilson, 2004), it is un-
der IIRSA’s auspices that the road received major financing and the national
and international support to expand it and place it firmly on the Peruvian
map. Construction on the Interoceánica began in earnest in 2004, when the
government of Alejandro Toledo gave the project ‘priority status’ in order
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1049

to fast-track it past the Sistema Nacional de Inversión Pública (SNIP — the

National System for Public Investment) and avoid waiting for an environ-
mental impact assessment (Dı́az and Álvarez, 2008: 27, 30). The stakes are
considerable for Peru. According to the World Bank, Peru’s infrastructure
deficiencies hamper its growth prospects. Improving infrastructure could re-
sult in major payoffs. To cite one influential World Bank study, Calderón and
Servén (2004: 20–21) estimate that if Peru were to improve its infrastructure
to the level of Chile or Costa Rica (both leaders in the region), its growth rate
would rise by 3.5 per cent. If the level of infrastructure development rose
even more, to that of Korea, ‘the impact would be huge — growth would
speed up by at least 5 per cent per year’.

Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts of the Interoceanic Highway

By 2012, the road had been all but completed, though with delays and
major cost overruns. This did not stop Juan Carlos Zevallo, the director of
Peru’s Agency for the Supervision of Investment in Public Infrastructure
(Ositran), from claiming in April 2011 that the Interoceánica had already
created 10,000 direct and 30,000 indirect jobs and produced roughly US$
3 billion in economic activity.5 However, the road’s negative impacts are
also becoming evident. Over the past eight years, activists and researchers
have warned of major environmental effects from the road, especially on the
fragile ecosystems of the tropical lowlands and the Andean sierra.
Unfortunately, as Dourojeanni (2006) points out, the financiers of the road
do not have their own environmental guidelines. The Brazilian National De-
velopment Bank (BNDES) has no such guidelines, while the Andean Devel-
opment Bank (CAF) simply defers to the respective countries’ (usually lax)
environmental standards. In fact, the Peruvian environmental ministry de-
veloped an impact mitigation programme in collaboration with CAF, known
as CAF/INRENA. As will be discussed below, this mitigation programme
has been a focus of critique by members of the civil society working group.
Broadly, impacts can be direct (that is, associated with the actual con-
struction of the road) and indirect (in which the road facilitates other
environmentally damaging processes). Among direct impacts are the ero-
sion and sedimentation of rivers, air pollution, micro-scale climate change
due to deforestation and asphalting, destruction of wetlands, habitat frag-
mentation, and displacement of wildlife and plants. Indirect environmental
impacts include increased migration to the road, which in turn results in
increased deforestation, illegal hunting and an enormous increase of illegal

5. See ‘Construcción de IIRSA Sur generó beneficios económicos que superan los US$ 3,000
millones’ (‘Construction of IIRSA-South Generated Earnings Exceeding US$3 Billion.’)
http://www.andina.com.pe/Espanol/Noticia.aspx?id=z7eFCN0MZN0= (accessed 12 May
2012).
1050 Sonja K. Pieck

gold mining in the Amazon (Dı́az and Álvarez, 2008; Dourojeanni, 2006;
Dourojeanni et al., 2010; Fernández and La Rosa, 2010; cf. Laurance et al.,
2001). In some ways, the most worrisome implications of the Interoceanic
Highway are these indirect impacts (Dourojeanni, 2010: 17; Killeen, 2007).
As experience in other contexts across Latin America has made clear, roads
built into the rainforest accelerate ecological destruction by initiating a socio-
economic ripple effect. Most serious among them is internal migration. In a
context of extreme poverty and landlessness, the construction of a road into
ostensibly ‘empty’ lands encourages the in-migration of colonizers from
other parts of the country, who try to make a living either by eking out
an existence on the agricultural frontier, or by engaging in a host of illegal
activities such as mining, logging, the drug trade, prostitution or sex traffick-
ing (Dourojeanni et al., 2010). Land disputes arise as new arrivals confront
already existing populations, including indigenous communities.
Because sections of the road pass through various sensitive ecological
areas and indigenous lands, especially in the Amazon lowlands, many of
these activities are likely to happen in national parks and other protected
areas. The region is considered to be a ‘biodiversity hotspot’ (Mittermeier
et al., 1997) — the national park Bahuaja-Sonene is home to 15–17 per
cent of the world’s plant species. The endemism rate is as high as 46 per
cent (Dourojeanni, 2006). As one group of experts warned, the direct and
indirect impacts of the road are likely to extend not 250 m (as indicated in the
feasibility study) but rather 50 km on each side of the road. This means that
among the areas impacted are not just the Bahuaja-Sonene national park,
but also the Salinas y Aguada Blanca reserve and the Tambopata reserve.
The road is also likely to negatively affect the Manu and Alto Purús national
parks, the Titicaca reserve, as well as the territories of the Amarakaeri
indigenous communities (Dourojeanni, 2006).
With a troublesome beginning, an unsatisfactory mitigation programme
and already visible environmental and socio-economic impacts, the road
has given rise to a network of environmental and social justice activists
working to articulate a coherent vision of good environmental governance
in Peru. After a brief discussion of the history and current structure of the
group, I focus on how the road informs the networking process, activists’
critiques of politics-as-usual, and their ideas of the roles citizens should play
in environmental governance.

ROAD CONSTRUCTION AS COALITION CATALYST

The Civil Society Working Group for the Interoceanic Highway (hereafter
‘working group’ or GTIOS, after its Spanish acronym) is a two-tiered activist
network consisting of a national umbrella working group, headquartered in
Lima, and three regional working groups that are based in the areas impacted
most heavily by the Interoceanic Highway: Madre de Dios (Amazon), Cuzco
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1051

(highlands) and Puno (highlands) (Figure 2). The network counts over fifty
organizations as members. Among them are Peru’s most important envi-
ronmental NGOs, such as SPDA, ProNaturaleza and DAR, alongside rural
development NGOs like SER.6
The GTIOS was founded in 2006, but it had grown out of a longer-term ef-
fort to monitor deforestation in the Tambopata-Manu area, run largely by the
Centro de Datos para la Conservación at the Universidad Nacional Agraria
la Molina and the Frankfurt Zoological Society (Interview, GTIOS found-
ing member, 11 March 2011). By mid-2005, it was decided that a meeting
should be arranged to bring environmental NGOs and business actors to the
table in order to discuss a particularly troubling project in Peru: the Intero-
ceanic Highway. That meeting took place in Cusco in February 2006. In the
aftermath, various individuals realized that a more organized response was
required. In August 2006, Ernesto Raez, then an ecologist at the Universidad
Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, was named national coordinator, and
the three regional working groups were created. A separate Lima working
group was deemed unnecessary since the largest, oldest and most important
Peruvian NGOs are located in the country’s capital (though some have satel-
lite offices in various regions of Peru). As one interviewee stated, ‘having
access to Lima authorities and the Lima ministries is important’ (Interview,
11 March 2011), if the goal is to ultimately change national policy. This
spatially dispersed group meets periodically to exchange information and
develop strategic plans. Along with its membership, the GTIOS’s scope has
grown from an initial focus on the road to a larger discussion about the re-
lationship between development and environmental protection in Peru. An
electronic membership list was created in 2006, which currently has over
130 subscribers.
In its own words, the GTIOS seeks to ‘promote, propose and support
initiatives that are compatible with sustainable development around the
Interoceanic Highway, with the aim of having the negative impacts miti-
gated and the positive impacts of the road strengthened’.7 To this end, the
GTIOS monitors development mega-projects and increases public access to

6. Some of these NGOs had previous experience collaborating on environmental issues though
little conversation had happened across the environmental–rural development divide due
to the bifurcated histories of the organizations. Rural development NGOs in Peru can be
traced back to the country’s old Marxist left and the human rights movement. Environmental
NGOs are much younger and derive much of their inspiration and growth from the interna-
tional environmental movement. They are financially heavily dependent on North American
conservation organizations (Dourojeanni, 2009). Rarely have the two groups collaborated.
Even within the Peruvian environmental NGO sector, there are divisions. ProNaturaleza,
founded in 1984, is one of the oldest environmental NGOs in Peru and is dedicated to
biodiversity conservation. SPDA, created in 1986, focuses on environmental law. Finally,
DAR was founded in 2005 and employs a more populist discourse than the other NGOs.
The concepts of citizenship and governance have managed to harness these perspectives
into a more coherent critique of IIRSA.
7. See www.bicusa.org/proxy/Document.100409.aspx (accessed 14 October 2011).
1052 Sonja K. Pieck

information about the positive and negative impacts of projects that can
affect people’s lives and livelihoods. The GTIOS represents an interesting
fusion of environmental, social justice and development concerns, which
intersect in the concept of environmental governance. The GTIOS engages
this idea to highlight that development has failed, because it has occurred
without an appropriately holistic governance framework; it is civil society,
the concerned environmental citizens, who have both the right to know and
the obligation to act, to make development democratic, participatory and
sustainable. Environmental governance has been the channel through which
the working group has opened up space for citizenship. It is thus both a
critique of the current social order and the promise of its transformation.
How far it can go towards realizing change, however, will depend on the
political choices and positionings of GTIOS members.

Critiques of the Development Process

To illustrate the frames that the GTIOS is developing around the concepts
of ‘governance’ and ‘environmental citizenship’, this section analyses the
written and spoken discourses of the GTIOS members. This is based on
an analysis of interviews and documents, especially those emanating from
the GTIOS organizations that are currently most active, namely ProNat-
uraleza, DAR, SPDA and SER.8 Their articulations are hybrids of en-
vironmental, rural development and human rights concerns. Two themes
are especially salient in interviews, survey responses and documents: cri-
tiques of the IIRSA development process; and proposals for improving that
process.
The GTIOS members have consistently criticized the way development
is implemented in Peru. A key point of contention is the perceived lack of
transparency on the part of power holders. Civil society knows very little
about how development projects are initiated, financed, or even when and
where they will be implemented. One interviewee was visibly frustrated that
local communities often did not know about a new project ‘until the day
the bulldozers pull up’ (Interview, regional coordinator, 25 March 2011).
Numerous activists explained to me that since large infrastructure projects
under IIRSA are financed in part with public monies, the projects required
a more sustained public debate. In fact, by 2007, the road was already cost-
ing 40 per cent more than previously thought.9 To create ‘environmental
governance’ in this context, information between the state and its citizens
must flow more freely and civil society should be able to take part in de-
cisions that will affect civic life. Governance, in the case of southern Peru
‘involves the relationship between all the actors involved/affected in the

8. The following discussion draws heavily on Fernández and La Rosa (2010), whose report
was written on behalf of, and with substantial input from, the GTIOS.
9. See http://www.bicusa.org/es/Article.10647.aspx (accessed 15 August 2011)
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1053

decision-making process of public administration’ (Fernández and La Rosa,

2010: 69).
After the road was approved for construction, a mitigation programme
— the Programa de Mitigación de Impactos Indirectos del Corredor Vial
Interoceánica Sur, jointly managed by INRENA (Instituto Nacional de Re-
cursos Naturales, part of the Ministry of Agriculture) and CAF, the Andean
Development Bank — was set in motion. The working group members made
it a priority to carefully monitor this programme and it has become the pivot
around which the GTIOS has developed alternative conceptualizations of
governance. From the beginning, CAF/INRENA suffered from underfund-
ing and poor institutionalization (Fernández and La Rosa, 2010) and, despite
good intentions, was not able to meet its own objectives. No communica-
tion mechanism existed through which information about or produced by
the mitigation programme could reach the broader public, including af-
fected communities. The resulting situation has been described as one of
‘un-government’ (‘desgobierno’) (Interview, SER staff member, 23 March
2011).
Most troubling for some of the GTIOS members is the fact that the con-
struction of the Interoceanic Highway, while it signals the completion of
a century-old dream, is not taking place within the framework of a larger
development vision for Peru. Such a vision would require the input not only
of central government, the business sector and civil society but, in the con-
text of decentralization, of regional governments as well. Without a broader
framework, the road can only represent ‘desarrollo de asfalto’ (asphalt de-
velopment) rather than anchoring a truly integrated development process
that improves livelihoods and ensures sustainable use of resources.

Visions of Environmental Governance and Citizenship

In Peru, under conditions of incomplete sovereignty, diffuse and non-

transparent neoliberal governance regimes and uneven democratic processes,
the GTIOS is using environmental governance to challenge dominant narra-
tives of state–society and human–environment relations. Here, governance
is not about facilitating ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2005),
by disenfranchising the public as the CAF/INRENA mitigation programme
does. Instead, the working group uses environmental governance discourse
to politicize nature, demanding accountability for elite decision making on
matters relating to resource use and abuse, and calling for citizens’ increased
access to information and decision-making power within a more inclusionary
framework.
In my engagement with GTIOS members in Peru, ‘governance’ was the
keyword for mobilization, as it pries open space for the enactment of a
different kind of citizenship — not narrowly economic but deeply political.
I offer here some examples of how GTIOS members ‘defy the prevailing
ideological containment of the meaning and practice of citizenship’ (Latta,
1054 Sonja K. Pieck

2007: 231) in Peru by engaging alternative notions of governance. These

instances also, however, illustrate the youth of the movement and its as yet
insufficient reach into, and representativity of, the grassroots.
Moving Between the Technical and the Normative. At this early point
in its development, the GTIOS is still largely composed of professionals,
academics and scientists, working in the NGO sector. Numerous survey re-
spondents asserted that this had been beneficial to the extent that it gives the
GTIOS ‘credibility’ as a high-level discussion partner with elites in govern-
ment and development banks. Its technical capacities, however, also cross
over into the normative realm. As Luque explains (2005: 220), crossing
‘technical’ and ‘value’ discursive framings allows for the ‘negotiation of
a common ground of shared knowledge’. Most importantly, this interface
allows the GTIOS to position itself and its demands in both the scientific
and political fields, effectively politicizing scientific insights and scientizing
politics (Bäckstrand, 2003; Fischer, 2000). According to a staff member at
SPDA, the GTIOS’s influence flows from the capacities of its members.
Based on each member’s professional ‘presence’ or role regarding the high-
way, these capacities include ‘being able to predict risks or impacts that are
happening or are likely to happen, and alert the appropriate authorities of
those risks so that they take the appropriate measures in time’ (Interview,
28 March 2011). The GTIOS members hope that, in their role as ‘citizen
experts’, they can give voice to civil society in Peru.
In another interview with staff members at DAR, I was told that the
working group, as an ‘informed, technical voice’, was now in a position to
move from research to proposals and from local to national. The challenge,
for this interviewee, was that the GTIOS needed to coordinate ‘a regional
vision’. This was ‘not just a vision regarding the purpose of the highway, but
a vision regarding the purpose of development and debating what the role of
the GTIOS was within that development. These are not so much technical
challenges as they are political ones’. The technical work of the GTIOS made
it credible because it can deliver ‘the same level of clarity and precision as
the central and regional governments’ and therefore has the arguments and
the proposals to present to the central government to influence development
financing or impact mitigation. Rather than simply pointing to problems, the
GTIOS can offer serious, technical solutions (Interview, 21 March 2011).
Making Elite Decisions on Matters of Public Concern. Consideration of
environmental governance forces questions about the relationships between
individuals, communities and a larger polity. The nation was evoked by
activists in order to dislodge the easy assumption that the Peruvian state
represents the interests of its citizens in the governance of the country’s
environments. Working group members asked repeatedly about the ultimate
desirability of the Brazil–Peru road as currently conceived: ‘What changes
will it generate in our countries? What do we gain from all this? Or rather,
as a country, as peoples, as citizens, what do we gain from this connection
with Brazil?’ (Interview, DAR staff member, 21 March 2011). What, in
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1055

fact, are the benefits of development represented by the road? According to

a staff member at SER involved in the Puno regional civil society working
group, the road has been a poor investment and its cost to the public has not
produced the benefits that would have validated it:
This is likely the biggest investment that has occurred in this department in all its history. For
a region this poor, having such a major investment ought to produce an improvement in the
living conditions of the region’s people, especially those living next to the road. Nevertheless,
years later we find that nothing’s changed in terms of public health, education . . . The
problems are the same and, in fact, now we have a much more dramatic situation in terms of
deforestation and social conflict. (Interview, 23 March 2011)

So what is the ideal relationship between the state, development and civil
society? One important linkage between state and society is monetary —
either through tax collection or earnings from what many Peruvians consider
to be resources of national heritage like oil, gas and minerals. The fact that the
Peruvian government is financing many of IIRSA’s development projects
from its own purse, means for the GTIOS that the citizenry, correspondingly,
should have both insight into and a say in national development plans, in the
spirit of a social contract. As one organizer from Cuzco put it:
At the very least . . . if they [construction companies] are going to charge us — because this
is on the basis of a loan — this is a topic that isn’t just a problem for the people along the
road, it’s a problem for the entire country. It’s about deciding how the money gets spent,
how information gets managed. That’s what annoys people . . . (Interview, 17 March 2011)

By enabling citizen oversight of public investment, a more democratic

politics of nature would become possible. According to the GTIOS mem-
bers, development should occur within a holistic governance framework that
articulates a vision for Peru. Liberal echoes of ‘good governance’ are audi-
ble in these interviews, but tied to them are communitarian ideals in which
the ‘we’ (citizens, civil society and Peruvians) has the right to participate in
processes affecting the country’s environmental future. This environmental
governance plan:
has to involve sustained participation on the part of all national sectors and, of course, the
regional and local governments. The plan should manage, in a harmonious and efficient way,
the diverse programs that are being implemented at a national level responding to interests
we have as a nation, it should manage the key economic, environmental and social objectives
and the ways in which we should prioritize them. (Fernández and la Rosa, 2010: 172)

In particular, civil society participation ‘is key’ and needs to occur at

three levels: at the highest decision-making level, at the level of programme
implementation, and the level of programme monitoring. Civil society input
must be as respected as that of other actors within the greater development
apparatus (ibid.: 176). These kinds of proposals therefore redefine the rela-
tionship of civil society vis-à-vis the state and the architects of development.
Environmental governance means direct engagement in the definition of the
country’s future and thus forces an alternative kind of citizenship.
1056 Sonja K. Pieck

This kind of technical intervention has so far produced at least one

important result: by strongly criticizing the first mitigation programme
(CAF/INRENA) as discussed above, the GTIOS managed to get itself
invited to the table as the second-round mitigation project, now called
CAF/MINAM,10 was developed in 2011. In an instance of ‘direct civil
society influence on central government’ the new mitigation project has pro-
visions for consultation workshops across all affected departments; these
workshops boast broad participation by local mayors and community mem-
bers along the road (Interview, Cusco regional working group coordinator,
19 April 2012; Interview, former national coordinator, 28 April 2012). In
other words, without the ‘expert knowledge’ and ‘technical assistance’ of
the GTIOS, it is likely that the development process would have remained
as non-transparent and exclusionary as before.11
Accessing Information and Advancing a Politics of Knowledge. The
GTIOS sees itself in a variety of capacities. On the one hand, various inter-
viewees and survey respondents made clear that the working group is proud
of its ‘technical capacity’ and its ‘expert knowledge’ that make its members
credible discussion partners with government and other agencies. On the
other hand, the GTIOS is also aware that it plays a profoundly political role
by being an ‘interlocutor’ that communicates between the grassroots and
elite powers in national government and the international development ap-
paratus. In this role, the GTIOS must demand accountability for development
projects in the interest of local people.
I think one of the key challenges for the group is that it [needs to] transform itself into a key
actor, a key interlocutor to discuss, denounce, and support in some way the work of the new
regional government [in Puno], especially since there were no bridges. Good so far, no? But
as interlocutors it’s not just about thinking ‘what am I opposing?’ but rather, ‘what can be
done so that proposals are discussed and produce results?’. (Interview, SER staff member,
28 March 2011)

To be an effective interlocutor, disseminating knowledge becomes

paramount because citizenship implies a certain bundle of rights (or
duties) and without knowledge of those rights, and knowledge of how those
rights are being violated, it becomes impossible for people to meaningfully
exercise the kinds of powers and capacities they might have. According to
another member of the Puno working group:
What we do that’s important is disseminate the official discourse that exists, both around
the highway itself as well as information about the risks and impacts and about what is of
local interest. In other words, it’s not that I’m somehow submitting to this, but rather that
I’m using official elements so that local people know who is speaking to them. It’s about

10. MINAM is the acronym for ‘Ministerio del Ambiente del Perú’ (Peruvian Ministry of the
Environment).
11. Whether GTIOS activity has led to a larger-scale ‘disciplining’ or even ‘silencing’ of local
communities vis-à-vis the state, and what kind of consequences this may hold, is an important
matter for consideration in future research.
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1057

making information available and making people talk about it. (Interview, Puno working
group member, 23 March 2011)

As Gudynas (2009: 67) explains, neoliberal citizenship is based on a min-

imal set of individualized rights and generally does not recognize or protect
social rights, especially not the right to a safe and healthy environment.
Neoliberalism also ‘rejects any kind of social intervention because there
is not enough adequate information to justify such action’. In that sense,
the GTIOS’s keen interest in information is a direct response to the lack
of transparency and knowledge about development. Many working group
members praised the network’s ability to access, distribute or create ‘high
quality information and data’ on environmental and social impacts of the
road. In this more politicized version of environmental governance, properly
disseminated information can transform the neoliberal citizen from a gener-
ally passive and market-oriented subject into an environmental citizen. Such
an individual is an active and political subject who is capable of advocating
for him- or herself and can demand accountability for development from the
state and capital. This concern with individual improvement may reflect a
liberal bias, but these hopes are embedded in a larger concern for national
ecological welfare and a more just distribution of the costs and benefits of
development in Peru. Ultimately, such citizen engagement would strengthen
environmental governance by making it reflective of broader public needs.
However, assuming the position of environmental citizen speaking on
behalf of the disenfranchised and the voiceless is, ultimately, a problematic
positioning and weakens the working group’s environmental governance
framework. NGOs are often not representative of their constituencies and a
proliferation of NGOs can even disguise a democratic deficit (Gray, 1999;
Igoe, 2003). Speaking on behalf of local communities may or may not be
in the local interest. A repositioning of the GTIOS, along with a concerted
engagement of the grassroots, will be needed in order to realize the kind of
environmental governance that the working group envisions.

NGOS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP? PROMISE AND PERIL

Gudynas (2009) has summarized some of the requirements for environmental

citizenship in the Latin American context:
It requires promoting instruments and guarantees that ensure participation, access to infor-
mation, and the exercise of a social control over natural resources. It is necessary to identify
what the new rights and obligations are with respect to the environment, how these affect the
definition of the citizen, and what the role of the nation-state should be. (Gudynas, 2009: 93,
my translation)

How far does the working group’s engagement of ‘environmental gov-

ernance’ take us? To what extent can the GTIOS advance an alternative
citizenship practice? To assess the work of the GTIOS, one must remember
1058 Sonja K. Pieck

that Peru’s emergence from authoritarianism began in 2000 when Alberto

Fujimori, the country’s controversial leader, resigned amidst a corruption
scandal and fled to Japan.12 In a country that has passed through the trauma of
authoritarianism and its associated curtailment of participation and freedom
of expression, the emphasis of NGOs on governance, and the transparency
and accountability it implies, is understandable and should not be underval-
ued. Moreover, given the recent transition to democracy, civil society in Peru
is relatively young (Arce, 2008; Paulett, 2006). Environmentalism has hardly
been institutionalized and confronts a state with deeply entrenched special
interests in mining and hydrocarbon development. Pushing for governance,
especially when the term is used in a more substantial way than the domi-
nant institutions employ it, is a transgressive act.13 In terms of Gudynas’s
comment above, then, the GTIOS has taken important steps in the realm of
demanding participation, increasing access to information, and beginning
to develop a sense of the roles that civil society, regional governments and
central government can and should play in environmental governance.
Nevertheless, serious shortcomings remain in the tactics, discourse and
positioning of the working group. The first is its limited diversity. As dis-
cussed, the GTIOS still consists mainly of scientists and academics, which to
some extent is a strength: their knowledge and credentials bestow credibility
and authority on the group in their dealings with government agencies. How-
ever, several interviewees and survey respondents pointed out that in their
opinion, the GTIOS was still too ‘closed’ and simply not diverse enough.
One regional coordinator felt that NGOs were too dominant in the regional
working group and that the latter did not include enough other stakeholders
(such as local communities, local universities, or even the business sector). In
addition, NGOs are mistrusted by many local communities.14 Accordingly,
too strong an NGO presence in the regional working group seems to hamper
the group’s ability to reach out beyond the professional community. Another
regional working group member added that the group was too concentrated
in urban areas, to the detriment of rural areas. While ProNaturaleza and SER,
for instance, do have offices further afield, other NGOs like DAR do not.
This is not an uncommon limitation in the NGO world (Bebbington, 1997;
Gray, 1999; Mercer, 2002).

12. After five years of self-imposed exile, Fujimori was arrested in Chile in 2005 and is currently
serving a twenty-five year jail term in Peruvian prison for human rights violations during
his presidency.
13. Add to this the fact that Peru passed a law in 2006 that gave central government
much stronger surveillance powers over NGOs. For more information on Law 27692
see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6112284.stm and http://www.icnl.org/research/
monitor/peru.html (accessed 14 May 2012).
14. This is the result of a general suspicion of outsiders (due to the long-lasting war between
the Shining Path and government forces) and past experiences with NGOs (Interview, SER
staff member, 28 March 2011).
Environmental Citizenship in Peru 1059

The second limitation is the working group’s lack of grassroots ties. While
some regional working groups were proud of their hard work developing
strong relationships with regional governments, all regional coordinators I
spoke with said that now was the time to think hard about developing deep
connections with the grassroots. This includes indigenous federations and
communities along the road (such as local mayors) as well as campesinos
and the business sector. The working group is once again hampered by its
homogeneity and its reliance on NGOs, which seem to discourage broader
participation by local communities. Until this changes, the GTIOS cannot,
and should not, speak for rural communities. As Smith and Pangsapa (2008:
13) observe: ‘rather than treating science as an authoritative basis for action
or an unquestionable “resource”, it needs to be supplemented with authentic
knowledge that accurately represents the lives of those affected by envi-
ronmental problems, and scientific knowledge should be seen as much as
a “topic” of research and open to deconstruction and problematization as a
resource’.
What does all this mean? As Peru undergoes an economic boom, does
the ‘environmental citizenship’ framework of the working group promise
a more socially just and ecologically sustainable future? Three potential
conclusions can be drawn. First, GTIOS so far has had a strong impact on
central government. Its promotion of an alternative environmental gover-
nance framework has resulted in a much more participatory and flexible
mitigation programme. In this sense, the working group has indeed made
progress and has opened up a space for alternative citizenship; the new mit-
igation programme is built on a participatory process. Second, the working
group’s engagement with environmental citizenship to date falls short of the
kind of deeper democracy that the concept promises. Largely because of its
composition, the working group does not (yet) have a representative voice.
Third, environmental citizenship itself needs to be thought of in different
terms. GTIOS members are adapting a neoliberal discourse, radicalizing it,
and using it to engage state institutions. One could say that the GTIOS is
‘organizing (or “channelling”) protest and citizen participation into orga-
nized and recognized institutional forms (NGOs) that are subject to rules
laid down by the state’ (Mercer, 2002: 18). Mercer posits this as a nega-
tive, but activism is temporally contingent. It is probable that in its work
to disseminate information to central government and local communities,
the GTIOS is opening up space for future reworkings of the relationship
between the Peruvian state and its citizenry.

CONCLUSION

In Peru, the Interoceanic Highway, the country’s single largest infrastruc-

ture project in recent memory, has become a mechanism for civil society
1060 Sonja K. Pieck

actors to challenge the state, development agencies and international capital.

They do so by framing their struggles within the context of governance and
calling for a reinvigorated and democratic relationship between the state, the
development apparatus, and civil society — in other words, environmental
citizenship. Their version of environmental governance implies participa-
tory, democratic processes paired with a holistic and integrated vision of
Peru’s present and future. Environmental governance thus lies at the inter-
section of development and politicized nature. A focus on this idea now sets
the stage for a vibrant alternative citizenship practice. Yet whether activists
can meet this potential is linked to their practices and positionings. Rights
are ‘living institutions that are perpetually being contested and transformed
by claims for social and ecological justice’ (Latta and Wittman, 2010: 113),
and the capacity to advance these rights is contingent on actor, place and
time. The working group’s ability to promote environmental citizenship will
be seen in the coming years.
Elsewhere, Hickey and Mohan (2005: 251) have described some NGOs
as engaging a radical democratic politics by ‘an explicit focus on and pursuit
of participation as citizenship’. This means that these NGOs will ‘seek not
only to bring people into the political process, but also transform and democ-
ratize the political process in ways that progressively alter the “immanent”
processes of inclusion and exclusion that operate within particular political
communities, and which govern the opportunities for individuals and groups
to claim their rights to participation and resources’. As the GTIOS moves
from technical to normative, from accepting elite decisions to making them
a matter of public debate, and from a band of experts to a more represen-
tative interlocutor between local communities and governance institutions,
one hopes that these ideals are achieved.

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Sonja K. Pieck is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Pro-

gram at Bates College, 7 Andrews Road, Lewiston, Maine 04240, USA.
Her research interests include transnational activism, NGO politics, indige-
nous movements, and debates around environmental governance in Latin
America. E-mail: spieck@bates.edu